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Another Free Operating System: NewOS 210

Posted by timothy from the world-isn't-finished-yet dept.
JigSaw writes: "Is the world ready for yet another Operating System? Travis Geiselbrecht, an ex-BeOS kernel engineer, seems to think so. (He is actually the one who wrote the Linux ext2 filesystem add-on for BeOS). He recently put up on his web site his personal Operating System, NewOS, with full source code. The OS was written from scratch and it is very modern and powerful as you can see from its feature set. It currently runs on x86 and... Sega Dreamcast but he is planning ports for Alpha, SGI and Sun Blade machines in the near future."
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Another Free Operating System: NewOS More

Another Free Operating System: NewOS

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  • Not GPL... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Looks like the license is based on the BSD. At least Stallman won't be coming around wanting to rename it GNU/NewOS. I'd hate to see version 2.0: New GNU/NewOS. And so on and so on...

  • Re:Very nice (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Better yet, why port to x86? It already has an OS [microsoft.com].

    t.

  • Re:oh yeah... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Please, check your damn stereotypes at the door.

    Funny. In the eyes of some still, Linux is not a "real OS." And never will be.

    Some in Microsoft surely hold this opinion. And this was an opinion definitely held in the past, even by those fairly knowledgeable in the computer field.

    Are you now devolving this to this low standard of blasting an effort before you've even loaded the product? That simply because it's new and that others, totally independent of this effort, have failed, that this project will?

    Heck, where on earth on any part of the pages did he say, "We want to rule the world via this OS?" Unlike another OS that does (MS) and another OS humorously states its intentions as such (Linux), this guy seems to have just put this up for fun.

    He's not even looking for money. He put up a page on a project of his. Someone posted it on /..

    GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE SAND. People don't always use the dominant OS, or the one furthest along in development. They use the one that best fits their needs, whether that be by interest, technical merit, or shear joy in working on it.

    Look at Linux. Look at OpenBSD. etc. etc. If people choose to put time into an OS, that's their business. Not yours. Linus did, and I'd guess that his "Best of luck to him" OS probably runs on your freakin machines.

  • Re:Dreamcast? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    On a side note, the Dreamcast uses the very cheap RealTek RTL8139 10/100 Ethernet chip, which is also in many low-end PC PCI network adapters (like mine).

  • Re:Not at all surprising. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Despite what many people seem to think, an OS is not an inherently complex thing.

    c:\> THAT REALLY DEPENDS ON THE OS.

  • Re:NewOS (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No, you are completely wrong in saying that pussy=fitta in Swedish. In fact, the Swedish word for pussy is "mikrosoft" which is very similar to the name of the well-known company "Microsoft".

  • New OS name - how about ... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    TravOS!!!

  • Open Source Desktop OS (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ah, finally some Open Source Desktop system with some friendlyness for lamers. Linux/FreeBSD/etc is a good OS for servers and for workstation use by geeks, but *not* for normal users. I also think that's actually the reason the Linux Desktop market is collapsing.

    AtheOS was a good initiative and I really think a good /stable/ Open Source BeOS clone could get a large share of the desktop market.

  • BeOS? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Aren't they dead yet?

  • Re:Very nice (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:34PM (#204115)
    Why a port to Sega Dreamcast? Doesn't it have its own OS already, in ROM or something?

    Why port to Sega Dreamcast? Why run linux on a Sparc? Why do this? Why do that?

    I'm sick and tired of questions like these. For the love of God, can't someone do something for fun? Obviously, this guy has fun doing it or he wouldn't. So why not port your personal operating system to a Dreamcast?

    Heck, my pc came with its own OS already. Why did I dump it in favor of Debian? Because I like Linux and I don't like Windows. Linux is fun.

  • "Anytime I see a booyah! in source code I know it's quality."

    To conform to mil-spec, that line would have to be changed to "hooah!"... :-)

  • > The Amiga shall rise again!


    yes, it's just it's polite southern manners that are causing it to wait until the confederacy has its turn . . .


    hawk

  • >in no way competing against linux/*bsd/hurd/etc.

    hawk
  • Of course, you could just reverse-engineer your sandwich and look to see if there's a bug in it, but that's not legal persuant to the DMCA.

    It gets worse. Microsoft would proclaim that they invented the BLT years before anybody else did but forgot to tell anybody. They would then lobby the government to have sandwich-hacking tools declared illegal. Suddenly anyone in possession of a butter knife is guilty until proven innocent. Microsoft then bundles a donut inside every BLT, claiming that this increases consumer choice because every consumer likes to eat donuts. Customers found removing the donut from their sandwich are cut-off from future BLT supplies because they have "ruined the Microsoft BLT experience".

