Niche Operating Systems

Eugenia writes: "So, you think that BeOS or AtheOS are niche Operating Systems? Well, you haven't seen anything yet. OSNews provides a list and short description of the most active and most promising Operating Systems written by individuals or small teams just for the fun of it or because they have a dream of how the perfect OS should be (is there such a thing though?). Some of them, like SkyOS for example, are even quite far down the line in terms of usability and advancements."

Comments

The more OS's the Better.

[groebke]

This is what I like to see: choice. Althought there is something to be said for standardization, it is hell on choice and leads to entities like M$.
Although I have standrdized on MS for the dsktop, I still am a Solaris pig for the back end. After all, the less the end users know about the server room, the better.

Re:The more OS's the Better.

[i_am_nitrogen]

It seems to me that you just contradicted yourself. [paraphrase:] "Standardization kills choice" ... "I have standardized on MS." So, you like to see choice, but you'd rather not use it? Interesting.

Re:The more OS's the Better.

[Junks Jerzey]

Standardization kills choice" ... "I have standardized on MS." So, you like to see choice, but you'd rather not use it? Interesting.

_Everyone_ can make a choice. His personal choice is Windows, but he's saying that he wants lots of options available so each person has more to choose from.

Re:The more OS's the Better.

[i_am_nitrogen]

Now, there's no reason to start a discussion on all the reasons to dump Windows. There are far too many, and would likely fill /.'s hard drives.

Re:The more OS's the Better.

[Cato the Elder]

Standardization shouldn't be "hell on choice"

It only is that way when some platform specific, propreitary method becomes the de facto standard. That's the whole reason for the IETF standards process.

Standards should enhance choice by providing inter-operability for certain components while allowing customization of others. As the best and biggest example, TCP/IP is highly standardized and yet you can choose from a bewildering variety of stacks for different operating systems.

Re:The more OS's the Better.

[Mama's Family Troll]

I don't know what you're talking about idiot. You're about as coherent as Eunice...

I want to stick the disk thinggie into the slot and have the damn thing work. If that means some idiot named Bill get's all my money, fine. He's standardizing the computer!!!

Damn it, my mouse is on the right side of the pad again. I can't move the arrow and more to the right... I guess I need to shut off the power strip again.

Re:The more OS's the Better.

[MaxwellStreet]

You're entitled to your opinion, of course.

Me? I choose to avoid them precisely because of their business practices.

Their products are good - and in some cases great - but if there's an alternative I use it wherever possible because of their behavior as a business.

Isn't freedom to choose great?

Re:The more OS's the Better.

[groebke]

Actually, no I am not being young and foolish. I am being young and well paid.
Quite frankly, I am now, and have been in the past, responsible for the IT side of the house for companies with more than one or two employees. I do not, nor will I ever, have the time to educate end-users that can barely operate Windows to use KDE, Gnome or CDE based workstations. I have to keep the health of the business in mind, and, since most people have some sort of Windows experience, it is a no brainer.
As for the college crack: while you were busy playing patty-cake on the playground, I was hacking out my CS assignments on HP mini's in ASM (the only REAL language), and working on my Physics research using the Slackware (2.x) and a system I pieced together to run particle interaction simulations.
Grow up.

Re:The more OS's the Better.

[giberti]

As anyone who works on systems from day to day knows... as much as I don't like it, each system has strengths and weaknesses.

Linux is a fantastic system for serving web content and doing databases and back end systems stuff

Microsoft, like it or not, has made a desktop and whether by fair play or not, taught most of the world to use it.

Macintosh has incredible strengths in the graphic design world. They have found a way to get the desktop out of the way of creativity.

BSD has great strengths in virtual host setups (down to splitting the processor / memory usage).

Each OS has a strength, the key to a good system is using the *best* tool for a given job and not buying into one system that does it all.

I love Linux and am an advocate for open source. I run Linux machines, but I also run Windows Machines because there are tasks that are easier on each. Both OS's have a place.

Just as there are many styles of education and learning, so too are there different ways of approaching the problem of the desktop. By having choices, we are enabled to choose what works best for our style. Otherwise, you folks running Themes wouldn't bother changing the defaults.

Nitch OS's have a place too... and thank's to the devoted masses who keep their missions alive, we all benefit from them, even if other companies lay off their work force or swallow them whole.

Because of visionaries discovering a great way to do something the collective pool benifits.

Re:The more OS's the Better.

[sjames]

That's awfully noble of you! Do you avoid Wal Mart because they put small companies, local buisinesses, etc. out of business? Do you avoid driving because of the evil automobile corporations that pollute our planet? Do you make your own clothes because your sick of selling out to corporate clothes companies?

Answers in order:Yes. As much as possable (it's not easy!). And no but I do avoid the worst of the lot.

It is quite difficult, but carrying the alternative to it's natural conclusion would result in the destruction of civilization (almost by definition).

It's coming!

[Dancin_Santa]

DancinSantaOS is coming!

Keep your flues open!

Dancin Santa

How about OS's that should be brought back?

[sphealey]

There's an old adage that every mistake that has ever been made with computers has been made three times. It originally referred to the mainframe, minicomputer, and PC eras. That could probably be extended to at least five times today by adding "client/server" and "web" environments. One of the strange aspects of computing is that everything has to be started from scratch and nobody seems willing to even consider the lessons learned in the past.

Given this, I would prefer to see a list of operating systems in which things were done RIGHT, but which are no longer in use or from which lessons are not being learned. Multics, TOPS-10, and TOPS-20 come to mind. Any others?

sPh

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[Sloppy]

A rather obvious answer to that would be AmigaOS.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

The OS's mentioned here are people who *want* to write from scratch. They want an OS to their own specifications. For mainstream OS's, Unix-style has seemed to work very well, and has been used as a base for numerous OS's.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[Troed]

That's quite biased .. right? Where's the pre-emptive multitasking? I for sure don't want to go back to cooperative :)

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[ChadN]

The Amiga had (and always had, from first release) a pre-emptive OS. It was also a micro-kernel, and had many "advanced" features for its time.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[Sloppy]

That's quite biased .. right?

Well... any suggested answers to the question are going to reflect some sort of bias in the values of the answerer.

Not sure I get your comment about PMT. Even the newer platforms have PMT like the Amiga. My only gripe with the newer platforms' multitasking is that they're dynamic, instead of using fixed priorities like the Amiga had. In terms of PMT alone, though, I think just about everything (even MacOS, as of this year, finally) has caught up with the Amiga.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[consumer]

One of the strange aspects of computing is that everything has to be started from scratch and nobody seems willing to even consider the lessons learned in the past.

This might be partly due to the fact that employers insist on hiring the youngest programmers possible, preferably straight out of college, so that they can work the hell our of them. People who are old enough to remember how things were done before have all been relegated to management positions where they have little effect on the actual code.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[Troed]

(I'll just make a quick comment to myself here, I was trying to make a funny remark in the remembrance of the old OS-wars - where type of multitasking etc was one of the things always argued about. I didn't mean to claim Amigas had co-operative multitasking ;)

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[Fixer]

Given this, I would prefer to see a list of operating systems in which things were done RIGHT, but which are no longer in use or from which lessons are not being learned. Multics, TOPS-10, and TOPS-20 come to mind. Any others?

VMS.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[yellowstone]

Re: Amiga OS:

Where's the pre-emptive multitasking?

"It's in there" ;-)

• Amiga: pre-emptive multitasking, no virtual memory or memory protection.
• Mac: cooperative multitasking, no virtual memory or memory protection (prior to OS X, anyway)

What the Amiga did have that is noticably missing in current OSs is a simplicity of design (though to be fair, Amiga OS only had to run on a relatively small variety of hardware, and wasn't trying to fit into every niche in sight (embedded, desktop, server, wireless, etc).

The real strenght of the Amiga was that it was targeted to a fairly specific group of graphics artists, gamers, and hackers. It's really too bad the Amiga never had the corporate support it deserved -- with the right backing, it could have been great...

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[stx23]

the Amiga having PMT explains a lot.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[Malcontent]

Yea it's called NT now.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lisp Machines: Symbolics' Genera, TI's Explorer (not MS Explorer), LMI's Lambdas, Xerox's Interlisp boxes, BBN's Jerichos, MIT's CADR, and MIT's CONS. (Now watch the ignorant slashdot "there is no OS but Linux, and Linus is its prophet" kiddies denigrate that which they so fundamentally fail to understand -- code=data, extensible languages, etc. Is it the fault of their universities? Is this the fault of GNU for picking UNIX to clone instead of the LispM?)

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[Phork]

Mac OS has had virtual since 7.0(maybe before), it might not have worked all that well, but it was there.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[ajs]

Apollo's (then HP/Apollo, then HP) Domain/OS (originally Aegis) was the world's first network-based workstation operating system. By this I mean that it was developed to be a seamless part of a network of clients, servers and devices. It was a vaguely UNIX-like OS (which had UNIX emulation packages to layer on top of it) which was tied to the Apollo hardware.

Up until the RISC revolution, Apollo's hardware was not very exciting, but the Prism architecture in their DN10000 line made their OS really shine as an accedemic and scientific computing platform. Also, their DSEE (forunner of and superior to ClearCase) source control and versioning environment made it a powerfully compelling environment for large teams of programmers who needed to work collaberatively.

A great platform, gone forever because their marketting sucked and HP had no vision. :-(

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[hexx]

The USA killed ~7000 innocent Somalian civilians in -98 to kill one single warlord. Nice.
I would email you but you don't post your address. What actions are you referring to in your signature above?

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[Doomdark]

...or from which lessons are not being learned. Multics, TOPS-10, and TOPS-20 come to mind. Any others?

And all this time I thought lessons from Multics were in fact well learnt and understood? You do know where name 'Unix' (originally, pun intended)
comes from, right? :-)

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[Lars T.]

Let's not forget that the Amiga's fixed priority PMT had some issues, like higher priorities always blocking lower ones, which ment those could be starved. E.g. (AFAIK) the process to display the icons of a newly opened window had a high priority, but was quite slow for large numbers of files. At long as it was running, lesser processes would not run, putting PMT basicaly out of order.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[yanyan]

...or from which lessons are not being learned...

um, MS-DOS? =)

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[Mr. Piccolo]

No need:

OpenVMS seems to still be going strong.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[On Lawn]

There was a book written about this episode (can't remember the title). It was a Ranger battalion caught in a military action underprepared and undersupported. It has been widely studied as a military blunder like a SEAL episode in Panama where they tried to take a airport hanger. Considering how armed a Ranger battalion is, and their training *and* that they were backed in a corner you can expect lots of casualties. The book insinuates the problem was an incompetant commander in chief.

