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Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs

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Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs

#81

Post by iamnothere »

luke8086 wrote: post #75
iamnothere wrote: post #3

This is great, thanks for releasing your work. Very impressive. You may get some interest from others in the retrocomputing/permacomputing sphere if you implement an Uxn emulator; it is extremely simple and can run on very limited hardware. https://100r.co/site/uxn.html Vintage hardware would be a great host for Uxn programs, so I suspect this would generate some excitement.

Thank you so much! Somehow I haven't heard about Uxn before, but it seems very cool and I'll definitely look into it.

You’re welcome. You’d probably appreciate its focus on long-term stability; the authors wanted an environment for their software that would ensure code could stay frozen in a working state forever. The only thing that may need updates is the VM, as the host OS and userland will shift over time, but the VM is designed to be exceptionally easy to implement and maintain. That comes at the cost of some capabilities, but they were specifically aiming for simpler software, so it works out.

Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs

#82

Post by nosioptar »

lproven wrote: post #66
sixothree wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code is cleaner that what I was expecting from a C repo. Also, it's quite a feat to fit this into 4 MB on a 386.

> it's quite a feat to fit this into 4 MB on a 386. I had 2 different Librex 386SX laptops, with 4MB of RAM, on long-term loan from work around 1992. One was quite chunky, the 2nd was a slimline thing with an off-centre hinge. I ran OS/2 2.0 on them both. So I could run multiple DOS apps, and a WinOS2 VM containing Windows 3.0, meaning I could run Win16 apps as well. And native OS/2 apps, although I didn't have many.…

That's a wonderful machine. I'd love to see that style of keyboard on new stuff.

Its wild to me to think of how much old computers could do relative to new. WordPerfect for DOS was always responsive and quick wheb I used it. I've seen ms word cludge up machines that should have plenty of power to run a word processor.

Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs

#83

Post by luke8086 »

rasz wrote: post #60

Am I crazy or are the "photos" generated? I did have T1800 and it never looked like this. It had a very early very bad grayscale LCD wiht fiddly contrast control, not a perfect crisp vibrant OLED like this page shows. example how one looks like irl https://allegrolokalnie.pl/oferta/laptop-toshiba-t1800 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxIc_UVKxvc

All the photos are real, though it took me *lots* of time to get them somewhat right. The display on T1800 is indeed "challenging". What helped was:

- Letting it warm for a while

- Putting windows in the right places, because each one generates its own artifacts

- Setting background to dark with the white pattern

- Fiddling with the contrast knob and matching it with the right viewing angle

- Using 2x zoom

To be fair, the default photo app of iPhone 16 automatically reduced some of the artifacts. The only post-processing done myself in GIMP was very basic stuff like adjusting white balance, exposure and contrast.

Here you can see a few very quick-n-dirty photos I just took for comparison - https://imgur.com/a/6Xz6vc8

Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs

#84

Post by luke8086 »

rasz wrote: post #76
bor_real wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a new panel was retrofitted into it?

OLED panel? that would be a bigger hack than this OS :) Either all pictures are AI generated using QEMU templates that were there previously https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32/commit/d40576226b7020... or those are real pictured beautified by AI. YT loves doing that to thumbnails, example https://hackaday.com/2026/06/03/hydraulic-drive-for-your-law...

The only AI-generated artifact is the cyberpunk wallpaper from the last photo, I'll admit that :)

Btw. the QEMU screenshots are still in the repo in https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32/tree/main/doc/appimg

Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs

#85

Post by lproven »

nosioptar wrote: post #82
lproven wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's quite a feat to fit this into 4 MB on a 386. I had 2 different Librex 386SX laptops, with 4MB of RAM, on long-term loan from work around 1992. One was quite chunky, the 2nd was a slimline thing with an off-centre hinge. I ran OS/2 2.0 on them both. So I could run multiple DOS apps, and a WinOS2 VM containing Windows 3.0, meaning I could run Win16 apps as well. And native OS/2 apps, although I didn't have many.…

That's a wonderful machine. I'd love to see that style of keyboard on new stuff. Its wild to me to think of how much old computers could do relative to new. WordPerfect for DOS was always responsive and quick wheb I used it. I've seen ms word cludge up machines that should have plenty of power to run a word processor.

> I'd love to see that style of keyboard on new stuff.

OMG yes please. :-)

Yep, WP for DOS was quick. Rather clunky UI compared to MS Word for DOS, IMHO, but fast. A friend of mine used a simple method to demo its speed: on his cheap monochrome 286 home computer, he loaded the book he was working on -- one big file, a few hundred pages -- and just held down the cursor key to scroll through the whole thing. It kept the entire doc in RAM and the text just blurred as it zoomed through the entire book in under a minute.

Compared then (early 1990s) to Windows where a similar text took tens of minutes, as my faster computer struggled to load in pages of text from disk, render the fonts, etc.