    The DVD CCA then wraps their own sandwich (a ham and baloney) in cling wrap and announces that this is an anti sandwich hacking device. They then take out a patent on cling wrap, claim that anybody opening the cling wrap to eat the sandwich is doing so to steal the intellectual property of the sandwich, and have cling wrap circumvention devices (such as fingers) outlawed with the government's blessing. Instead you need to hire the services of a DVD CCA employed Cling Wrap Removal Expert whenever you want to unwrap the sandwich. Naive customers who unwrap their own sandwich are sued by the DVD CCA. The customer claims that they did so only to eat the sandwich but the judge slaps the customer silly anyway.

    Maybe we should all be glad that sandwiches have heaps of prior art.

  • Hmm. I wonder if this could be an effect of the "Collective Unconscious" that C.G. Jung postulates in his book "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious." Perhaps not only have we been made aware that it's possible to roll our own OS, but the collective unconscious of the developer community is more geared toward doing it these days.

    I think it's more likely that the toolsets are simply better now. 30 years ago if you wanted to build an OS, first you wrote the cross-assembler, then the boot strap, then the drivers, then the kernel, then the libraries, and then if you had any more steam left you wrote something useful like a text editor.

    These days - mostly thanks to GNU - you get a cross-assembler and compiler for free. There are plenty of libraries already written (GNU and BSD at least). In the case of AtheOS you get most of the difficult device drivers via the BIOS. And once you're done, if you wrote a POSIX alike OS, you can fully populate user space in a day with some quick compilations.

    And keep in mind that computers today compile 10000 lines of code faster than you can fart. 30 years ago you punched paper tape and waited for a week while the compiler chugged.

    And the documentation! You can buy excellent books discussing in excruciating detail the exact workings of an OS. 30 years ago you probably had to invent half the concepts yourself!

    It's simply so much easier to write an OS - in fact any software - these days.

  • The basics that he has now, while amazing, are pretty much still basic. 32bit OS's have been done to death - there is a lot of reference material...many books on OS design, 386 architechure, etc...

    Now...the Win32 API is HUGE. There are so many minor compatability things between this and that revision (WindowOpen, WindowOpenEx). And while the function calls are documented (though sometimes not well) it's figuring out what is done behind the scenes that is taking time.

  • The one thing that annoys me most is the lack of uniform look and feel among applications. All the different toolkits and incompatible desktop environments are a product of this. There is no way that you can say "give me a button" or "add an alias/shadow/shortcut/link to this application" and make it work as you wanted. You can't specify that all applications should behave the Gnome way in your user account, or the KDE way for another user.

    X is built for remote displaying: run the apps on one computer, see the results on another. This is a smart feature, but again solved in a bad way. Every pixel changed is transmitted, instead of high-level commands like "draw button with text 'blah' and dimensions 80, 35 at 3, 3".
  • If you want to do something for the open source community right now, the last thing you would want to do is write another OS. Linux, and all other open source OS:es, lacks a good graphical user environment. Notice "good", which rules out X immediately. A completely new, OOUI environment with standard libs for widgets would help out incredibly much. It would remove most of the arcane design choices that were taken with X.

  • ...TravOS!

    You know this is a damned funny idea.

  • ...right =) CIPA is the "Children's Inline Protection Act" - proposed to protect our children from the perils of Inline Skates, which, as everone knows, can cause severe, lasting trauma in children, considered worse, even, than pr0n by some prominent physicians and psychologists that I will conveniently fail to mention by name. We must make sure it passes, so that we can protect the children from being scarred for life. We must outlaw the use of Inline Skates in public places, such as libraries, and schools! We must prevent the unauthorized sale of Inline Skates to those under the age of 30, by severely punishing those evil, EVIL storeowners who push their wares on our unsuspecting, innocent children!

    This post has been rated ;P by me, for poor humor and sarcasm.
  • Isin't newOS the default folder name Microsoft Operating System Creator uses for a new project?
  • ...something as familiar and well-defined as an OS...

    MSDOS, QNX, BeOS, Windows 2000, Linux kernel, Redhat Linux distro, Kallisti OS and many others are all described by their creators as an "OS". They all offer very different 'levels of service' and facilities to their client processes.

    It's not well-defined.
  • > Amiga (it's dead, face it!)

    So what better use for it than playing around with his OS?

    His page says "Also, I seemed to have collected a bunch of old non-x86 machines that need something running on them. I figure, "Hey, why dont I just port my OS over?" The rest is history."