However even in the article, the highest count mentioned was from the Somalian Government at 1000+, with the latest estimates hovering around 500. Another hopeless effort to wrest an article into something it isn't.

This was a US/UN action known and condoned by world diplomats, and was not targeted at civilians. That was also mentioned by the article.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[lostguy]

Given this, I would prefer to see a list of operating systems in which things were done RIGHT, but which are no longer in use or from which lessons are not being learned. Multics, TOPS-10, and TOPS-20 come to mind.

An excellent sign that you've never even looked at Multics, and therefore probably have no idea what you're talking about.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[alex_siufy]

AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking... It didn't had memory protection, though, as the early 68k chips had no MMU, making things harder.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[sphealey]

An excellent sign that you've never even looked at Multics, and therefore probably have no idea what you're talking about.

I must confess to puzzlement at comments of the nature, particularly when directed as posts which are clearly designed to be food for additional discussion, rather than to be complete in themselves. You have no idea who I am, how long I have been working with system, what I have or haven't worked with in the past, or what my personal opinions are of the systems I mentioned (for good or ill), yet you know I have "no idea what I am talking about".

Perhaps a mirror would be in order?

sPh

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[On Lawn]

Note to moderators:

I didn't bring up this topic, I'm just replying to someone else.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[akc]

RSX-11M for PDP 11s

Came with Source Code which you compiled to make it work on your machine.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[Sloppy]

Let's not forget that the Amiga's fixed priority PMT had some issues, like higher priorities always blocking lower ones, which ment those could be starved.

That's not a bug, it's a feature. :-) I want dnetc_68k to utterly and completely starve whenever my web browser is decoding a JPEG. And I want the JPEG decode to utterly and completely starve when the fast UI thread is redrawing a button gadget that I just clicked on. I hate there ever being the slightest delay in giving visual feedback when I click on something, no matter how busy computer is. 1000 MHz box here, running Linux+GNOME fails -- too slow. 300 MHz box at work, running Windows NT or OS/2 box fails -- too damned slow. 50 MHz Amiga satisfies -- fast as greased lightning even when running 100 processes. (To be fair, the aforementioned 1000 MHz box running Beos 4.5 or QNX NTO is as fast as the Amiga.)

E.g. (AFAIK) the process to display the icons of a newly opened window had a high priority, but was quite slow for large numbers of files. At long as it was running, lesser processes would not run, putting PMT basicaly out of order.

Hmm.. I haven't run Workbench in years, but I don't see that problem with DOpus Magellan. I open window on slow media (zip disk) -- it's reading .info files and slowly displaying icons -- and I can open up other windows, etc. while I wait for icons on Zip disk to finish displaying.

If workbench had a problem with that, then it's a bug in Workbench. Don't run non-instantaneous stuff at prio more than 0, silly Workbench programmers!

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[DavidRavenMoon]

(To be fair, the aforementioned 1000 MHz box running Beos 4.5 or QNX NTO is as fast as the Amiga.)

Yikes! I can't imagine Be OS on a system that fast. I have to say I used to be very fond of Be OS PR 2 running on my old PowerComputing, PowerCenter 132... this was the pre x86 Be OS days. it was a very fast OS and booted in about 5 seconds.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[DavidRavenMoon]

(Microsoft also has a history of good, iterative technologies; DDE led to OLE led to COM led to ... OLE came from Apple's "Publish and Subscribe" used in a lot of Mac apps for years (like QuarkXPress)

Re: How about OS's that should be brought back?

[Inthewire]

So...those who know better are now the ones hiring and managing those who don't? Isn't part of the manager's job to guide the subordinate?

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[Tadu]

just about everything has caught up with the Amiga.

Not really[tm]. Look at KDE. What do you see? "Use" and "Cancel" in the preferences. What does it mean? Well, "Use" means "Save", and "Use" and "Revert to last saved" are just missing. Check out the (AmigaOS) style guide. This is a basic user interface issue that KDE fails at, and one that makes KDE suck.

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[Lars T.]

The problem is that a single buggy or malicious process can block the whole computer until the user intervenes - which takes all the fun out of PMT. If lower priorities were simply scheduled less often instead of not at all, things would be fine.

BeOS...?

[joestar]

I knew BeOS long time before Linux. So if after years of existence BeOS is not yet a mainstream OS, I don't see why I shouldn't call it a "niche OS"! AtheOS on the other part, is likely to become a mainstream. If only it could come with many more supported videocards...

Re:BeOS...?

[slashdot2.2sucks]

The word nich doesn't distinguish between having a small following now but more later, and having a small following now but none later. It only means having a small following now.

However it does seem odd to group BeOS with all of these up and comming OSen, seeing as BeOS is as dead as OS2 and DOS.

Re:BeOS...?

[dstanley]

I would assume they didn't consider Be a niche OS since it had a descent number of people actively working on it on a regular basis. Most of the listed OS were small groups of people. If there was a group at all.

Re:BeOS...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of interest, what video card do you have?

AtheOS currently has drivers avaialable for:

Matrox cards

S3 Virge

nVidia

Vesa2.0

If you look on Kamidake you can also find a Riva TNT driver, and just recently, an ATI driver for a lot of cards.

More drivers are on the way of course, but thats most bases covered....;)

Re:BeOS...?

[DkY]

why would you say atheOS is likely to become mainstream? I was just wondering.

Re:BeOS...?

[DkY]

fair enough but wouldn't it be harder to get developers who code in assembly?

Re:BeOS...?

[wishus]

So if after years of existence BeOS is not yet a mainstream OS

BeOS is pretty much dead since it was bought by Palm. Hopefully we will see elements of BeIA in some future Palm device.

Re:BeOS...?

[pi radians]

Why was this modded down?

Re:BeOS...?

[maxpublic]

So long as it's GPL'd I wouldn't care, assuming it can do the job as well as (or better than) Linux. From what I've seen of it the interface is much nicer and slicker than either the KDE or Gnome desktops.

If, however, it isn't GPL'd and I can't use it under the terms of the GPL, or do with the source code as I see fit, I wouldn't care how well it outperformed Linux. My frustrations with closed-source OS's has gotten to the point where I just won't use them, period.

Max

Re:BeOS...?

[discogravy]

BeOS' lack of vid card support is probably the main reason i don't use BeOS anymore. Sure, you can do nice things with it, but you can do nice things will other OSes as well. Be's work on the OS was/is magnificent. I think linux's free beer/speech is really what made a lot of people choose linux over BeOS; Be did offer the R5 free for personal use right before all the flying excrement started recently, but they couldn't go open source due to licensing agreements w/r/t propriatery code or something. It's a shame, really.

As for atheOS, i hope it gets GPLed (last time i checked it wasn't,) as that would give it a better chance at avoiding BeOS' fate.

Clicker 32 is interesting...

[Sir_Real]

I like the idea of setting up profiles that allow you to fire up all the programs necessary for "text processing" applications.

I don't know how easy it would be to use this system, but at least it's innovation. It's the most original OS interface idea I've seen since the virtual desktop.

Andrew

OS Standards

[alen]

Why can't every OS be based on a set of common standards and have some proprietary extensions to differentiate itself from the others? And every OS should support a number of common API's for applications to run on them. If you buy an app it should run on most OS's. Some apps can be specific to some OS's because of their features.

Re:OS Standards

[Mr. Slippery]

Why can't every OS be based on a set of common standards and have some proprietary extensions to differentiate itself from the others?

I belive the word you're looking for is POSIX.

Re:OS Standards

[Wesley Felter]

What would this standard API look like? POSIX sucks, but if the standard API was non-Unix-y, then Unix wouldn't be able to efficiently support it. Trying to put a common API on top of very different architectures would just be a mess.

Re:OS Standards

[sjames]

What you speak of is called the "Win32 API". Don't blame Microsoft, they fully support it.

You must be kidding! MS can't even manage to implement their own API consistantly between versions of their own operating system. Not to mention that the API itself is a mess.

New direction for slashcode

[Hostile17]

How about we start the SlashdotOS project, to go along with it SlashdotOffice and who would want to miss the Slashdot.NET development package which includes the Slashdot# c compiler.

Niche - and quixotic

[kingdon]

My vote for the most obscure goes to FreeVMS. Warning: very little code got written and there hasn't been activity in years. But the way in which it failed was interesting: no one wanted to do anything unless it had the blessing of Digital ^W Compaq ^W Hewlett Paqard. The biggest leverage of the proprietary OS was over the minds of the users/enthusiasts/etc. One could argue about whether the legal issues were real, but the free unices managed to get around legal issues with Unix including the setuid patent.

Re:Niche - and quixotic

[i_am_nitrogen]

Wow. A patent on the SetUID bit? And I thought patents were getting weird now... This was in 1973. Next thing you know people will be patenting the number 4 or something...

Re:Niche - and quixotic

[Amazing Quantum Man]

At the time, SetUID *WAS* new and innovative, and I belive that Ritchie put it in the PD, but I'm not sure.

Re:Niche - and quixotic

[Fourier]

But the way in which it failed was interesting: no one wanted to do anything unless it had the blessing of Digital ^W Compaq ^W Hewlett Paqard.

I think you must have misunderstood. Clearly, the project must have failed because VMS is pure evil and nobody wanted to clone such a hideous creation.

Re:Niche - and quixotic

[jockm]

At the time SUID was an innovation. Because Bell Labs was concerned that a patent on software might be rejected, they wrote the patent as though it were a piece of hardware.

Also since the patent had a lifetime of 17 years, it expired in 1990.

What about VSTa?

[i_am_nitrogen]

VSTa is a very promising upcoming OS, with a microkernel architecture and very modular design. Why wasn't it mentioned in that list? Development seems to be active. I know of someone at MontaVista who spends all his spare time working on VSTa. It's supposed to be similar to Plan9 in a few ways, very advanced, research-based, designed by people experienced with kernel and OS programming... It already supports SMP.

Re:What about VSTa?

[Kazmat]

VSTa has been in development for over a decade now, and to be honest, it's still very primative: VSTa doesn't have an installer, it resides entirely in a /vsta subdirectory of the install partition, it's painful to setup (manual editing of /etc/passwd, etc) and has a very small HCL. Saying it already supports SMP when it's over a decade old is not very impressive.

VSTa was designed as a research OS, to play around with new ideas, and it's definately achieved that goal, but it definately isn't "very promising" or an "upcoming OS".

Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of the ideas that went into VSTa - the file permissions, /env, the IPC, to name a few, but VSTa is a research OS, and only a research OS, do not expect to be using it on your desktop.

