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Old 19th May 2014
censored censored is offline
Swen Tnavelerri
 
Join Date: Jan 2014
Posts: 45
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Most people think *BSD operating systems are obscure! I guess it's a relative thing. Relative to the average computer user, I don't use anything but obscure operating systems. My fav OS list numbered six until today: *BSD, Haiku, Minix3, Plan9, OSRisc, and Bluebottle (A2). Today, I added O3one (o3one.org) as a potential candidate for the fav list.

O3one.org's Ozone

I've looked at lots of hobby OSes in my spare time, and generally I've found that the majority of them execute only the first portion of the boot loader before splatting. When I see a single author OS that goes beyond that, I take notice. The strange thing about O3one is that its web presence is sparse. There is one small article about it on OSNews, and little else that I can readily find. It hasn't been worked on for awhile (well, ages - 2004) - but the docs on the site are pleasantly readable. The author is obviously a very talented coder, and that idea shines through most of the site's documentation.

It could be that people tend to overlook it because it touts VMS-like features, and so they think it's some kind of derivative. Actually, according to the author, it's from scratch. He's incorporated the idea of UDI spec drivers (universal drivers used unchanged OS to OS) and some nifty other features. It's GPL2 licensed. I was able to get it running, and do some good things (which includes getting the network stack up and running, mounting CDs, editing files, and so on). I think if the Haiku guys had started with this as a base, they'd have taken less time to get where they are. Not to diminish NewOS in any way, but IMO the O3one project is much further along than what NewOS was when the Haiku guys tapped it.

I've been playing with O3one a couple days now, quite a few hours each day, and have had only three panics. One of the crashes may have affected the file system, but I'm not sure. Yet - relative to my experience with hobby OS projects, that's not terribly bad. It has potential.

I wonder if anyone on this forum has ever taken a look at the site? Warning: sunglasses suggested for viewing site

A2 / Bluebottle

Nice OS, but a little finicky about hardware. Helps to have really old stuff (grin). It does have a minimal browser and net stack, and I've cruised this forum with it :-)

CD ISOs are available from a university in Zurich (ethz.ch). Those folk (or others at the place) are now at work on a new OS (BarrelFish) - but currently it's available only as source...

Last edited by censored; 21st May 2014 at 05:10 PM.
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