    --
  • No. It just crashed VMWare for me.
  • Didn't Linus Torvalds say pretty much the same thing back in '91? And look what happened to that.

    Could this be the next bandwagon? Anyone's Jon Katz detector buzzing yet?

  • Use your own OS... (Score:4)

    by mattkime ( 8466 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:26PM (#204135)
    Isn't it funny how many developers can write their own unix-like-OS, yet a whole team of developers haven't yet fully implement the windows 32 bit libraries of top of linux?
  • Why a port to Sega Dreamcast? Doesn't it have its own OS already, in ROM or something?

    No, the machine as such only has a booter and some basic tools (memory pack management, play CD) - the "real" OS ships on the game/GD-ROM/whatever, most often this is Sega's OS, sometimes it's Windows CE - and smetimes it's apparently NetBSD or NewOS. :-)

  • And that's too bad, because it means while there is lots of OS which are currently written very few are usefull..

    For me an OS is an interface between applications and the hardware.
    Having applications for a new OS is easy: implement POSIX.

    But at the lower level, there is no standard for the device drivers, so usually these new OS works on very few hardware..

    GGI seems quite dead, that is too bad..

  • Re:oh yeah... (Score:3)

    by josepha48 ( 13953 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:37PM (#204139) Journal
    Well truthefully the hurd is still going, although it is moving slowly, it is functional. Atheos is in the same boat.

    If this person can create a new OS kernel that is faster than BSD, Solaris, Linux, Windows, etc, and can replace lets say the Linux kernel .. then he has a big chance at success. The fact is that if you can create a new kernel like what the hurd is doing and to have it work as a drop in replacement into lets say the Linux kernel then he can have success. Ideally if he had a micro kernel that could actually run some of linux drivers with little modification he could go somewhere.

    I doubt it, I think Linux is having enough trouble surviving and I think that the effort of the hurd, atheos, beos, and him could be better spent in improving an existing system, like Linux, (one of the BSD's), or any other Open Source OS.

    just my opinion though.

    good luck guy..............

    I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • The guy's homepage makes it sound like this is
    his effort to explore OS design not to design
    yet another OS for mass consumption, which may
    be why he is not looking for help.
  • Do remember that a lot of those links are dead. Not too surprising, but since the commentary on the OS isn't marked with a date one has no idea of how recently a "quite active" project actually was at all active.

    That said, most of them are active, and it's a good source of information on where to get system code.

    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • Is Open Source getting too scattered? No. That's the point of it. Consider the hill-climbing problem. If you want to avoid a local maximum, what you do is start your hill-climber at several different points. Lots of climbers is better than a few smart ones. Each one just heads up-hill, and then when it reaches a point where every direction is down-hill, it says "I'm at the top."

    To find the highest point you can reach, you survey the climbers, and choose the highest. If you don't think that he's at the top, you take all of the lower ones (that have finished climbing) and randomly redistribute them.

    This can be fine tuned, but that's the idea. And that' open source development. Lots of developers starting in lots of different places, and heading uphill. (Well, you can see that it's really a bit more complex, but that's one valid abstraction of the process.)


    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • Isn't it funny how many engineers can design an airplane, yet a whole team of engineers can't design a donkey cart with 9 wheels (some of them square) that can fly to the moon and back?

  • Re:Not GPL... (Score:3)

    by Arandir ( 19206 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @08:29PM (#204149) Homepage Journal
    It isn't based on the BSD license. It is the BSD license!

  • Re:Okay, this is ridiculous... (Score:4)

    by hicktruckdriver ( 29349 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @08:06PM (#204154) Homepage
    Oh, open source sandwiches definitely make sense!

    If there's a roach in a proprietary Microsoft BLT, you won't know about it until you've swallowed it and contracted some horrible disease. With open source sandwiches, you can send your changes back to the developer.

    Of course, you could just reverse-engineer your sandwich and look to see if there's a bug in it, but that's not legal persuant to the DMCA.

    darius
  • no, not on every gd... only some dreamcast games use windows ce. soul calibur for example uses the katana devkit, which is 100% sega libraries and no wince code anywhere at all.
  • There is - it is called VCD [vcdhelp.com].

    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!