If you like very modular microkernel OSes, check out QNX. QNX is a very nice OS, based on an extremely nice microkernel, and is under active development. The only downside to QNX is that it's not Free Software (although still free as in beer).

Re:What about VSTa?

[erikdalen]

The development of VSTa has been slow for some years. But it's really picking up some pace. I wouldn't be that sure that it will never be more than a research OS to toy with. Sure, it will probably never in the conceivable future be an os for the average windows user.

And QNX, while a nice unix, is another unix. And by the way GNU HURD is also a modular microkernel unix.

/Erik

yeah like Vx-works is niche

[johnjones]

wake up vx-works and Itron are some of the most deployed O/S's in the world so what do you call niche ?

ones that the general public uses ?
(ever thought about the O/S in a mobile phone)
or even yourt Set Top Box pluged into your TV

just because it doesnt screem the version and who made it does not make it less of a O/S

regards

john jones

p.s. oh and linux need to sort out threading I found out today (-;

Re:yeah like Vx-works is niche

[Miles]

Taken to an extreme, aren't all OSs niche OSs? After all, couldn't you say that Windows X is a niche product since they have to make so many different versions for different markets? Similarly, doesn't IBM use different OSs for different markets?

Re:yeah like Vx-works is niche

[Icculus]

niche != less of an OS, or less of anything, for that matter

niche n.

2. A special area of demand for a product or service: One niche that is approaching mass-market proportions is held by regional magazines.

I think cell phones count as a special area of demand, as do set top boxes.

Different types of niche operating systems

[adadun]

In my (somewhat limited) experience with niche operating systems for PCs, they can roughly be divided into two categories:

• "Toy" systems that are written by a few hackers "just because they can". Those are typically written in (x86) assembler and even eary versions can produce a nice looking GUI. (Note that "toy" systems can very rigid and functional, despite their name.)
  
• "Research" systems that are written by researchers to prove a point. The rarely have a GUI (unless the research involve real-time graphics as for Nemesis).

Both kinds are extremely hard to install, only run on a very carefully selected set of hardware, and don't really gain much appreciation other than from a very small group of followers. Followers from both groups often look down on eachother.

Lately, the operating systems research has come to a slowdown, but the operating system hackers (that produce the "toy" systems) are gaining more and more momentum. The latter can most likely be contributed to the success of Linux. Can the former be explained by that operating systems now is a fully explored area?

Re:Different types of niche operating systems

[Anonymous Coward]

The latter can most likely be contributed to the success of Linux

This is correct as far as driver development and portable applications are concerned. A lot of useful stuff (compiler, C library, shell, GNOME etc.) can also be directly credited to the GNU project.

However, I believe that one main reason we see a new wave of OS development is large scale Internet and PC availability. It's far easier to both create a meaningful OS and tell the world about it today than it was, say, 10 years ago, when Linux got started. SourceForge etc. also contribute to this, as do weblogs which make people aware of cool new projects.

Re:Different types of niche operating systems

[ReelOddeeo]

niche operating systems for PCs, ...can be divided into two categories

They can be divided into one category: illegal operating systems.

SSSCA

Re:Different types of niche operating systems

[ENOENT]

I hadn't thought of that aspect of SSSCA. So, that means that undergraduate Operating Systems classes will be shut down, since they typically use reduced-complexity or toy OSes for programming projects, while graduate OS classes will be renamed "Stupid Windows Tricks".

Can we have some well-spoken and photogenic hacker volunteers to run for seats in Congress? Please?

Re:Different types of niche operating systems

[Earlybird]

You left another important category:

• "Wannabe" systems that are written by idealistic, hopeful and often naïve developers, often trying to emulate the success of Linux. Some of these are clearly over-ambitious. But it all has to start somewhere (apparently Finland works for some people).

Re:Different types of niche operating systems

[woggo]

Your request implies that some well-spoken, photogenic hacker exists. That may be the big problem to solve first.

Re:Different types of niche operating systems

[Russ Steffen]

The classes will probably continue, but the Universities, Professors and students will have to be specially licensed to handle non-Certified operating systems. Comp-Sci students will probably have to have periodic FBI background checks to prove that they can be trusted with such dangerous code.

And outside of school, dangerous tools like compilers and debuggers will have to be controlled and licensed as well.

The future's looking so bright I could cry.

Re:Different types of niche operating systems

[discogravy]

because windows has a well-spoken, photogenic Evil Overlord^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H monkeyboy^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spokesman and that's how it got so widespread.

How about this for a niche OS

[Tim Macinta]

When I first looked at the title I mis-read "niche" and thought somebody had created a "Nietzsche" operating system. Now that would be a niche OS. What would such an OS do? I supposed it could complain about Jesux users.

Re:How about this for a niche OS

[gowen]

I suppose it could complain about Jesux users.

Jesux's webpage hasn't been updated for two years, so it looks like development may have stopped. I wouldn't rule out the whole distribution suddenly rising from the dead though...

Re:How about this for a niche OS

[AndroidCat]

"That which does not kill a task makes it stronger"?

Re:How about this for a niche OS

[__aaahtg7394]

didn't you hear?

Jesux's Developer is dead.
-- Nietzsche

(another bad pun brought to you by jbm)

Re:How about this for a niche OS

[chromatic]

It'd probably save on energy bills, with a built in will to power. On the other hand.... think of HAL 9000. Yikes.

Re:How about this for a niche OS

[Stonehand]

Ouch. Sounds like you'd need a BFG then, at least to deal with the nastier processes...

Re:How about this for a niche OS

[psin psycle]

I think geocities has heard of the slashdot effect.

The web site you are trying to access has exceeded its allocated data transfer.

Visit our help area for more information.

Access to this site will be restored within an hour. Please try again later. http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Node/408 1/

Re:How about this for a niche OS

[Sloppy]

When ran the debugger on the program, the program ran the debugger back at me.

learning from the past

[stego]

>>everything has to be started from scratch
>>and nobody seems willing to even consider the
>>lessons learned in the past.

Except maybe Apple, who rewrote their entire OS based on Unix for its proven stability, ability to play nice with others, etc etc...

Re:learning from the past

[cpt kangarooski]

Except of course, that this ignores the lessons regarding Unix's abyssymal UI; ignoring the lesson that OS demands on hardware have to be as minimal as possible (esp. wrt the graphics system); ignoring areas where Unix could stand improvement, e.g. security models, filesystems, etc., etc.....

Unix is not the end all be all of OSes. Reimplementing it means that EXACTLY the mistakes of the past will be made, as opposed to a random assortment of mistakes and successes -- including new ones -- by trying something different

Re:learning from the past

[NDPTAL85]

If that were the case with Apple and OS X you would be right. Instead Apple improved on things where Unix needed improving and left things alone that didn't.

Re:learning from the past

[cpt kangarooski]

UI is better in some respects, but a step down from MacOS, and by no means an improvement to the state of the art.

Security model hasn't changed.

Speed's not amazing, though at least 10.1 is an improvement over the earlier releases.

Metadata's being depreciated.

I'm sorry, I'm not seeing that it's a substantial improvement on Unix, OR that Unix is a particularly desirable choice of OS for ordinary people. (Frankly, they could all stand significant improvement)

Re:learning from the past

[NDPTAL85]

You've developed a reputation on this forum for preferring that Unix stay on the server and away from the desktop. Its an opinion you are entitled to but your persistence does not make it true.

You say OS X is a step down from the Mac OS UI, others would say its a step up. Who's right? Who's wrong?

Security model: Agreed.

Speed: Won't be a problem in a year or two with faster hardware and 10.1 is already a big improvement.

Metadata: Debatable. It makes OS X more compatible with other OS's and for normal users its something that makes transferring documents easier.

Until Artificial Intelligence arrives which could anticipate and automate common tasks for everyone and adapt to each person individually, we'll have to put up with what we have. Thats Unix and NT for the forseable future.

Re:learning from the past

[be-fan]

Speed: Won't be a problem in a year or two with faster hardware and 10.1 is already a big improvement.
>>>>>>
A lot of people happen to think that the OS has no business demanding so much system resources. People don't run OSs, they run applications. While I can understand a 3D moderling taking a 128MB machine, I can't understand a desktop environment doing the same. The OS should just get the hell out of the way and leave all of the resources to the apps. MacOS-X is a great example. They use an absolutely brain-dead model for their OS. The pile a monolithic server on a microkernel. Not only does that add bloat, but it takes the disadvantages of a microkernel (speed), and the disadvantages of a macrokernel (vulnerability to bugs in OS) and puts them together.

Re:learning from the past

[cpt kangarooski]

While of course, different users will have different preferences, HCI is more of a science than you seem to believe. Objective user testing and creative thinking can in fact determine _just_ how much of an improvement something is for various classes of user.

Given that, based on inclination to go with the Mac platform, prior investments, planned usage, and populations, the order of users whose needs should be addressed, and who should be attracted basically goes: Mac, Windows, newbies, Unix, misc. it's really mysterious as to why, for example, OS X would have Unix-like user directories, or a terminal divorced from the GUI.

Of course, Apple has done little HCI work that is seriously innovative since System 7. So it's not too surprising. Personally, I'm always suspicious when I see some Unix feature that was never in popular use crop up in OS X. It's tough for me to imagine that there could be so little improvement to UI than what was done by two guys in the late 60's.

Were there ideas that were quite cutting edge, that were nicely polished (e.g. directories that refresh themselves, much like System 1's did, hierarchical menus not limited to five levels, etc.) I'd be less critical of their overall efforts, and could concentrate on the substantive nature of the UI itself. Right now, there's not much that's new to go on.

Regarding metadata, there are other ways to handle cross-platform issues that preserve metadata, as well as new features that could be provided by the OS and documented in the HIG, such as auto-appending suffixes to outgoing flat files, etc. Apple's regressing to the old ways, and it's not all that necessary. NTFS has good support for metadata, for allied things like forked files, and is the coming standard. Apple's getting left in the dust, and ironically is NOT being a terribly good neighbor.

Re:learning from the past

[NDPTAL85]

"Given that, based on inclination to go with the Mac platform, prior investments, planned usage, and populations, the order of users whose needs should be addressed, and who should be attracted basically goes: Mac, Windows, newbies, Unix, misc. it's really mysterious as to why, for example, OS X would have Unix-like user directories, or a terminal divorced from the GUI."

What makes you think Apple is trying to attract current Mac users first and foremost? The Apple website makes very clear their intentions to get the other 95 out of 100 people who buy PC's instead of Macs. While Apple isn't ignoring current Mac users, they aren't putting them in the front seat anymore either and thats a good thing.

