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."

What about VSTa?

[i_am_nitrogen]

VSTa [vsta.org] 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.

Another resource

[Z4rd0Z]

FreeOS [freeos.com] is another good place to find out about these kind of operating systems.

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 [kamidake.org] 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....;)

My favorite Niche OS...

[Ortado]

By far has to be FreeDOS [freedos.org]. 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 [sf.net]. Not much to use yet, but i really enjoy it.

CP/M, still going strong

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

Interesting OSes

[DGolden]

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

An "interesting" OS is AROS [aros.org] - 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 :-).

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. :-(

They forgot an extremely important OS

[AKAImBatman]

EROS [eros-os.org]. 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 [jos.org], 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.

Microware OS/9

[justanyone]

There's a small company named Microware [microware.com] 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!

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 [multicians.org]. 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.

Freedows

[alumshubby]

Maybe this is unhealthy nostalgia on my part, but remember the Freedows [freeos.com] 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 [freeos.com] project was going to use the same cache-kernel technology, but it apparently hasn't budged either.

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.