  • Yeah (Score:2)

    by wiredog ( 43288 )
    But you can patent [164.195.100.11] them, the way Smuckers did.
  • That reference to the dreamcast network driver sticks out like a sore thumb. It doesn't run on an SH4, but it has drivers for the DC's NIC? Why?
    --
  • Custom MIPS 4300i running at 93.75MHz (rounding off.) Don't ask me why I know this.
  • Ha ha. I always loved how WinCE without caps was a very accurate term for the facial expression you get when using it. Something that seems to have gotten past the MS marketing dept.
  • Tsk, tsk tsk. Is Rasterman the only geek with some asthetic sense? Names DO matter. UNIX, for example, is a very cool name. It makes you feel good to run a UNIX machine. However, the new gen of OSS programmers is ignoring the good-naming heritage of their UNIX ancestors. Linux just sounds nasty, GNOME sounds GIMPy (oh god, bad pun), XFce sounds gross, and all the G's and K's in GNOME and KDE apps creates a very childish resemblance to all the 64's at the end of Nintendo games. On the other hand, KDE is pretty good, ORBit is plausible, aRts is really nice sounding and fitting, and X is just plain cool.
  • Lexus, yech. If I bought a car that expensive, it would only be with a Jag license plate. It's not marketing, but style. I don't agree with style over substance, or substance over style. The two are not mutually exclusive. If you make the hype, you better have the goods to back it up. If you have to goods, don't forget the hype to show it off. In the end, to each his own. There is no rule that says that nerds are not allowed to have any artistic sense.

  • never call anything 'new' .... (Score:4)

    by taniwha ( 70410 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:58PM (#204171) Homepage Journal
    if it takes off 10 years from now you'll be sorry ....
  • As Steve Maguire said in "Writing Solid Code," programmers need to be aware of the interfaces they are working with. getc returns an int, not a char! It is a poorly designed function interface that you should be aware of.

    For the record, the definition is int getc(FILE *stream);

    Maybe the booyah was a bit premature. :)

    --
  • if it takes off 10 years from now you'll be sorry ....

    Not really -- that just means that version 2 will probably be called "New and Improved OS."

    "Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
  • i'm thinking of an OS where there is no compiler, something more like forth going on. something where, if you wanted, you could click right down to the basics.
    Lisp Machines [faqs.org] have the characteristics you seek. Imagine a system where instead of core dumps, you get debugger windows, with full access to the stack and source. Imagine a system with full incremental compilation, always available. Imagine all of this fifteen years ago. Lisp machines did not take over the world because:

    They were CISC, and RISC outran them.

    They were caught in the AI Winter downdraft.

    LispOS was harder to port than Un*x.

    Mass parenthephobia.

    They were The Right Thing [dreamsongs.com] (see section 2.1) and were killed off by the New Jerseyites.

    Choose any or all of the above.

  • First of all, Windows is a huge Operating System compared to most Unix featuresets. To make matters considerabley more complicated, POSIX is a well-defined, clean standard in all respects. Making a POSIX implementation unix clone is a fairly straightforward operation with well documented and defined goals, limitations and requirements. The win32 API is enourmously deverse in form, structure and compatibility. Much of it harkens back to win16 (HGBLOBALs, HDROP etc). Much of the API is a complete departure from the traditional C-like win32 API (OLE). So the question becomes what is fully implemented? There are things that Solaris has that Linux doesnt. So is linux not fully implemented? Wine is pretty close on Win32. As close as you can get. They just need to work out the bugs.

  • Issues with being from Be (Score:3)

    by diablovision ( 83618 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @08:58PM (#204179)
    I am also currently working on my own hobby Open Source OS, and have considered a job at Be after I graduate, doing kernel level stuff. The thing I was concerned about was Be reacting to my involvement in an Open Source project where I might feel compelled to implement similar solutions to the BeOS kernel, and thus leak Be's trade secrets. I am sure this would be a serious issue for someone in my position, but I wonder, as an ex-employee, whether the author of this OS has received any heat from his former employer.

  • Other OSes in development (Score:5)

    by diablovision ( 83618 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @08:24PM (#204180)
    I don't find this to terribly new. There are literally hundreds of OS projects like this one, at various stages of completion. Read alt.os.development sometime, there are plenty of brilliant people toiling away on their hobby operating systems. Recently the developer (or someone pushing it) posted a link to this OS on the newsgroup, but the page was in Italian or Portugese. Needless to say, good way to frustrate a bunch of OS developers!

    For some info on developing your own OS check out:

    http://www.execpc.com/~geezer/os/

    Is just one of the regulars (well not too regular these days) on the newsgroup. The "Triple Fault Club" is kind of funny actually. Everyone's OS has flummoxed many a frustrated x86 processor at some point! From his site I learned some of the ropes. Also check out some of the sites on the webring. Many OSes, varying from toys to useable systems.

    BTW, people on the newsgroup generally sneer at any OS named ____OS or ___ix. There are so many ChrisOS, and DaveOS, and Winix and Finix and Pukenix, etc...