All of the Windows users I know have expressed much interest in OS X. I have a Powerbook and show it to who-ever asks and they all want it. Several are going to buy iMacs and iBooks just to be able to use it. I don't see the Unix behaviour of the underlying core of OS X scaring anyone away. Many commented on how it was easier to use and more intuitive than Mac OS 9 and below.

As for the UI, OS X is an OS created with the help of much consumer research and the results of focus groups. Its not as if it was just thrown together to look pretty. Its easy to criticize a company for not doing enough "new and innovative" things but Apple is a company that needs to make money. Surprisingly they are also a company that finally wants to grow. The "innovative and cutting edge UI" that was the Classic Mac OS didn't move many boxes. Sure there are about 20 million Mac users worldwide today but thats nothing compared to the 100's of millions of Windows users.

Re:learning from the past

[cpt kangarooski]

The reason that they must address the existing user base first is simple, really. It's the only one they have. Perhaps Apple can attract other customers. But given the high barriers to entry, regarding incompatable software and expensive niche hardware, and the better/good dichotomy, gambling that new customers can be brought in at the expense of old customers is insane. It's an absolutely ridiculous risk to unecessarily run.

As for UI testing, I really, really doubt that there was much at all. The UI is too unpolished -- it bears the hallmarks of something that was designed by fiat, designed by artists, and not designed by HCI designers. Most UI experts that have weighed in at all have tended to agree, several of whom have worked at Apple.

You remark that the previous UI didn't move many boxes. Well, the commercial success of OS X has, of course, yet to be realized. But are you seriously proposing that regression would work better? DOS sold bajillions of boxes... but I'm not hearing much call for that any more.

NextStep, upon which OS X is clearly based, sold hardly anything at all... I'd give MacOS more credit. Even in the face of MS, it was the only OS with any desktop popularity at all, besides Windows, though Apple squandered it for ages.

Re:learning from the past

[NDPTAL85]

Considering that Apple woefully underestimated the demand for 10.1 to the point that they now have the update discs on backorder and that 10.1 has resolved most of the remaining issues with OS X I would say that Apple has already pleased its current customer base.

You are right in that most of the UI experts have chimed in with their opinions on the Aqua UI and yes some of them even used to work at Apple. The thing is, times change and most of thoes "experts" haven't done anything of note since their original works.

NextStep sold hardly at all because the prices of the boxes were even more expensive than the Macs of the era which were already rediculously priced. That and the lack of applications, its focus on students and inability to run current (at the time) Mac applications at the time said more for Next Inc's troubles than the NextStep OS itself.

Re:learning from the past

[DavidRavenMoon]

Except maybe Apple, who rewrote their entire OS based on Unix for its proven stability, ability to play nice with others, etc etc...

Amen to that! Well actually they rewrote NeXTSTEP, but that's a good thing too!

(running OS X 10.1)

Re:learning from the past

[DavidRavenMoon]

A lot of people happen to think that the OS has no business demanding so much system resources. People don't run OSs, they run applications.

Actually there is nothing wrong with the speed of OS X 10.1 when running applications. The only place that the OS has speed problems is in the Finder, and it's not that bad with 10.1. I'm running on a 466 G4, below the bottom of the line now, and it runs fine. Most applications launch ina few blinks of an eye (or bounces in the Dock) and even though it's not as fast as OS 9.2.1 on the same machine, it will get faster with time.

I do have 896 MB of RAM, but it ran fine on 384 too! ;-)

Oh and my vote is that Aqua is nicer than OS 9's GUI, and is a step up.

Re:learning from the past

[DavidRavenMoon]

it's really mysterious as to why, for example, OS X would have Unix-like user directories, or a terminal divorced from the GUI.

Why is that? It IS Unix! You have to remember that this was exactly the way NeXTSTEP was, and of course that's basically what OS X is.

Of course, Apple has done little HCI work that is seriously innovative since System 7.

I take it you don't use Macs? OS 8 made HUGE improments to the GUI and introduced a bunch of great things like spring loaded folders, tabbed pop-up windows, and the control strip. it's been an evolution, not a revolution. OS X is the logical step (the NeXT step?) in the right direction.

For the new user, or the non techie user, we have a Unix based system that doesn't look like Unix. Something a lot of people have been asking for with Linux. For the power user you have all your Unix tools. You can even run X-Window apps.

Re:learning from the past

[cpt kangarooski]

I use Macs all the time, own a G3 BW, been using them since the mid-80's, used to sell and repair them... I think my Mac credentials are in good order, thanks.

I also have a NeXT Cube that I used to use (hm, I could probably sell it now... I need the cash) and I completely agree with you that OS X is OpenStep 6. But I contend that OpenStep was, while a user friendly Unix, not as user friendly as any OS out there. MacOS, BeOS, and even Windows beat it in those regards.

MacOS 8 did not introduce the control strip, and while I agree that spring loaded folders and popup windows (the latter, one of my favorite things) are great innovations, they do kind of pale before the work done earlier. Platinum is a skin, I'm afraid, and that's pretty minor. Of course, Apple laid off a lot of key HCI staff just after System 7 was done, and most of the rest trickled out not awfully long afterwards. They're sitting on a mountain of good UI concepts, but little is being produced. I've been fortunate enough to see little glimpses here and there, though things are often under wraps. Quite a lot of the things that came out in the 90's were in fact developed by third parties!

Sheets are about the best thing I've seen in OS X, I'm afraid.

Anyway, looking like Unix is quite a different thing from behaving like Unix. Behavior, really, is more fundementally important than appearance. (though I'm not discounting the latter) And in that respect, there's not been much improvement AFAICT.

The appeal to other Unix users is probably going to be more minimal than you think. Apple hasn't got the experience or products to move into the medium-high end server market. (hell, you can't even rackmount their stuff easily) And on the low end, you've got to contend with x86 commodity hardware that can be dual booted into Windows if necessary. I'd be a little more encouraged if they migrated to x86, but that's probably not going to happen.

Re:learning from the past

[cpt kangarooski]

NextStep sold hardly at all because the prices of the boxes were even more expensive than the Macs of the era which were already rediculously priced. That and the lack of applications, its focus on students and inability to run current (at the time) Mac applications at the time said more for Next Inc's troubles than the NextStep OS itself.

While I think that NextStep itself played more of a role than you give it credit for, let's discount that for the moment. Now replace 'Next' with 'Apple,' stick Steve at the helm... and I find that unless Apple had made a spectacular effort to turn around, an almost impossible one, that they're repeating some non-technically oriented mistakes of the past as well.

Re:learning from the past

[cpt kangarooski]

Oh, a number had been canned all through the 90's, ever since System 7 finally came out. (plus, to add insult to injury, the trigger for the Blue Meanies' ULTIMATE easter egg was removed. Bastards!)

But yeah, basically, Steve is supreme. Hell, the stupid bastard didn't even understand the benefits of GUIs until the two PARC trips were arranged SOLELY for his benefit. Everyone else had gotten it -- but not him. (then he thought it was his own idea... jeesh)

However, I think that a combination of modified popup folders and spring loaded folders would make a better Apple menu than the Apple menu itself. It's too long to discuss here, but look for my posts on Ars Open Forum for more details

Another resource

[Z4rd0Z]

FreeOS is another good place to find out about these kind of operating systems.

Dare I mention...

[Crusty Oldman]

Dare I mention that the Forth language IS an operating system in its own right? Damn good one too!

Re:Dare I mention...

[AndroidCat]

FORTH LOVE IF HONK THEN

I have a certain fondness for Forth-like languages because they were so easy to boot-strap on 8-bit micros.

Re:Dare I mention...

[motherhead]

Dude, i loved BeOS as well, I hate Microsoft, and i am writing this on a G4 running OS 10.1...

Apple had more to do with killing BeOS then M$ did. Remember what happened when apple rolled out the G3? yeah that's right, it refused implicately to share or allow data that was instrumental in porting BeOS on up to the new proccessors... BeOS had a lot of momentem at the time and i believe it was build 2.4 or 2.5 I was running on my 8600 at the time.

When apple shanked them on the G4 it was the begining of the end, they switched gears to port it to x86, the BeOS box took a dump... momentum shifted and everything came undone....

It took as long as last saturday for me to actually use my Mac as my main box again.

beOS is NOT a niche operating system.

[Sj0]

beOS is a great consumer OS which was crushed by the infernal machine(MS). Don't forget it.

Re:beOS is NOT a niche operating system.

[Malcontent]

MS simply threatened computer manufacturers not to pre-install BeOS. If anybody pre-installed it they would lose the legal right to install windows. Just your typical mafioso tactic from MS.

Re:beOS is NOT a niche operating system.

[CodingFiend]

BeOS was crushed due to management having the equivalent brainpower of a box of twinkies and not keeping up with the latest hardware developments.

Re:beOS is NOT a niche operating system.

[pyramid termite]

No, no, no. BeOS failed for a very simple reason. There wasn't enough applications availablle to run on it. Who cares about MS as a threat? What computer company in their right mind is going to bundle an OS that doesn't have a decent browser or office suite and doesn't have any games or applications available?

Re:beOS is NOT a niche operating system.

[Sj0]

No, no, no. BeOS failed for a very simple reason. There wasn't enough applications availablle to run on it.
Lets investigate this.

What computer company in their right mind is going to bundle an OS that doesn't have a decent browser
hmmm...Like Opera? or the browser that comes with beOS?
or office suite
Like Gobe Productive or Abiword?

and doesn't have any games or applications available?
Like Abuse, Quake, Quake II,Doom, Doom II, or scores of others?

Stop talking out of your ass. beOS has plenty of apps for it.

Re:beOS is NOT a niche operating system.

[Malcontent]

"Who cares about MS as a threat?"

Every computer manufacturer does that's who. Could Dell, gateway, compaq, ibm or anybody else afford to lose the ability sell PCs with windows on it? Of course not. That's what MS threatened them with. If you pre-install BEOS (or even netscape) then we will yank your licence and you will have to sell your PCs without windows.

Re:beOS is NOT a niche operating system.

[borgheron]

Too far off the beaten path. One word folks "marketing". Come on sound it out... you can do it! When was the last time you saw an add for anything but Sun, Apple, or Microsoft? Companies need to market, or no one know about thier product.

For example, I had an old friend from High School ask me recently "What's Linux". Of course She's not a computer person, but it shocked me because I thought everyone knew about it. I sometimes forget that I'm a geek. ;) The point is that the average person *does not care* which OS is running on his/her box. All they want is for it to boot up and work.

