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MenuetOS

menuetos.net

11–20 of 55 posts

Re: MenuetOS

#11
I gave it a try many years ago and its speed was jawdropping. Too bad that a port to ARM would require a complete rewrite; those cheaper lower end *Pi-like embedded boards seem just the perfect platforms to take advantage of such a small and fast OS.

Re: MenuetOS

#12
post #3

It's such a pity that the 32bit version is open source and the 64-bit version proprietary. The open source alternative is KolibriOS.

My understanding is that Kolibri is a hostile fork of Menuet, and that Menuet's author closed it in retaliation.

Re: MenuetOS

#13

What are boot times like? I see a lot of text-editing environments geared towards "distraction-free, focused editing" but not a lot of innovation on an OS focused on the same experience. I would like to see such a "writing OS" that boots to a text editor in less than a second. Maybe this OS is a candidate?

I don't know if much innovation is really required, honestly. You probably won't find what you're looking for with Mac/Windows, but if you run a tiling window manager like i3 on Linux you'll pretty much just see a clock, some system stats, and whatever applications you have open on the screen. You can pretty easily configure the bottom bar to remove the superfluous system stats, or even the clock if you want.

Is that the kind of experience you'd look for in a distraction-free OS? If not I'd be interested to hear your ideas - I use i3 for work but manage to distract myself anyway because I always have a web browser open.

Re: MenuetOS

#14
post #3

It's such a pity that the 32bit version is open source and the 64-bit version proprietary. The open source alternative is KolibriOS.

My understanding is that Kolibri is a hostile fork of Menuet, and that Menuet's author closed it in retaliation.

> KolibriOS has forked off from MenuetOS in 2004, and is run under independent development since then. All our code is open-source, with the majority of the code released under GPLv2 license.

https://kolibrios.org/en/

Re: MenuetOS

#15
post #3

It's such a pity that the 32bit version is open source and the 64-bit version proprietary. The open source alternative is KolibriOS.

My understanding is that Kolibri is a hostile fork of Menuet, and that Menuet's author closed it in retaliation.

You are correct.

http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=22194

(MenuetOS is Ville's project)

The code was GPL, but kolibri did replace copyright headers and that was Ville's main gripe. Whether or not that breaks the GPL, I cannot say (they kept his name in the license file).

Re: MenuetOS

#16
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Kolibri is a hostile fork of Menuet, and that Menuet's author closed it in retaliation.

You are correct. http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=22194 (MenuetOS is Ville's project) The code was GPL, but kolibri did replace copyright headers and that was Ville's main gripe. Whether or not that breaks the GPL, I cannot say (they kept his name in the license file).

Ville, in response to who forked it: "Coders from Ukraine's eastern neighbor. And closed source seems to be a quite good way of getting rid of their forum spamming (to use a polite expression)."

Re: MenuetOS

#17
post #9

What are boot times like? I see a lot of text-editing environments geared towards "distraction-free, focused editing" but not a lot of innovation on an OS focused on the same experience. I would like to see such a "writing OS" that boots to a text editor in less than a second. Maybe this OS is a candidate?

It was said to boot in 5s twenty years ago... The hardware compatibility list shows a promising number of machines ( http://www.menuetos.net/hwc.txt ). If you have a spare one, you could try and report. There is a chance that you will achieve a very fast boot time. -- AROS (Amiga) could reboot in ~7s, ~15yrs ago. And you can do more than you can with MenuetOS. Again, today you will probably break that record. https:/…

It was even faster than that. I remember it being almost instantaneous. And you could even play Doom!

Re: MenuetOS

#18
post #9

What are boot times like? I see a lot of text-editing environments geared towards "distraction-free, focused editing" but not a lot of innovation on an OS focused on the same experience. I would like to see such a "writing OS" that boots to a text editor in less than a second. Maybe this OS is a candidate?

It was said to boot in 5s twenty years ago... The hardware compatibility list shows a promising number of machines ( http://www.menuetos.net/hwc.txt ). If you have a spare one, you could try and report. There is a chance that you will achieve a very fast boot time. -- AROS (Amiga) could reboot in ~7s, ~15yrs ago. And you can do more than you can with MenuetOS. Again, today you will probably break that record. https:/…

Last time I ran it, Lakka (a Linux disto for Retroach emulation appliances) booted in 5s or less on an RPi2, to a usable graphical menu, complete with particle effects or whatever if you have that stuff enabled.

Re: MenuetOS

#19

What are boot times like? I see a lot of text-editing environments geared towards "distraction-free, focused editing" but not a lot of innovation on an OS focused on the same experience. I would like to see such a "writing OS" that boots to a text editor in less than a second. Maybe this OS is a candidate?

On any recent PC, I find that more than half the time booting Linux to a GUI is in POST.

[edit]

And 5 seconds for DHCP if you are using dhcp

Re: MenuetOS

#20

What are boot times like? I see a lot of text-editing environments geared towards "distraction-free, focused editing" but not a lot of innovation on an OS focused on the same experience. I would like to see such a "writing OS" that boots to a text editor in less than a second. Maybe this OS is a candidate?

When I used it (and Kolibri, Floppix, and QNXdemo) in the mid-2000s it was mostly down to the speed of the floppy drive. So about the same as loading Windows 10 from a conventional (spinning rust) hard drive.
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