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Minix from Scratch Project Established
decuser writes "The MFS - Minix from Scratch project was established in the wake of the Brown-Tannenbaum controversy. MFS aims to be to the Minix community what LFS is to the Linux community, a recipe for building an alternative OS from 'scratch.'" See the project's website at mfs.sunsite.dk or minixfromscratch.org.
Have you looked at FreeDOS? Under the hood DOS is simple, heavily documented, reliable and capable of doing many tasks, it can also be very well secured with the right tools or modifications. For example many people forget that COMMAND.COM can be replaced with other programs and there are many tools around designed to block actions or commands from being executed (hint for security look at BBS SYSOP security tools that many people like myself used to write).
Umm.....freedos?
It's interesting to see Tannenbaum's influence on Senn:
"I have to be upfront with you, I am a fair newbie at Minix. I have been using Linux since the 0.9 kernel (downloaded via ftp on VMS in 90s) and have a fairly decent background in Unix - solaris, sco, bsd, etc. I got interested in Minix back around the same time too, but I had success with Linux and stayed with it. I got reminded of Minix the other day when Andrew Tanenbaum posted his response to the 'Brown' book - pure enlightenment - http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/."[emphasis added]
Here is some more background infoon the genesis of the project.
Operating Systems: Design and Implementation
Meant to go alongside Minix (most of the source code is printed in the back) and written by Tanenbaum. We used it in my operating systems class, and I think it's one of the best resources to understand what's going on. Install the code in BOCHS under Windows/Linux and tinker away.
Slashdot should stop promoting projects that have nothing more than a Web page.
MFS looks like it's trying to write a manual for installing Minix. That's fine, but will it really teach "operating system design concepts"? Wouldn't Tanenbaum's textbook be better for that? Linux From Scratch teaches you a lot about Linux, but it doesn't teach you how the kernel works.
Tanenbaum said it's been released under a BSD-style license. Well, if you believe the quote Ken Brown gives....
Hmmm sounds like 4DOS. Personally I was never a huge fan. I did write a couple of real and joke shells. Ahh those were the days when you could fake an entire DOS application in a few minutes in front of a compiler. I remember one of our programming teachers used to suddendly appear and start scrolling up and down to read our code as we were busy typing away (very annoying) so one day I wrote the program we were asked to write and another program which displayed the first program and looked just like the programming editor. Imagine his surprise when he hit the down arrow to be greated with a personal message being typed up on the screen.... ;-)
I wonder if there are any explorer.exe replacements?
Yes. How to is documented in both official and unofficial programmers guides. Miles's useful site TinyApps links to a few (as well as some other useful OS distributions and other OS tools of interest). However at a really simple level:
SYSTEM.INI
[boot]
shell=explorer.exe / progman.exe / taskman.exe / myprog.exe
Even possible to start DOS.... better stop there :)
Sorry to nitpick..
Mach (or rather, GNU Mach) is the forms the basis or Hurd now. The Hurd itself isn't a microkernel. And we know that Mach came from CMU and it has been around for a while even though the original Mach is no longer being worked on. It still lives on in the form of say, GNU Mach.
Wine? More like ReactOS. Wine is basically just a from-scratch rewrite of part of the Windows API, not a complete OS.
It was a really good paper.
You can install Debian/HURD right now. It's already very much a "real OS". It's just dog slow.
Actually, I just got it booting on my Asus A7N8X with Western Digital WD1200JB and NVidia GeForce FX 5900. Turns out there is a newly discovered bug in gnumach which barfs when you have lots of RAM installed. Add the command uppermem 523648 to Grub's boot entry and magically it all works.
For the more adventurous, you can check out Hurd on L4. The link is to a wiki page that I have been working on recently. But while you can actually run the Hurd and do things in the X-Window system with Gnumach, the L4 variant is just getting off the ground. Some recent crucial code porting has recently occured and we may soon see a libc0 for Hurd on L4 with any luck. If you want to spend about an hour making a bootable debugger then check out the link :-P
Clickety Click
Read the post. It is comparable to a Linux distro called "Linux From Scratch". They're not talking about writing Minix from the ground up....
The biggest problem with drivers etc is that nobody wants to duplicate work for many OSs. Having a "Linux driver comapatability environment" could make Hurd a viable place for experimenters to play in.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
MFS - Minix from Scratch
This project is not intended to replace or compete with ANY existing operating system. It is not an installation FAQ. It is not a DISTRO.
It is an attempt to make OS design and system internals accessible to the masses in a way that Linux cannot - due in part to its sheer mass and in part to its complexity (what makes it useful as a desktop and enterprise server). Minix provides us with a platform that is well designed, modular and well documented in source code, in addition to being a compact code base from which to spring from.
The project is in its infancy. A lot of folks have been complaining, here at /., that the project is lacking in output - give us a break, we are less than a month old. We are dependant on collaboration, if you think that there isn't much done yet - do it and you'll be very appreciated - otherwise, watch and learn, we'll get there in time.
To the many folks who have expressed interest in our little project - thanks, I look forward to working with you.
Will