BeOS is, by Be's own admission, a "multimedia OS" which aims it squarely at a certain portion of individuals which, by definition, makes it a niche. In addition Be's total Q2 revenues were $715,000 which most came from "integration services for customers" see http://www.be.com/press/pressreleases/01-07-25_q2r esults.html

for more info. I would say that with sales figures that low, not many people are buying BeOS.

In summary, while I agree BeOS is cool, sometimes cool is just not enough to make it.

Later, GJC

Re:beOS is NOT a niche operating system.

[pyramid termite]

beOS has plenty of apps for it.

Abiword and Opera can be run on the operating systems I already have. I have Star Office for Windows and Linux. The browser that came with BeOS was so-so. And the games you've listed can all be run on Windows and/or Linux.

Look, I tried it, I kept it on my hard drive for months and visited the popular web sites and dug deep for reasons I should spring for the full edition and I couldn't find one. I backed up the partition on a CDrom and deleted it. I still haven't found a compelling reason to put it back. I still look at bebits.com once in a while just to see. It was a nice OS, but my options in Windows and Linux are a lot broader.

If I'm going to mess with a 3rd operating system, I need a compelling reason to run it. BeOS didn't provide me with one.

DV editing with Mac OS

[green pizza]

in my neck of the woods Win32 variants are on the desktop and Linux and Solaris are in the server room. Though we do have a few Apple G4 machines running Mac OS 9.2 for video editing of MiniDV and DVCAM. The OS and software have been working great and we're looking foward to seeing what will come about with Mac OS X. Our local VAR has been showing off some HD video work (Sony HDCAM source through a Cine card with Ciprico 7000 fibrechannel RAIDs via an ATTO FC card). Looks neat, but a bit kludgy compared to doing the same thing on, say, an SGI Octane2. (Plus I'd take IFX Piranha over FinalCutPro any day).

Re:DV editing with Mac OS

[green pizza]

Mac OS is a great OS for some tasks, but it is far from mainstream. Even Apple admits the fact on this page. With 5% of marketshare, they have even fewer users and new adopters than Linux. This doesn't make it any less of an OS. We've had no problems thus far with our OS 9.2, Final Cut Pro 2.02, & DVD Studio Pro 1.1 setup. It's no SiliconGraphics machine, but it doesn't cost nearly as much either.

Re:DV editing with Mac OS

[DavidRavenMoon]

the sign of an accepted, mainstream OS is when most major software (Photoshop, MS Office, IE, etc) is available for said platform. Most of the most heavily used applications available for the Win32 platform are also available for the Mac

You have that backwards. Those are all programs that were written on the Mac then ported to Windows. Photoshop was a Mac program back before there was Windows! As was MS Word and IE was derived from NCSA Mosaic. Windows 1.0 was derived from code licensed from Apple just to run Excel (or was it called Visicalc or something...)

But I agree that makes Mac OS and Windows mainstream OS's

We already have it with linux

[famazza]

There are plenty of specific kernel patches for specific tasks, like high security, and graphics enhancements, or even an experimental enhancments patch, we all know them and hear about them every week here in /.

The big advantage of these patches is that the resulting OSs have full compability with GNU/Linux. Wich is very good, because then developers don't need to offer basic support, and can focus only in the OS funcionality.

Maybe this is the way for Nich OSs.

new operating system

[donabal]

There should be a new operating system that is wholesome, healthy and comes in various flavors, from plain to sugary to apple-cinnamon-y.

CheeriOS.

--donabal

Re:new operating system

[zerOnIne]

so would the SMP edition for this be called MultiGrain?

besides, you forgot a very prominent one, and i can hardly believe it!

you forgot honey nut... i basically grew up on honey-nut cheerios and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches ... yum :)

it's a honey of an oh-oh-oh-*thunk* ok, i'll stop now...

it's all well and good...

[hajmola]

but an OS is nothing without applications - and only until there are applications for an OS, can its usability and robustness be truly measured.
-raj

POSIX.

[Sj0]

A lot of systems have POSIX compatibility, which is pretty close to what you are talking about. A recompile will make a lot of Linux apps (shell apps at least...) work under beOS, and BSD, but most of these apps are *recognised* by the OS, so if you were to perfectly port glib for linux to beos, you could run without a recompile.

Thank you Linux/BSD/etc

[MattW]

The fact that there's all this open source driver code helps make other OS's possible, and also helps make them more usable (in case you need a new driver for the niche OS). The contribution of a device driver writer for linux is obvious when you get your linux distro and have the device; but there is a big secondary benefit in the way they help contribute knowledge that can be used by others on other projects.

MS-DOS 2.0!

[wiredog]

Fits on a 5.25 inch disk and runs well in 128kb of memory! Fast and easy to use!

Re:MS-DOS 2.0!

[Glenn R-P]

Fits on a 5.25 inch disk and runs well in 128kb of memory! Fast and easy to use!

My favorite was the unnamed OS that came with the AIM-65 (6502-chip-based) machine. It fit in a 4k EPROM and ran well in 1k of memory and an additional 4k of EPROM for application code such as the assembler. Problem was it completely filled the EPROM so when I wanted to upgrade the assembler to handle new 6502-C instructions, first I had to rewrite some of the existing code to take fewer bytes, to make room for the new stuff.

Re:Hey, America!

[Mama's Family Troll]

That's just wrong...

I'm calling my congressman.. Jesse Helms.

They never stood a chance.

[Sj0]

Microsoft has convinced idiot users that somehow if it isn't windows it's inferior, which was NOT the case with beOS. The move to release a free version sold them at least *one* copy of it(I have a copy of R5 on my laptop, and I use it regularly). Linux users in paticular seem to have an inferiority complex when it comes to comparing themselves to windows (not all of them, but I always hear about 'why linux will never beat windows', when in reality, MS is a business company, not a software company, and that's why they dominate (I don't think they've ever released anything that wasn't somebody elses code)...

Business tactics don't dictate the quality of an OS. be made some mistakes, but they didn't deserve to go out of business. MS is brutal, but they do deserve to go out of business.

one way to

[Hadlock]

one way to show off your girlfriend. not too shabby. incase you're wondering what i'm talking about, take a look at SkyOS's latest screenshot. Not the most flattering picture, though, lol.

as a side thought, there's a lite version of mozzila called gecko...it's designed for easy portability (i think), which basically is why kmeleon exists....but how much effort is involved in porting gecko over to a new OS? from my POV, what really makes or breaks the popularity, or even someone bothering to download/test out an OS is a working psudeo-graphical web browser, no matter how buggy. MinuetOS was neat from my standpoint, b/c i could load it from a floppy, but after about 10 minutes of playing with it, it lost my interest. yes, i'm sure someone'll reply saying 'hey, why don't *you* volunteer to rewrite gecko to work on SkyOS? i would, but i'm not that much of a software hobbyist. i'd be more interested in writing up some sort of tutorial on how to convert gecko for your OS's needs, however contradictory that is to my previous statment. just a suggestion. as a side question, are there any tutorials like that out there? i haven't looked at the mozzila code myself, so i'm not sure how userfriendly the code is to need a tutorial in the first place.

Re:one way to

[green pizza]

one way to show off your girlfriend. not too shabby. incase you're wondering what i'm talking about, take a look at SkyOS's latest screenshot. Not the most flattering picture, though, lol.

Still pretty cute, though...

My favorite Niche OS...

[Ortado]

By far has to be FreeDOS. Although development is slow, and the user base pales in compairason to others like Linux or FreeBSD, it's really amazing what they've done. The developer's list has 500+ people on it (most inactive) and recently the system is getting pretty good. Back 10 years ago, DOS was by far not a niche OS, but today it has become. Sad it is, but glad that some people accually understand that for such a simple OS, it's quite extendable.

Oh, and of course, by favorite GUI to go ontop of FreeDOS: DWin. Not much to use yet, but i really enjoy it.

I'm a developer for ReactOS (WinNT Clone)

[isolation]

Check it out at www.reactos.com

The SkyOS site is /.ed

[MacBrave]

I want an OS that is immune to the /. effect. Commodore C-64 anyone?

Re:The SkyOS site is /.ed

[rasjani]

Add Lunix to your c64 and something listening on port 80 then basicly alll there's left is to duck and cover =))

can't remember who said this

[GMOL]

As someone who once wanted to design his own OS and actually got reasonably far, I came across this quote somewhere (was it Kerrigan?)...

"Those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to re-invent it."

Re:can't remember who said this

[GMOL]

Read the quote again, let it sink in and then read it again...this is one of those zen-like truths in computing.

But for the sake of discussion, what would you desribe as an OS that is unUNIX?

Re:can't remember who said this

[thermostat42]

OS/400 - single level store, Machine Interface, its native file system. . . its the least UNIX like OS I've seen.

Re:can't remember who said this

[stantron77]

The quote I assume you are talking about is "Those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it, poorly." by Henry Spencer

Here's a mirror for skyos that currently works

[ben_tarval]

the skyos.org site is /.'d right now. If you want a site that is currently working, try http://lightning.prohosting.com/~skyos/

Re:Jesux

[stud9920]

Did make a custom Konqueror version called Krusader ?

new OS announcement ;-)

[McFly777]

I am thinking of developing a new OS with the aim of making everybody happy.

I think I will call it CheeriOS.

Hmmm... you don't think General Mills will mind do you?

Indirect Slashdot Effect

[Leif_Bloomquist]

It seems we have performed one of the first Indirect Slashdot Effects.

OSnews is fine, but the sites the article links to are Slashdotted...

Re: linux need to sort out threading

[Jeffrey Baker]

The entire concept of signals sucks. No wonder signals and threads do not mix.

Just say no to asynchronous delivery. Your program should be notified of events only when it calls dequeue_event() or whatever. For something that is really async like segmentation violation, your program should just get whacked without any opportunity to do anything else.

Getting rid of signals would solve most of the problems I perceive with programming in Unix.

Re:Jesux

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm currently working on a Unix-based windows manager - PlatoX. No actual windows. It only supports dialogs.

here's their first test

[gnurd]

how well they take a slasdotting!

Definition of MainStream?

[Alien54]

So if after years of existence BeOS is not yet a mainstream OS, I don't see why I shouldn't call it a "niche OS"! AtheOS on the other part, is likely to become a mainstream.

So what constitues a mainstream OS? what number of users? what number of developers? What market share?

Seriously, How would you define it?

of hand I can think of at several quals, but there have to be more. And these may be messed up.

1) Main population of users is not restricted to a specific location or region.
2) Probably a lot more users than developers
User base consists of a substantial fraction of the total user base.