    But of course there is MacOS and Linux...

  • MIPS (whose supporting that anymore?)

    haha, this is so funny because i think you're actually serious. there are shitloads of companies suporting the MIPS processor and it's extrememly popular in the embedded market. there are a hel of a lot of devices that you probably use on a daily basis that use a MIPS processor, not to mention all the Cisco equipment this message passes through to get to you.

    for a group that's supposedly in tune with technology it suprises me how many of the slashbots are so unbelieveably igornant. if it's not a PC it doesn't matter i guess. hah.

    - j

  • Jung's "Collection Unconscious?" (Score:3)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:48PM (#204186) Homepage Journal
    Hmm. I wonder if this could be an effect of the "Collective Unconscious" that C.G. Jung postulates in his book "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious." Perhaps not only have we been made aware that it's possible to roll our own OS, but the collective unconscious of the developer community is more geared toward doing it these days. I was kicking around what it would take to roll one as a conceptual exercise the other day and it's really not as horrid as you might think it is, the trick being to start small.

    If it is a "collective unconscious" thing though, that's going to blow a personal hypothesis of mine out of the water; that being that the collective unconscious (if it even exists) is primarily a genetic race memory thing. The explosion of knowledge that we're seeing in this field would tend to point to other factors.

  • YAFOS ? (Score:3)

    by Choron ( 88276 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @08:02PM (#204187)
    Yet Another Free OS ? Well kind of, as there are already quite a few [freeos.com] existing already, looks like the guy has fun developping it so that's cool, but I don't think he expects much from this.

    As was noted by someone, he doesn't seem to ask for help either, so I think that sums it up quite well.

    Still, this is nice but I'm not sure it's stuff that matters© that much. Oh well...

  • Uhhh that doesn't make it buggy. All character functions return int, because they are the same thing.
  • It's (probably) a reference to Linus originally releasing his OS as 'Freax' (or somesuch). Somebody decided that that was too dumb and renamed it to the much snappier 'Linux'.

    High UID kids these days -- no respect for their history. ;-)

  • Anytime (Score:4)

    by rjamestaylor ( 117847 ) <rjamestaylor@gmail.com> on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:57PM (#204198) Journal
    Anytime I see a booyah! in source code I know it's quality.

    int main()
    {

    int fd;
    size_t len;
    char c;

    printf("test\n");

    printf("my thread id is %d\n", sys_get_current_thread_id());

    printf("enter something: ");

    for(;;) {
    c = getc();
    printf("%c", c);
    }

    for(;;) {
    sys_snooze(1000000);
    printf("booyah!");
    }

    for(;;);
    return 0;
    }

    This was taken from main.c and is:
    /*
    ** Copyright 2001, Travis Geiselbrecht.
    ** All rights reserved.

    --

  • NewOS running on defunct hardware! (Score:3)

    by ryanf ( 123139 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:49PM (#204202) Homepage
    Half of those systems are now obsolete!

    • Atari
    • Dreamcast
    • Amiga (it's dead, face it!)
    • MIPS (whose supporting that anymore?)
    At least there's no PowerPC port. That would be a bad omen for Apple!

    By the way, this isn't troll...I'm just stating an obvious anachronism.

    Ryan Finley
  • Isn't it funny how many developers can write their own unix-like-OS, yet a whole team of developers haven't yet fully implement the windows 32 bit libraries of top of linux?

    well that team of developers has many fundamental problems. many include preferences and ability. in large groups there is probably more talk than code. this one guy decided himself what he wanted and went that way not having to prove anything to anybody.

  • "There are literally hundreds of OS projects like this one"

    I think though, thanks mainly to a swift response from the government, which is using the army to destroy rogue OS`s, as well as fully qualified systems engineers working out in the field, that the number of new Operating Systems has fallen to its lowest daily level since 1991, so there is no need for the public to panic.

  • Part of the problem is that they're trying to hit a moving target. It's not as though the Win32 API is as stable as the IA32 instruction set, you know. Microsoft is constantly adding new functions, and they're not quite as eager and Intel is to tell everyone exactly how things are working behind the scenes.

