New/Hobby Operating Systems. | The Coffeehouse

Rossj

I spend a bit of time each week playing about with alternative Operating Systems* and assumed that a couple of people around here might be the same.

So anyone tried Syllable - either full install or the Live CD? Or NewOS?

*No I don't think they are a threat to anyone's market, but you know it's fun. And in some cases (thanks NewOS) you get to learn a lot about OSs.

Skriker V1.0
Need more money...

Are these not based on UNIX/LINUX ???
are there really any new OS in work out there?

(not that I dont love Windows)

Rossj

Skriker V1.0 wrote:
Are these not based on UNIX/LINUX ???
are there really any new OS in work out there?

(not that I dont love Windows)

Neither are based on UNIX as such. NewOS is by an old BeOS developer and Syllable also seems to have some relation (that I am unsure of) to the BeOS/AtheOS camp.

Yggdrasil
Pour me a cab, 'cause I can't drink no more.

Rossj wrote:
Neither are based on UNIX as such.

From the quick glance I gave them both, they seemed vaguely unixish. One had an announcement that they had a new version of libc to be installed in /usr/bin, the other needed GCC to build. They definitely come from that neck of the woods. Smiley

troublefunk

I gave syllable a go and found it rather nice.
While it does have some posix support, the developers are trying to avoid the porting of gtk, qt etc so it does not become another linux/bsd etc.

They are rather encouraging the use of it's native API which is kinda Beosish.
Still, it did not support my sound or video cards so I was stuck with vesa mode graphics.

Well worth a look. I think there is a live CD around.

If you want something really different, have a look at menuetos. All written in asm, has a gui and fits on a floppy!

AndyC

There doesn't seem to be an awful lot to Newos at the moment. Syllable on the other hand looks far too unix-y for my liking. Why would anyone writing an OS from scratch use the 9-bit security system? Even *nix systems like Mac OS and Linux are moving towards a more powerful ACL based system so it seems a silly implementation for something which considers not having to have backwards compatability to be one of it's coolest features.

Also - if you've got a fully OO API and a database like filesystem - why limit yourself to Unix style text files for configuration, surely there are better ways of storing that kind of data. It's good, but I don't think it goes far enough, which is a shame because trying out something which took really radical decisions would be more fun and maybe could teach the old boys a thing or two!

Rossj

AndyC wrote:
There doesn't seem to be an awful lot to Newos at the moment.

You should take a look at the code for NewOS but I should have been more explicit, it is just a kernel - albeit the original base for the doomed OpenBeos project.

AndyC

Yes, sorry. Didn't mean to sound quite so dismissive, I just had a quick look at the site and there wasn't enough info to make a comment.

I think it's really cool that people are out there trying this sort of stuff, it's the kind of thing I'd quite like to do given the choice and the time. Re-inventing Unix doesn't really interest me though, which is why my inital interest in Linux petered out I guess.

I'd like to play with really radical ideas - e.g. Do we really want hierarchical filesystems? We don't seem terribly good at organising information that way. Given a completely clean slate could we do better? And what would an OS look like if it was fundamentally designed to be Object Oriented, even down at kernel level? Would inheritance and polymorphism give us more stable drivers? Could it ever be performant?

Still until the day I find time, I'll watch the Going Deep videos with great interest and continue to read up on Longhorn and onwards to see where the future will take us. And maybe one day...