But what counts as substantial? If Apple was just starting, would 10% of the market be considered mainstream?

and which markets?

Re:Definition of MainStream?

[pmz]

I would estimate that something is considered mainstream when it reaches either "buzzword" status or "household name" status.

For example, MS Windows and MacOS are household names (one due to market dominance and one due to sheer longevity). Linux, on the other hand, still seems to be in the buzzword phase, but it is becoming more and more a household name over time. The BSD-based OSes are becoming buzzwords and are a little further from becoming household names. The lesser-known OSes, such as AtheOS and BeOS, have either not yet gained buzzword status or have lost it after gaining it.

There are different audiences, too. Solaris is a household name among some corporations but just a niche among home computer users. Another example is Windows NT/2K in corporations, which can be either a household name, a buzzword, or a joke, depending on the context.

Which ones are Unixen?

[strredwolf]

So far, I'm not seeing many niche Unixen out there, save for Minix (which I'm half-tempted to port to a virtual machine).

Screw niche operating systems

[Slashdot Cruiser]

I'm working on a Nietzsche operating system.

Not only is it very abstract, it's downright existentialist. If you try to log in as "God", it tells you you're dead.

Re:Screw niche operating systems

[Slashdot Cruiser]

Even Barry Bonds strikes out sometimes.

Re:Screw niche operating systems

[Slashdot Cruiser]

But we're both black.

Well, ok, I'm actually green with white trim.

That's it -- both me and Barry get white trim!

Re:Screw niche operating systems

[pyramid termite]

I've perfected a Beckett operating system which takes forever to boot up. It's called Waiting for GodOS.

Niche isn't the word I'd use.

[Junks Jerzey]

"Niche" implies that there's a particular, small area in which it would be extremely useful. The OSes listed in this article are pretty vanilla for the most part, implementing the usual set of OS features, but with programmer's own pet technical bent ("Written entirely in assembly language," "Highly modular," and so on). As such, while these may be fantastic learning projects, the world is not clamoring for operating systems that differ in minor technical ways.

Quite possibly, the world is not needing another OS in the traditional sense. When someone uses Windows, for example, he or she thinks of the "OS" as being Explorer, Internet Explorer, and certain common applications. It doesn't matter that they're running on top of the Windows kernel or the Linux kernel or whatever...that level of detail is irrelevant unless you make a hobby out of being concerned with it. The separation of a computing tool into "OS" and "application" is outdated. A better angle is to focus on what computers get used for most commonly, and then write a so-called operating system to give you the support you need to provide those tools to users. Writing the OS first is akin to the usual mistake of architecting a 3D engine without any clue as to what game it should be used in. That's the backward approach.

Re:Niche isn't the word I'd use.

[ZigMonty]

On the contrary, if you want to make the "computing tool" stable, you have to write the kernel first. Without a well defined kernel what does the virtual memory, memory protection, process scheduling, symmetric multiprocessing etc? What you have described is the environment of the early Macs, which was an application with a bunch of support routines, or "managers", in ROM. This turned out to be a terrible solution when Apple tried to extend it beyond these roots. VM was patched on, multitasking always was a hack etc. It's ironic that now the Mac's OS, MacOSX 10.1, is the exact opposite. It's based on the mach microkernel, which is probably one of the most well thought out microkernels in history.

Just because the user shouldn't have to worry about what kernel the GUI is running on doesn't make it irrelevant. It is the opposite. If you do the kernel well, the user won't have to worry about it. Do it badly or half-heartedly and the user will be VERY aware of it! It seems that you use a system with a good kernel, which might be why you don't see it as important. It is!!

In summary: you shouldn't write the applications first and then hack together an OS to support them. Write the kernel first, starting with VM and working up from there. Make it support multiprocessors right from the start. If you design it well then, to your users, it will seem like it's not there. Once you have a stable kernel then by all means hide it under a user-friendly interface but give it the attention it deserves!

Re:Niche isn't the word I'd use.

[Junks Jerzey]

On the contrary, if you want to make the "computing tool" stable, you have to write the kernel first. Without a well defined kernel what does the virtual memory, memory protection, process scheduling, symmetric multiprocessing etc?

No, this isn't true. Look at some of the big successes in "alternative views of computing" in recent years: Erlang, REBOL, Python, Zope, etc. None of these involved writing a kernel.

CP/M, still going strong

[Anonymous Coward]

Build your own hardware. Roll your own CP/M kernel. Check it out:comp.os.cpm

Re:CP/M, still going strong

[Crusty Oldman]

I remember the days (but then I'm a crusty old man) when we could get things done faster and with a lot less hardware, on a Kaypro, a Xerox, or an Osborne. Usually with 48k memory or less!

Then somebody started pushing this MS/DOS crap. I never understood the big deal. It took four or five times the memory, and six or eight times the hardware cost to do the same stuff. But the suits made a big and profitable market. It happened again in an even bigger way when they put a disfunctional GUI on top of MS/DOS.

I wonder what the next bloated "advance" is going to be.

Re:CP/M, still going strong

[Crusty Oldman]

I used Wordstar and Spellstar back then. Worked just fine, didn't have to move from board to mouse and back all the time.

Interesting OSes

[DGolden]

EROS is a very promising O.S. - orthogonally persistent, cool security.

An "interesting" OS is AROS - it's AmigaOS, but open-source on x86, complete with Amiga-style:

pre-emptive multitasking.

total lack of memory protection, except for "cooperative" m.p. via semaphore locking.

blazingly fast IPC by by-reference message passing

on-the-fly shared library function patching

user-space device drivers (though, without any memory protection, user space is a pretty abstract concept :-).

integrated GUI + unix-like shell.

Also has a fun "soft-pseudo-reboot in a fraction of a second" feature, based on just freeing all memory except the kernel + vectoring to the kernel entry point - whcih means, you may crash due to lack of memory protection, but you'll be back up,very,very quickly :-).

Where's EROS?

[kzinti]

Where's EROS, the Extremely Reliable Operating System that Eric Raymond wrote about no too long ago? OppcOS sounds a lot like it - saves its entire state to disk periodically, has no "file systems" - but in a quick peruse of the OppcOS site, I couldn't find any mention of whether the two are/were related. EROS sounded very promising, and unless its development has been abandoned, should have been on this list. (EROS used to have a web site, whose URL I cannot remember - obvious guesses like www.eros.org seem to be pr0n sites.)

Little help?

--Jim

Re:Where's EROS?

[wtpooh]

it's here:
www.eros-os.org

some text to satisfy the lameness filter gods

Re:Where's EROS?

[On Lawn]

EROS is alive and well, just nearing a 2.0 release that involves a lot of rewriting (kind of like where PleX86 is these days.) It involves many comprimises.

Re:Where's EROS?

[woggo]

http://www.eros-os.org

It looks like they last updated it on 6/9/2001.

Re:Where's EROS?

[Mr. Piccolo]

www.eros-os.org

Try that.

Re:Where's EROS?

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

EROS is alive and well, thanks.

The EROS site is at http://www.eros-os.org. Some related stuff that I'm working on can be found at http://srl.cs.jhu.edu

For a variety of reasons, we decided not to do a real release of the 2.x series of the kernel, because it became clear that another round of kernel architecture changes would be needed to adequately support embedding and real time. We've been hard at work on that, and the currency of the web site has suffered as a result. To give you a sense, the kernel has shrunk over 200k since the pre-2.0 non-release and is still shrinking.

In fact, sometime in the next few weeks we expect to pass a significant milestone: commands typed at a (pretty dumb) shell. At that point we'll have the component model pretty well solid, and can start in on application-level work seriously.

As to OPPCOS, it has no relationship to EROS. I went so far as to haul down the tarball and take a brief look. It's not clear to me what their plan is. There is no documentation, which makes it hard to discern where they are going. Hopefully, they will put some up soon.

The big news about EROS recently is that we received some significant funding from DARPA to get a secure web client going, and that in the process we are going to be able to build up most of a reasonable user environment.

For those who are interested to keep track, make sure that you are on the eros-announce list. You can subscribe at http://www.eros-os.org/mailman/listinfo.

Regards,

Jonathan S. Shapiro
(The EROS Guy)

Re:Where's EROS?

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

Oops. I got my version numbers mixed up. The version we skipped was the 1.0 version. 2.0 Will be the embeddable microkernel version.

A curious thing relative to OPPCOS: the EROS group decided to move orthogonal persistence back out of the kernel along with drivers, because (a) once the drivers are out, persistence pretty much has to go out as well, and (b) embedded systems often don't want it, or want explicit persistence management.

Regards,

Jonathan S. Shapiro
(The EROS Guy)

Re:Where's EROS?

[Peaker]

Oppcos is not directly related to EROS, but is very much inspired by its model.

Its plan is to create a simple and functional system, that can later be improved in terms of performance or low-level design. To achieve this, it will provide a high-level programming interface through layers of libraries, allowing the internal system structure to 'violently' change, as many low-level design decisions knowingly select simplicity over sanity/good-design.

The idea of simplicity above all as the first implementation stage, is inspired by Linux 0.01's success in its achieving functionality, and recruitment of developers.

Oppcos's lack of documentation is a direct result of the fact it is written by one programmer (me) with only weekends to work on it, making it quite unreasonable to spend this time writing docs, rather than coding :)

Oppcos is really just an educational/fun experience, or I'd better spend my time working on the EROS code base.

The operating system design I truly believe in, is a Vapour-like one, whereas I still like the EROS-like one, for the purpose of running unsafe languages in a secure, sane environment.

Re:Where's EROS?

[geeklawyer]

EROS certainly has the potential to be the best of breed "niche" OS and I'd recommend everyone to check it out. I'm interested to hear you talk about real-time and I wonder if/how this is related to multimedia and if that features in the plans?

Another thing I'd like to know is what the state of play is as far as native compilation goes? I tried to install it but I couldnt get cross compilation to work.

For a lot of these projects it is so important to maintain external interest with a current webpage. Projects build through community involvement and if the webpage looks dead few people will take the effort to join. Moving EROS to GPL was a good move in this respect but a page mainter really does matter of there can be a downward spiral.

(BTW with persistent state what happens if you have decrypted docs? are these flushed to the disk unencrypted?)

A more recent set of pages is here.

[ben_tarval]

One has to wonder why a 2 year old mirror is left around. But in any case, courtesy of google, here's a more recent collection of pages.

They forgot an extremely important OS

[AKAImBatman]

EROS. No, it isn't an OS that displays pr0n. It stands for Extremely Reliable Operating System and is used as a test bed for new OS enhancements such as OS persistence and token security. Besides, these guys get a real kick out of showing how they can kick the plug out of the wall and have their machine back up moments after they put the plug back in.