In the late 1980s, Amstrad introduced new CP/M machines, the PCW range:

https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/PCW

They sold for over a decade and shifted about 8 million units. A CP/M computer, in the early Windows era.

Maybe it's time to do that again: a very low-spec machine, but with a crisp e-ink screen and a great premium-grade mechanical keyboard, shipping with a modern FOSS DOS, a compilation of free DOS apps, and some nice friendly graphical launcher. Wrapped up as an easy appliance that doesn't do Internet stuff at all, but makes it trivially easy to save your work on USB media or zap it to modern devices wirelessly.

Form factor of a big late-20th-century laptop, with a massive battery so it can double as a power bank for your phone or something.

Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs

#86

Post by lproven »

NoGravitas wrote: post #78
lproven wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's quite a feat to fit this into 4 MB on a 386. I had 2 different Librex 386SX laptops, with 4MB of RAM, on long-term loan from work around 1992. One was quite chunky, the 2nd was a slimline thing with an off-centre hinge. I ran OS/2 2.0 on them both. So I could run multiple DOS apps, and a WinOS2 VM containing Windows 3.0, meaning I could run Win16 apps as well. And native OS/2 apps, although I didn't have many.…

I had a 386SX-16 running OS/2 from 2.1 to 3.0. It was usually fine, you could multitask several OS/2 and DOS applications or a WinOS2 session. It was very easy to get it swapping, though, and when it was swapping, it ground to a halt. It helped a lot putting 8MB on it, though 4 of those were on an ISA card and very slow.

Reminds me of my early-1990s home network server: a late-1980s IBM PS/2 Model 80, a 386 tower built with a moulded iron case. Super tough, fancy 32-bit IBM expansion bus. 4MB of RAM on the motherboard, another 4MB in an expansion slot.

I attached a couple of big SCSI drives and ran Windows NT 3.51 Server on it. When not logged in, it only used a couple of megs of RAM for the OS so file serving performance was tolerable -- and the hardware was literally bulletproof. I dropped one down a flight of stairs in my first job. The computer survived but it knocked lumps out of the concrete stairs on the way down.

Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs

#87

Post by aktau »

I clicked around in the kernel section and the other commenters highlighting the simplicity weren't lying. It's beautiful in its simplicity.

Seeing the screenshots I was kind of expecting this was a pre-emptive multi-tasking OS (forgetting what I read in the submission).

Things that thus surprised me on a cursory look:

  - noticed krn_main() ends with `while (1);` [1]. I would've expected a "schedule" call or something. I assume there's no real busy loop burning CPU, maybe it's never meant to reach this code?
  - I'm reminded of the "bare metal OS" when I see one of the apps call `krn_\*` functions directly [2].
[1]: https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32/blob/main/kernel/main...

[2]: https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32/blob/ea691f14635c023d...

Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs

#88

Post by sixothree »

lproven wrote: post #66
sixothree wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code is cleaner that what I was expecting from a C repo. Also, it's quite a feat to fit this into 4 MB on a 386.

> it's quite a feat to fit this into 4 MB on a 386. I had 2 different Librex 386SX laptops, with 4MB of RAM, on long-term loan from work around 1992. One was quite chunky, the 2nd was a slimline thing with an off-centre hinge. I ran OS/2 2.0 on them both. So I could run multiple DOS apps, and a WinOS2 VM containing Windows 3.0, meaning I could run Win16 apps as well. And native OS/2 apps, although I didn't have many.…

For you to downvote my small comment, and then go on to lecture me about things you have barely any grasp or memory of, is just astounding to me. I currently own at least 5 computers with 4 MB of RAM, part of a collection of computers that is too large to count (hence the project on github).

A 386 with 4MB was the bare minimum to run Windows 3.11, which is considered the first mainstream GUI for PCs. Technically they required 3 MB, but recommended 4 MB.

Topping it all off, you're being disingenuous by suggesting running OS/2 desktop applications with just 4 MB of RAM. OS/2 was _notoriously_ memory hungry. At the very least it required more RAM than Win 3.11 (which recommended 4 MB). While OS/2 required 4 MB, suggested 8 MB as a minimum, but really needed 16 MB to do anything remotely useful.

And for you to not remember that is pretty telling.

Re: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs

#89

Post by Aldipower »

luke8086 wrote: post #80
Aldipower wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, even though the 386SX-25 is 32bit in my PS/1? Will try it eventually.

Oh sorry, a quick google check told me PS/1 had 286. 386SX itself should be supported, the monochrome Toshiba on the photo has 386SX/20 with 10MB RAM.

Anyway, I tried the 16bit version, and it works like a charm!! Thank you. Here's a video of the boot, I've just made. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fSsTa8Oc48

Although, the floppy light does not turn off. Not sure, if this a problem with the OS or my hardware.

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