A.P. Lawrence

Hobby Operating Systems

Link: Poll: Vote for the Most Promising Hobby OS

This OS news poll only lists a handful, and doesn't bother to provide any helpful links, so I have done that below.

With the possible exception of OpenBeOS and Syllable/Atheos, there's nothing there that is particularly "different". Where are the real radical ideas, like a pure virtual memory OS that only uses disks as backing store or perhaps a "network os" where everything is packet based? Oh, well: maybe one of these will ring your chimes:

OpenBeOS

http://www.openbeos.org/

This is an attempt to keep the BeOS alive as a desktop OS . BeOS once was desktop oriented, but closed down and sold everything to Palm. The distinguishing aspect of Be and OpenBeOS is their object focus. The whole OS interface is object based, which means you would program for it in C++ or some other object oriented language. See http://www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/developers/developer_library/tutorials/approachingBe.html for more.

MenuetOS

http://www.menuetos.org/

Pure assembly language (x86) all the way. Fits on a single floppy, yet boots as a GUI. Strongly focused on squeezing ultimate performance out of x86 hardware.

Syllable

http://syllable.sourceforge.net/

Syllable is a fork of Atheos. Both are "semi POSIX"; that is, they don't intend POSIX compliance but do borrow strongly. The distinguishing feature here seems to be the non-X GUI and a file system that is reminiscent of Mac resource forks, but extended to multiple forks.

TriangleOS

http://members.chello.nl/~w.cools/

This is one-man effort, and the source code is not available. It is surprisingly complete considering that, though there are of course major omissions still. I can't find anything you'd call unusual here: it's another OS.

ReactOS

http://www.reactos.com/

This is a brash attempt to make an NT compatible Open Source operating system. As might be imagined, it's rather incomplete.

SkyOS

http://www.skyos.org/

This is "mainly (99.9%) a one man project" according to the web page and looks to be more complete than Triangle. Again though, it's Just Another OS as far as I can tell.

FreeDOS

http://www.freedos.org/

The goal here is a free, 100% MSDOS compatible OS. Some people may wonder why, but in fact there is still a large amount of MSDOS code kicking about, some of it doing fairly important tasks, and porting it to other systems can be hard. As the day is fast approaching where you won't be able to buy real MSDOS at all, this could become very necessary.

DROPS

http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/drops/overview.html

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The Dresden Real-Time Operating System Project uses L4Linux to run ordinary time-sharing applications alongside the real-time tasks.

AROS

http://www.aros.org/

This is for the Amiga lovers. For those who have never experienced the fervor of a true Amigo explaining why nothing since has even come close to what Amiga was, well, it's something everyone should experience at least once. Some of their rantings actually have a base in reality, so don't discount this out of hand.

Others

I'm happy to add more if you'd like to point me at something you found interesting. ~

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