Another OS of interest is JOS, a Java based OS. While I agree with them in principle, they defined too large of a scope initially and ended up drowning in their own specs. Maybe one day we'll see an awesome OS out of them, but not today.

Re:They forgot an extremely important OS

[On Lawn]

They mentioned something like EROS, called OppcOS.

Not even out of PreAlpha yet, and only two developers.

The plug out of the wall story was actually about KeyKOS although I bet EROS would survive that test also.

I like EROS's idea of having no filesystem. A hard disk is the permanent memory map, and regulary memory is just cache for it. The capability system is a very interesting one also, allowing fine grained security for every part of the system even peripherals (But I suppose OppCOS would have that even though I can find no info on it.)

Re:They forgot an extremely important OS

[Crusty Oldman]

Maybe you folks should look into Squeak. It has the benefit of being well developed. Don't know how it would survive the plug test though.

Microware OS/9

[justanyone]

There's a small company named Microware based in Des Moines that's been producing a small Real time operating system for at least 10 years. The OS is named "OS/9". It was popular for use in set top boxes. The interesting thing about it was that any component of the OS could be turned on/off while it was running; it used a dynamic lookup table to be able to reconfigure itself on the fly. Microsoft never would dream of a no-reboot-necessary-ever Op system! (or could it?) Microware used to have their OS in a lot of cable TV set top boxes. They've been purchased recently, and I don't know how widely they're used, but it was a pretty cool OS for a while!

Re:Microware OS/9

[DNAGuy]

I supported this OS on a 68k based VME bus system in the mid to late 90's. It was used to control a Leica Confocal Laser microscope. The system currently lives at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City and the last time I checked it was still running A-OK. Now if I could only remember the IP. :)

Re:Eros OS

[F2F]

> BTW, why so many Plan 9 clones? Is Plan 9 development so closed that enthusiasts can't help?

plan 9 used to be closed source up until release 3 of last year. now that is fixed and everyone is welcome to it.
p9 also has a very interesting design, which could and has influenced other operating systems.

Why is it...

[humming]

..that every programmer that thinks he knows something has to either write his own programming language or Operating System?

//Humming

Re:Why is it...

[Fixer]

Why is it every carpenter who thinks she knows something has to either build her own house or kitchenette set?

Re:Why is it...

[Pyrosz]

Simple really.

For the fun of doing it.
Its like baking a cake. You can go out to the store and buy one, or you can bake one yourself. Its pleasure to eat something you made with your own hands.

Re:Why is it...

[1010011010]

For the same reason that people who know something about English (for instance) write their own poetry, prose, legal contracts, etc.

Don't forget these two niche OS's

[WillSeattle]

First one is OS/2 - still around.

Second is this cool one called WinXP. Read in today's business news that sales are so low that it's already a niche product, cause noone's buying it, and less than any prior release.

That makes it a niche system, in my book.

Re:Don't forget these two niche OS's

[PygmySurfer]

Second is this cool one called WinXP. Read in today's business news that sales are so low that it's already a niche product, cause noone's buying it, and less than any prior release.

Maybe sales are so low because it's not even available yet.

Try again after its release date, October 25th.

Re:Don't forget these two niche OS's

[WillSeattle]

Maybe sales are so low because it's not even available yet.

Try again after its release date, October 25th

Sorry, it's been shipping for two weeks with new systems. Try reading the business pages once in a while, instead of paying attention to the MSFT hype.

So it is a niche OS. WinXP for the masses!

Re:Don't forget these two niche OS's

[AKA da JET]

Its because WinXP is too expensive and most people already ran out and bought windows ME which came out not too long ago.

Hey...

[seanmeister]

They left out emacs!!!

(ducks and runs...)

"Toy" OS systems

[PineHall]

Linux was one of those "Toy" systems that broke out of the niche mode. What will be the next OS to do that?

Re:"Toy" OS systems

[ReelOddeeo]

Maybe a better question is why Linux broke out of the "toy" os niche.

Then you would have better insight as to why there might be a next os to break out of the "toy" niche.

If another os does go from "toy" to "mainstream", then it will likely be because it addresses some real or perceived shortcomming in the range of presently available OS choices. Please don't misinterpret me. It's not that I wish to get modded down for suggesting that Linux isn't absolutely perfect in every conceivable way. I merely suggest that you re-read my first two sentences above.

Eventually Linux's age will show. It won't be as nimble at adapting to technological innovation. An ever growing monolithic kernel could eventually lead to either: [1] instability or [2] slowdown in development in order to maintain stability of a growing code base. [This prospectus contains forward looking statements, blah, blah, blah.]

Other approaches could become more attractive, or less objectionable. For example, ever increasing hardware speed can be a great compensator for a more abstract, less efficient, but easier to grow design approaches.

What I'm saying is that there is a huge inertia to overcome for a new os to go mainstream. The new approach must solve a problem that people want solved. (ala Linux vs. MS) Otherwise, people aren't motivated to change and the newcommer remains niche. And as in the free vs. ms choice, the problem to be overcome is not necesseraily or purely a technical problem.

Re:"Toy" OS systems

[Anonymous Coward]

It's very easy to discover why Linux broke out of the toy nitch -- it was the only Unix-like operating system which ran modern programs and didn't cost thousands of dollars. Furthermore, Microsoft and IBM were hamhanding the 32-bit transition.

(If the BSD lawsuit was settled a year earlier, or if OS/2 had shipped for the i386 instead of the i286, Linux probably would have stayed a toy.)

The problem is that you don't get that sort of market opportunity every day. It was just a historical circumstance that there was this huge demand for a cheap Unix and vendors that were not willing to provide one.

Re:Don't forget Squeak!

[Crusty Oldman]

Just because you're right, don't expect to get modded up. You're too late, and Squeak is too foreign, good as it is, to deserve a passing mention here.

Re: linux need to sort out threading

[Chelloveck]

Right. And you should poll the hardware for events, rather than relying on interrupts. That would simplify designs marvelously.

Oh Yeah?

[Pinball Wizard]

Well, to quote Neil Peart -

You can choose a friendly guide in some celestial voice.

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill.

I will choose a path that's clear - I will choose Free Will.

Thank you.

FreeDOS

[Ed Avis]

One successful project that wasn't mentioned is FreeDOS, a free reimplementation of DOS. Unlike the others it already has a huge amount of software written for it. Still beta though.

Right. Sure.

[Sj0]

I'm sure that the regular user cares about the latest technology too. beOS is great for the people who don't give a shit about linux. People who use their computers to surf the internet and check their E-mail are perfect for beOS, and beOS is perfect for them.

Re:Right. Sure.

[CodingFiend]

So you obviously no nothing about BeOS. BeOS to surf the internet?! LOL!!! That's the biggest gripe of BeOS users, no browsers that are worth anything. Try learning about something before spouting off.

Re:Right. Sure.

[Sj0]

beOS is better.
Running windows is like some sort of punishment

...

Regular people don't deserve shit like windows.

Re:Right. Sure.

[Sj0]

Yeah. Tell that beOS user off. he doesn't know shit. He must be a heathen who doesn't mind using netpositive or Opera. A guy who isn't bothered by the fact that all the webpages he visits work fine under those browsers. A guy who isn't troubled by the lack of crashes when surfing...

Why was there a problem surfing the web under beOS again?

Get your facts straight

[ryantate]

It's GNU/Jesux .

Do you think the son of God could really have created his own operating system without decades of work by Richard Stallman? Pshhha.

Memory mapped files

[AKAImBatman]

I like EROS's idea of having no filesystem. A hard disk is the permanent memory map, and regulary memory is just cache for it.

That was actually an idea that originated in MULTICS. Unfortuantely for MULTICS, most of the devlopment companies pulled out leaving HoneyWell with the sucker. And HoneyWell managed to bungle their marketing to no end. As a result, there have only ever been a handful of MULTICS machines in existance.

Coincidently...

[aztektum]

Well this is the abridged version of a longer statement I just typed out, but IE crashed when I hit preview. (I'm not at my computer right now...grrr)

I just started thinking about working on a OS or at the very least a UI that's designed precisely the way I want it and tweaking it as much as I can for my own x86 hardware. (Sorta like what Apple does, they sell limited hardware configurations and work on the compatibility.)

However, I'm not an extremely experience programmer, I know C well enough and Python but don't have the real world experience, yes I'm basically just a script kiddie. So I'm looking for resources anyone might think would be beneficial to my cause. If you know of a book or online resource, feel free to reply.

Danke

Re:Coincidently...

[jgerman]

Well:

Modern Operating Systems

Linux Kernel Internals Unix Kernel Internals is better but I couldn't find a link

C Programming Language -- you gotta have the bible

These aren't nearly enoguh resources, but they're a good start. Of course if you just want your own UI it depends on what you want. You can write your own window managers ect for X or you can use
"Cracking Shells" in Unix Programming to give you a jump start on writing your own shell which is not a bad little project. Of course in order to build your own shell you'll probably want to have a scripting language tied to it so make sure to pick up the Dragon Book.

Re:Coincidently...

[BluedemonX]

There's actually a book, Design and Implement Your Own 32 Bit Operating System, I believe.
Out of print, but I've got a copy. If you can find it, buy it. It's really quite neat.

Re:Coincidently...

[rhost89]

Ive got multitudes of sites that would help you out, john fines home page is a good start, vnutz bootloader tutorial is another good place. Do a search on google. But if you dont know how to program very well your not going to get very far. At the very minimum your going to have to know asm, the more the better actually, and a very good understanding of C. From there you will have to learn about the computer from a hardware point of view, especially the BIOS services and related tables. I started writing my OS, finnished the bootloader, then the kernel loader which swithced to 32 bit mode and part of the kernel, but thats as far as i got, i will probably get back to development on it, need to finish out my memory management and driver module routines, then write a few drivers and a gui lib. then i can write a shell and it will finaly do something!!! By the way i say this to prove a point, there is a LOT of code involved just to get a modern OS to the point where i can start to be used. I wish you luck and mabey in 5 to 10 years when you get it finished i can read it on slashdot ;9

Re:Coincidently...

[BazHob]

Here is an interesting tutorial on writing your own OS

I still don't understand

[donglekey]

I don't understand why there are so many niche operating systems that aren't acting like a niche operating system. If someone is going to write a niche operating system, I think it would more beneficial to make it specialized and make operating systems for things that people will use one computer for. Someone should make MySQL into an operating system for example, then it could take full advantage of all hardware available. Many people dedicate whole computers to DB's and Webservers and such anyway, why not just take it to the next level?