  • Its just a guess (I don't know the author), but if I wanted to port my new operating system that I'd built as a hobby on my PC to another platform, then the one over there by the TV that I already own, rather than going out and spending a bunch of cash on buying a mac, SPARC, whatever machine. The Dreamcast is turning out to be quite a fun little box for homegrown development - take a look at some of the sites where things like emulation and even a sourceport of Quake have been performed.
  • It may be defunct hardware, but its all hardware that any self-respecting geek looking to play with a new OS is likely to have lying around. I'm sure he'd love to try a port to the Apple G4 or an S/390, but unless someone has one lying around spare its a rather expensive purchase just to play my little operating system with. No disrespect to the guy, writing an OS by yourself can't be an easy task, but I get the impression that this is for fun, rather than to destroy Microsoft.
  • There happens to be no such language called hindu. If it is hindi which is being referred to, I don't think that "Newoess" means one who makes false promises. In fact "Newoess" does not mean anything.
  • In reply to your Dreamcast, MIPS, and PowerPC comments, SH4, MIPS and PPC are all very heavily used in the embedded market, and likely will continue to be for years to come. While I doubt NewOS will ever get anywhere, it's always nice to see new open systems emerge that could be utilized in embedded space. Its ability to run on the Dreamcast (though while not really utilizing most of the hardware) is still fairly impressive considering what a nuisance the majority of the design of the Dreamcast is. *cough* maple bus *end cough*. So, while the Atari and Amiga are most definately dead, the rest of those are very much alive and kicking.
  • Well... at least this is shorter than the previous versions. What I want to know is what this has to do with something that isn't even Unix.

    /Brian
  • I thought it was to allow children to be directly interposed into an execution context for performance reasons rather than putting them through normal procedure calls?

    /Brian
  • Uh... can you expect much out of a community whose favorite database is called MySQL :-)

    /Brian

  • Re:Very nice (Score:3)

    by connorbd ( 151811 ) on Wednesday May 23, 2001 @08:28AM (#204226) Homepage
    Why not? The Dreamcast is cheap and very well documented. It's a de facto open system.

    /Brian

  • NewOS (Score:4)

    by quickquack ( 152245 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:15PM (#204227) Homepage
    NewOS's name is funny. In Hindu, "New Oh Ess" or "Newoess" means "one who makes false promises."

    Sort of funny. Like how CIPA (Children's Online Protection Act) means "pussy" in Swedish.
    ------------
  • This is very true!

    I know of a company (www.compusenseinc.com) that has named their latest product 'nTierprise', because its written on the whole nTier model... Yeah, I'd invest in that company! That proves this company is looking toward the future. This is the same type of company that would write something called "DosApp" and nobody would buy it!

    5 years from now, they won't be able to sell nTierprise either.

  • No mention of "help wanted" (Score:5)

    by proxima ( 165692 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:30PM (#204232)
    Curious, this guy makes no mention of wanting any developer help. This reminds me of the guy making AtheOS [atheos.com]. I am absolutely amazed at the ability for one developer to whip up something so quickly - within months. The coding talent and drive to create these small OSes is incredible. Considering much smaller applications easily have dozens of developers, the idea of creating an OS from scratch with multiprocessor and multithreading support is unbelievable. Perhaps they used some code or ideas from other open source kernels, but hey, that's what open source is all about.

    Even if neither of these OSes take off, I admire their drive to focus this well as a solo developer.

  • Well, you could burn a boot CD, witch would contain all the neccisary files to "run" the system, and then you will indeed be running that OS (although a system without connectivity is hardly a system at all). Keep in mind that you can fit 650 to 700 MB on a CD-R, which is more than enough room to contain your kernel, X, apps, etc.

    Or, if you want a more usefull system, you could tell the boot CD to access a NFS on your LAN via the DC's ethernet adapter.
    --
  • Eh, another OS. Too many, if you ask me!

    On the other hand...
    It is absolutely great that they can even do this. Clearly it takes so much to make an OS work, and even more so to work well. It's really inspirational to "younger" developers interested in programming.

    I once tried to write an OS for my PPC machine, based on a system called OpenOS and another, PowerOS.

    Bombed horribly - it sucked.

    The Idea: someone create a VERY simple OS... and let people build onto it. Not an open-source effort. But rather, they could "roll their own OS,' in essense, by following a tutorial, and see how it's done. I would feel SO proud to say, "I finally got threading written into my OS...."

    So NewOS is my Hero of the Day. :-)
  • First, the Dreamcast is NOT obsolete. Hello! I STILL don't have a 64bit desktop! Do I need one? Of course not. But it would be cool. I run linux on my home computer because it's free and fun. I run minix on my 286 laptop because I can. I reboot windows at work because I have to. What you morons are missing is that OS's are fucking dead! Average Joe Creditcard does not give a rats ass what OS his box runs. All he wants is streaming porn, email, and well, thats about fucking it. This big ass box with cooling fans all a whir next to my feet is soon to be a relic. The average business/home user can accomplish all their computing needs with a dreamcast. Internet? yep. MP3? yep. Awesome lookin games? yep. (that work out of the box I might add.) DVD? not quite... But why the hell isn't there a vhs quality cd-rom movie medium? I mean, there is a damn market for it. Email? yep. Porn? yep. office apps? wouldn't be too big of a problem. To those of you who whine about good people not working on linux, are you retarded or something? I mean people work on linux cause they want to. This guy does newos cause he felt like it. Microsoft did windows to enhance shareholder approval of their value-added quality initiatives to rake in big fat sacks of cash. I'm more worried about brilliant coders being paid truckloads to implement "Planned Obsolesence". Shouldn't you?





