| A real OS | |
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(Jedi)Obi-JK - Student  |
I know the WinBlows Linux, Mac, arguement pops up from time to time, around here, and everyone has thier reasons for running each OS. Here is a new OS for the experimental to try: MenuetOS MenuetOS is a fully 32 bit assembly written graphical hobby operating system, distributed under GPL license. Menuet supports 32 bit x86 assembly programming as a faster and smaller system footprint. The entire OS fits on a single floppy, I have been browsing thier forums and they have a lot people starting to hop on this idea. If any programers are interested, check it out at: http://www.menuetos.org/ _______________ Silent Bob (Kevin Smith): You know, there's a million fine looking women in the world, dude. But they don't all bring you lasagna at work. Most of 'em just cheat on you. -Steve (Obi) |
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(Jedi)Obi-JK - Student 
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Java as of right now the entire OS and all apps, list on the website are ~500KB the rest of the disk it filled with binaries, and there is still room to go! Personally I like the idea, of an extreme reaction to bloat. And even if one day it takes something absurd like 3 floppies! _______________ Silent Bob (Kevin Smith): You know, there's a million fine looking women in the world, dude. But they don't all bring you lasagna at work. Most of 'em just cheat on you. -Steve (Obi) |
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_cmad_ - Ex-Student 
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1) Yeah not all OSs that fit in a floppy suck. *cough* QNX *cough* 2) JavaGuy try getting VMWare or VirtualPC 5 (the last connectix version, before the company was bought by M$ and the program became slow) _______________ Your friends of today, are your enemies of tomorrow. |
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JavaGuy - Student 
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Wow. Quote: Menuet is a internet community project which might cause damage to your system. I like it already! I'm not being sarcastic, either. This is an OS by programmers for programmers, but I predict that it will become highly accessible for the casual user. Menuet has a long way to go, but its beginnings look promising. --Kernel written in straight asm. I love this. Very hard-core. Now they kind of exagerate the advantages of this over Linux, whose kernel is written in C. I say this because, firstly, much of C is just a paper-thin wrapping around asm, secondly Linux is by convention compiled with the highly efficient gcc optimizing C compiler, and thirdly because, where Linux has a need for speed, the kernel code is coded using in-line assembly language (I know whereof I speak on this one, as I have about two-thirds of the Linux kernel source in hard-copy form right next to my keyboard as I type this). So the asm advantage is somewhat exaggerated, but I still think it's awesome that they're coding in straight asm. --GPL license, source code included --GUI designed for asm programming but usable with any language --Http and email servers...and yet the whole thing fits on a floppy! Don't go thinking that fitting on one floppy means it sucks. Menuet, with its asm-purist approach, looks like an extreme reaction to "bloatware." And it shows dramatically just how bad bloatware has gotten. As Menuet becomes compatible with more and more hardware, it will be interesting to see if it still fits on one floppy. I can picture perhaps a customizable download, where you get a boot image with the kernel and only the modules you need for your system. This need not even break the monolithic kernel model. A couple of red flags I see, without having downloaded it yet: They say it isn't based on any operating system in particular. This is good and bad. It's sometimes good to start with a clean slate. But it's also dangerous to try to reinvent what took hundreds of thousands of highly skilled people many many years to create. When Torvalds created Linux, he took the best parts of Unix and chucked the worst parts. It sounds principled and brainy to says we're going to start from scratch without any preconceived notions, but often these "preconceived notions" are not preconceived at all but hard-won lessons about what works and what doesn't work, learned through years of painful trial and error. The other red flag I see is that I can't find much on the site about security. That kind of jibes with the philosophy of "removing extra layers" of software. But there are reasons for those extra layers. One of those reasons, and not the only one, is security. I'm not saying I know anything at all about Menuet or security therein, just that this is an issue I'd want to delve further into. All in all, nifty find! Now I need to find an old $20 computer to play with this on... _______________ My signature is only one line. You're welcome. |
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