You got Stallman in my Jesus!

[saintlupus]

Do you think the son of God could really have created his own operating system without decades of work by Richard Stallman? Pshhha.

To say nothing of all the fashion tips.

"Don't worry, Lord. Chicks dig beards and long hair."

--saint

Spring

[Wesley Felter]

Spring from SunLabs combined the efficiency of Unix with the extensibility of Plan 9 (and then some), and added in some nice features like single-system-image clustering (which, like all other features, was eventually hacked into Linux in the form of Mosix).

Re: linux need to sort out threading

[Jeffrey Baker]

No genius. The kernel handles the interrupts from the hardware delivers I/O events to user space via a queue. The program can come along and deal with the I/O events whenever it gets around to it.

The kernel is the RIGHT place for asynchronicity, because we definitely know what is happening when we get an interrupt on platform X. When programming in user space, who needs to deal with your program suddenly and unexpectedly jumping to a signal handler? You have NO idea where you are in the control flow. It's a stupid design, exacerbated by the non-uniform way different platforms deal with signals during system calls.

Re: linux need to sort out threading

[tzanger]

Right. And you should poll the hardware for events, rather than relying on interrupts. That would simplify designs marvelously.

<smartass> Actually in the embedded world sometimes polled is better because it's cheaper than making sure that the external interrupt sources are rate-limited or otherwise "clean". We just came across this in one of our designs. Interrupts were peachy-keen until it left the lab.</smartass>

OSes and hardware

[OOglyDOOde]

OSes exist primarily as the link between hardware and software. OSes that lack good hardware compatibility (independently of their software capabilities) will always have limited use compared to those that have more hardware compatibility (again, independently of their software capabilities).

One of the things that prevent these niche OSes from obtaining some more well-deserved attention is the lack of hardware drivers, which probably stems from the fact that obtaining hardware specs is very difficult.

I believe the development of all OSes (toy or research, niche or not) is, in the end, of a lot of benefit to the community. One is so entrenched in orthodox computing that we need people like these to bring out new computing ways.

But hardware remains the most important piece.

Freedows

[alumshubby]

Maybe this is unhealthy nostalgia on my part, but remember the Freedows operating system? Apart from at least one personality involved, it sounded like an interesting idea. I wonder if it's still percolating in somebody's basement or if it'll ever get dusted off and looked at afresh. The Alliance OS project was going to use the same cache-kernel technology, but it apparently hasn't budged either.

Bad Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

The sky is falling!

Re:I'd like to send out a big "fuck you" to...

[hyperstation]

for some reason, i laughed quite hard upon reading this, tho i have no idea who Ryan Christiansen is.

Re: linux need to sort out threading

[alext]

I find message queues (MQ Series, JMS etc.) suck in the same way. At first it sounds great - decoupled, guaranteed delivery, publish/subscribe and so on - then you realize that these 'features' have horrendous drawbacks and a polling solution could have been written in 1/3 the time and eliminated swathes of management problems.

Of course, you can add an asynchronous 'notification' event on top of this structure if polling is expensive, but this is just a hint to go looking for a message. (Another lesson from Multics, I believe - at least in its cousin VOS the s$wait_event call works like this).

--

Canon Cat

[Ukab the Great]

The Canon Cat, created by macintosh creator Jef Raskin after he left apple, had an OS written in Forth (and also a forth interpreter you could access). It was kind of a neat machine in that it didn't have a concept of files. The entire state of the machine, user data and all, was put onto a 720k floppy disk, sort of like the OppcOS mentioned in article. I have a cannon cat and it actually is quite a joy to work with. Some of the UI ideas implemented in the Cat are still light years ahead of OS's that run on today's machines, and they work suprisingly well even at the Cat's 5Mhz clock speed.

Re:Canon Cat

[anon757]

Heh. My computer was out of commission for quite a while a few years ago. So I dug out the old Cannon cat. Plugged the modem (300!bps!) into the phone line, dialed up a BBS with text based internet, & surfed the web with it. What an experience! And the whole cat OS was a word processor, with no concept of a file system. Ran off a 3 1/2 floppy. I heard there was a calender for it to, ran off it's own floppy & the calender was it's own OS.
The one thing I remember about it: it never, ever, ever crashed.

Re:Canon Cat

[mlosh]

I've been very intrigued by the Cannon Cat. I have been interested in Forth for over 10 years and have read Raskin's new book, _The Humane Interface_.

I'm playing around with a Cannon Cat-style user interface in my spare time, mostly to see if I would be productive with LEAP-oriented navigation. My experiment is just some rough C++ code written with MFC for Win32. So far it displays text, does LEAP searches, and allows text insertion and deleting. It only uses one mono-spaced font, but it does word-wrapping correctly to break long lines. It does not read or write any data to disk, but I have hard-coded perhaps a thousand words from H. G. Well's _Time Machine_ a bit of other text to let me exeriment moving around and editing. It also can display text in a few different color schemes, which I intend to use for embedded macros/code sequences and other special-purpose things like HTML content someday.

Like the original Cat, I may use Forth as my macro language (probably using FICL to start with) and/or Python (more popular at this time).

I don't know how close to the Cat I can come, since I have never seen an actual one in operation. I have only read descriptions of them in magazines, web pages, Usenet, and from Jef's _Humane Interface_ book. I use the two Alt keys on an IMB keyboard as my LEAP keys, but I think I have a several differences... right now, hitting the Alt(LEAP) key a second time after a leap will leap to the next matching instance in the appropriate direction. I believe the Cat required the user to USE FRONT + LEAP to do this. I allow the left and right cursor (arrow) keys on the IBM keyboard to bump the insertion point left or right, I think the CAT used the LEAP keys to do this (when the user did not combine them with other key presses). I select a range with the F8 key, I think the CAT required the user to press both LEAP keys together to do this. I may make my experimental code more consistent with the CAT, but at a certain level it will be impossible if I still use an IBM 101-key keyboard.

Eventually, my code could become a useable stand-alone OS. But for now, that is very far off -- its more of a toy version of a toy! If I get something I think is actually useful to other people in a stable state, I may publish it under BSD or GPL. The current crop of GUI+desktop systems are getting so complex and burdomsom. I think much more productive and approacable environment can be designed around a Cannon Cat-style UI plus modest amounts of more recent features like embedded pictures, simple diagrams, gesture and pointer-based manipulation, and perhaps voice recognition.
--
Mike

Re: linux need to sort out threading

[Jeffrey Baker]

MQ and JMS are way, way heavier than what I'm talking about. The kernel is just delivering a message to a program, and there are a finite number of messages to be deliveres, for example:

The mouse has moved
Async read on FD n is complete
Async write on FD n is complete
FD n is ready for more data
FD n has closed

There kernel only delivers "The mouse has moved" once between times that the program pays attention to it. The program sees "The mouse has moved" and calls some code to get the mouse position.

So, we're talking about something really tiny like struct event of a few bytes at most, delivered not all that often.

SkyOS!!!

[quigonn]

Yeah! I know the guy who programs it. He went to my school until 1998, and last year he did a presentation about it. It was really neat, although many things didn't work because of a major rewrite of many components. But cool anyway that this is now on /.

Mac OS virtual memory

[Jaeger]

There's an important difference between a feature existing and actually being useful. Virtual memory in Mac OSes from 7 to 9 existed, but it abjectly sucked: the application had to signal the operating system when it wanted to swap something out. For virtual memory to be useful, the system needs a kernel (or a similar mechanism) and hardware support so the processor can create a trap when memory is accessed that isn't currently available. Since Mac OSes prior to X didn't have a kernel at all, this would have been rather tricky.

So yes, Mac OS 7 had virtual memory. But it was barely worth using.

Re: linux need to sort out threading

[alext]

Mea culpa! Please note that the pattern I described *only* applies to messages of over 36 bytes, and frequencies exceeding a bushel per fortnight. Do not attempt to employ this paradigm outside this range, or you may invalidate the warranty.

Thank you.

--

Re:How about this for a Nietzsche OS

[AndroidCat]

Battle not with bugs, lest ye become a bug.
And if you gaze into the kernel, the kernel gazes also into you.
Nietzsche

Epson Valdocs

[Crusty Oldman]

The Canon Cat reference reminded me of the Epson Valdocs system. I admit that I don't have any firsthand knowledge of the system, but the magazine reviews of the time all gave it high marks. Its main drawback was being put on a very underpowered machine (Z-80. And don't get me talking about that subject!). I vaguely remember corporate politics being a factor in its downfall. It too was implemented in Forth.

It would be interesting to compare the Cat and Valdocs with the hot systems of today.

Dalas represent!

[swein515]

What about VaporOS?
Sweden has some great OS development, really!
VT!

VERY USEFUL

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

I use freedos sometimes. When I do bios updates or flash my DVD-Players, I boot from a freedos floppy. No MS for me.

Did you know how hard Win ME makes it to create a decent boot disk for flashing, Geeze. I tried to patch the DVD player of my girl-friend and had to try lots of stuff to get into dos mode.

So now I live in a 100% OpenSource World. linux & freedos.

the applications of an OS

[phossie]

when is everyone going to realize that the OS should *be* the application? take the UNIX modularity concept as far as it can go - and developers will be where they want to be, playing with blocks. your app? a schematic for how the blocks should be put together, nothing more. very high level programming, low level optimization, standardized *everything*.

yeah, i'm babbling on and i don't know what i'm talking about.

Screw CheeriOS. Create another *nix

[Ukab the Great]

Unix + "Crisp, sharp, graphics" = Crispix.

AtheOS has promise

[maxpublic]

Just took another look at the AtheOS screen site. The developers have really been plugging away; of the so-called 'niche' OS's this one seems to be the most consistent in it's progress, and doing things in a reasonable, well-ordered fashion.

Plus, the desktop GUI is alot easier on the eyes than any I've seen in Linux (shallow, I know, but I don't care - I want my GUI to *look nice*). The KDE and GNOME folks could buy a clue or two from AtheOS in this department. Love Linux, but it's clear that the various GUI's could really use some artistic help.

Max

At Least Be Original

[alexburke]

I mean no disrespect to the creator(s) of SkyOS, but at least they should have been creative with their icon design. See what I mean?

Re:Smugness won't get you anywhere

[holloway]

Linux Counter (?)

The two faces of idiocy...

[Sj0]

So the final verdict is: Linux sucks because it has a shitty UI, and BeOS sucks because it has a pretty UI?

...

What did I miss?

...And Linux is a pretty useless product too. So is windows. I fail to see the point. Operating Systems are inherently useless. Get over it.