  • division (Score:4)

    by bricriu ( 184334 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:17PM (#204242) Homepage
    *sigh* Another day, another partitiion on my hard drive.... what's that, now 5?
  • I have found that most people with only one system partition are those that are most surprised when they lose all their data due to a random disk formatting, they tend to be secretaries, businessmen, and those who find multiple partitions confusing.

    :-)
  • I believe this [google.com] is what you are looking for.

    All the "basics" to get you started on your own operating system.

    --
    Garett

  • Re:OSkit (Score:3)

    by garett_spencley ( 193892 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:48PM (#204246) Journal
    Oops. Although the link I gave you would take you there (google search), I copied and pasted out of the wrong browser window. Stupid me.

    Here [utah.edu] is the real link just in case....

    --
    Garett

  • For the love of God, can't someone do something for fun?

    Why do would someone do something for fun?
  • Amen brother!

    Go forth to the land of heathens. Ascend your divine milkcrate and preach the Word of Lisp among them. Do not be deterred by the two-letter commands they hurl your way; do not listen to their treacherous Larry Wall-isms. For they know not what they do.

    In the begining was Lisp, and Lisp was with God(el), and Lisp was God(el).

    And Lisp was made flesh, and the Lisp Machine/OS dwelt among us...

    For C/Unix was given by Kernighan/Thompson, but grace and truth came by McCarthy/MIT.
  • yep, not many operating systems [freeos.com] out there...

  • Re:Is Open Source getting too scattered? (Score:3)

    by tswinzig ( 210999 ) on Wednesday May 23, 2001 @05:31PM (#204256) Journal
    However, and I know this has been brought up before, is the open source community sporeading itself too thin? I'm not saying that there shouldn't be several flavors of operating systems, but I think some of these folks should try focusing their energies on one project. One secure, stable, fully-featured product is more desirable than 20 that do different things fine and other things horribly.

    You're missing the point. The coolest thing you can possibly do in geekworld is to write your own OS. This guy is just having FUN! He doesn't want to concentrate on the OS you want him to concentrate on. He wants to be creative and come up with his own thing.
  • Current Ports

    Intel IA-32 (x86) - Tested on desktops all the way to 4-way server
    Sega Dreamcast - Hitachi SH-4

    looks like it runs in SH4. and once you got that going, think about all the things you could do! once you got telnet/ssh going, just about anything you want in a console...on a TV. woot!

    in all seriousness, its always cool to have yet another OS not to run. No...seriously...it is...

  • Well, depends who you're coding for.

    The US Army would prefer a "Hooah!", but...

    Since the US Air Force would undoubtedly be funding it they might prefer the line to be "Air Force!".

    If coding for the US Marine Corps, (which would never happen, since they NEVER buy anything NEW) they'd want a healthy "Oorah!" or maybe just an "Errrr!"

    The US Navy would probably ask for a "Go Navy!" - there is however a limited part of the US Navy who does use "Booyah!".

    The US Coast Guard would simply request that the entire source code be submitted in bright orange.

    I guess it really just depends on which command requests it.

  • Okay, this is ridiculous... (Score:4)

    by wrinkledshirt ( 228541 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:29PM (#204263) Homepage
    Many thanks goes out to the people at Perforce for making such a good revision control system, the developers at OpenBLT for giving me some ideas, and Be for giving me such a good development platform.

    Okay, I'm all for Open Source and sharing of ideas and all that, but this has gone too far. For the love of God, you CAN'T open source a good sandwich!

    Where does it all stop? Why? WHYYYYYY?!?!?!

    (sorry)

  • It is not *too* dificult to create your own opperating system. Many colleges even have a course (usually in a masters program) where you have to create your own OS. The diference between Linux and any other number of fledgling opperating systems is that Linus never stopped developement for it after he got it to work. He ported some gnu stuff to it and the ball just kept rolling. It will be interesting to see if any of these new fledgling OS's "keep the ball rolling".
  • It seems that quite often, the developer of one OS moves on to create another in a short amount of time. This is one of the "small" OSes that I might actually venture to put onto a system of mine.

