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Old 20th May 2014
censored censored is offline
Swen Tnavelerri
 
Join Date: Jan 2014
Posts: 45
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A quick googling shows me something's happened recently on the Pedigree Project github, so it hasn't been abandoned yet...

MikeOS / Menuet

I've looked at MikeOS and Menuet, but it seems (to me) that few apps will ever exist for operating systems built mostly with assembly language...

Recently I took a look at the MonaOS (a "from scratch" kernel and OS project written by a Japanese person) - but I could not get it to work on my hardware. Has anyone had better luck with it?

House OS

And then, there is House OS, an operating system built with the Haskell compiler. It has a GUI that I found to be fairly responsive. I suppose the House OS could be useful, depending upon what a person might want to do. The House OS is at pdx.edu, and that site hosts a floppy image that makes House easy to try. Of course I'm the troglodyte with dozens of floppies laying around :-)

Too primitive for most

Edit: Some of the operating systems I've listed are more primitive than what the typical user might want to load and run, just for grins. But, I've listed some operating systems that are maybe in the "less primitive of the primitive" category.

Haiku. Minix3, FreeBSD

Of the OS candidates in my original list, I mostly make use of FreeBSD, Haiku, and Minix3. Lately I've been using Haiku more than FreeBSD, for general web browsing in particular. This is in spite of the fact that they say it's "alpha stage" software. Always, with open source, it's "caveat emptor"! Haiku does crash on my hardware, but not very often in my experience. They don't say much about security on their site. But - for just hangin'round the net, in my personal opinion - looks good, tastes great! I've used the latest version of Minix (3) for more browsing than I ever thought I would.

L4

I'm surprised nobody has listed any of the L4 variants. The most popular variant is L4 Linux. Blasphemy! That could explain why it's not listed here on this thread! However; I could guess that the "L" in L4 stands for the original (main) author's name, Jochen Liedtke, and not for "Linux"! L4 itself is not Linux. The work on the series has been done at various places, including the Karlsruhe Institute, Uni South Wales, and the Technical Uni /Dresden. Mostly German stuff.

L4 is a microkernel / hypervisor, upon which (in the default implementation) a "normal" Linux OS runs along with a RTOS (real time operating system). There is a CD DEMO ISO available that is great for peeking at an instance of the Linux/Demo-RTOS combo running on the L4 micro kernel. Look up "L4-Linux" and "DEMO CD". There's a floppy available that runs only the L4 micro kernel and a simple demo RTOS on top of it. The floppy has a nice kernel debugger (as does the CD), so you can play with it.

In my readings, I've found that (apparently) the L4 micro kernel architecture was adapted by commercial interests, and used in embedded devices such as cell phones. One claim I've found is that over 1.5 billion devices (including many cell phones), run an "L4 variant" software collection, with the baseband processing handled by an RTOS (or whatever), and the userland handled by whatever they decide to use for that. The company is OK Labs, which has subsequently been purchased by General Dynamics, a defense contractor.

Singularity

Blaspheme! Yes, it's an interesting OS, even though it's from Microsoft. While I mention Linux, I may as well mention Singularity :-) It's code is Microsoft reseach licensed source. I read where it cost millions. It's distributed on Codeplex, where I see only 60k downloads. I imagine Microsoftees are wondering what they did wrong to be so ignored!

Last edited by censored; 21st May 2014 at 07:41 PM.
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