    Why a port to Sega Dreamcast? Doesn't it have its own OS already, in ROM or something?

  • wtf rated this as informative?...
    I think /. needs some sort of dope test before handing out mod points, sheesh.

    btw I`m still trying to work out if this whole thread is a wind up or not :-)

    A crash reduces
    Your expensive computer

  • Re:feature set. (Score:5)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:50PM (#204283) Journal
    looks like "High-performance TCP/IP stack" is a planned feature

    That's pretty cool. I was thinking of implementing a "packet-losing, barely functional TCP/IP stack" with the upcoming SantaOS, but I may have to change my strategy now that someone's come along and promised better...

    Dancin Santa
  • It isn't based on the BSD license. It is the BSD license!

    Uh.. not according to the comments here [newos.org]:

    /*
    ** Copyright 2001, Travis Geiselbrecht. All rights reserved.
    ** Distributed under the terms of the NewOS License.
    */

    Now I've been poking around his Perforce repository, but can't find a copy if this "NewOS" License anywhere.

    Ryan T. Sammartino

  • Re:Use your own OS... (Score:5)

    by mech9t8 ( 310197 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:44PM (#204286)
    Well, the closer you get to the users, the more complex things get... never mind the feature involved. The Win32 libraries include everything from the base file system things to sound libraries to MIDI support to all the UI widgets to networking to printer support to ...

    There's a lot in there. Somethings haven't really been done on built-from-scratch UNIX environments, never mind trying to emulate exactly what Microsoft did...
    --
    Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
  • The problem was IBM had too big a team working on it, and they weren't coordinated. They just threw more bodies at the problem instead of analyzing the problem.

    There's a story that at one point, when they were really desparate, the managers were going around to the secretaries and asking them if they'd like to become programmers.
    -----------------

  • Looks like the license is based on the BSD. At least Stallman won't be coming around wanting to rename it GNU/NewOS. I'd hate to see version 2.0: New GNU/NewOS. And so on and so on...

    Gnu/Newspeak?

  • IBM had a big team working on that and they never succeeded either. The reason is that the Win32 API doesn't have a spec and you don't know all the hidden features "clever" programmers are taking advantage of.

    Of course, even if it did have a spec, reimplementing something obscure and complex to a spec is a lot harder than creating something and the later writing an obscure and complex spec for it.

  • Not at all surprising. (Score:3)

    by Flying Headless Goku ( 411378 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:53PM (#204296) Homepage
    Despite what many people seem to think, an OS is not an inherently complex thing.

    As far as I can see, there are only two extremely difficult (read: time-consuming, tedious) things to do re something as familiar and well-defined as an OS: comply fully with someone else's standard, and tune an entirely original design (not borrowing the main character from a familiar system).

    Making a unix-like OS is not much harder than making a compiler for a c-like language (I dunno about you, but I could do the latter in a couple of days). But then supplying every library routine and going and checking that you comply with the POSIX standard on every point would take forever (alone, that is).

    The win32 thing is a hundred times harder than that, because it's a huge, poorly designed, inaccurately specified, buggy interface. It's painful enough to even use that the vast majority of windows programmers hide it behind some other tool. Recreating it perfectly, without access to the source, is an exercise in futility, far harder than making it in the first place.
    --

  • Re:NewOS (Score:3)

    by warmiak ( 444024 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:30PM (#204301) Homepage
    CIPA does not mean "pussy" in Swedish !
    Perhaps you meant Polish where cipa indeed means "pussy" ...
  • Original? Ever heard of Window ME?
  • I'm sold!
    Microsoft out the window!
    Linux out the window!
    C'mon new OS... save me taht 75 bucks!

  • Isin't newOS the default folder name Microsoft Operating System Creator uses for a new project?

    No, that would be "MyOS".

    (Giveaway)

  • Is Open Source getting too scattered? (Score:3)

    by InjuredLabMonkey ( 453692 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2001 @07:42PM (#204313)
    By far one of the greatest things about open source is that anyone has the opportunity to go out and build whatever they want. This adds to the mix and to the overall quality of the products. However, and I know this has been brought up before, is the open source community sporeading itself too thin? I'm not saying that there shouldn't be several flavors of operating systems, but I think some of these folks should try focusing their energies on one project. One secure, stable, fully-featured product is more desirable than 20 that do different things fine and other things horribly. I'm not looking to get blasted with why having many different OSs do different things is good, because I know that. I'm just raising a question that seems to have faded from the open source community's mind.

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