woah, what a throwback. haven't thought about this in a couple decades
MenuetOS
21–30 of 55 posts
Re: MenuetOS
#22What 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?
Faster than you can say "what are boot times like" from what I remember. But it's not a practically usable OS, it's more like a study in how far you can get with pure assembly. Though if a text editor is really all you want, it might be good enough.
Might be pretty close to enough with a good ssh client and terminal. It’s probably actually real time which is neat for FOSS.
Re: MenuetOS
#23What 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?
You don't need a new OS for that. You can do that as a Linux distribution just fine.
Re: MenuetOS
#24What 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…
I'm running XMonad on Linux, and I don't see any clock or system stats, because I don't run that. No bottom (nor top etc) bar for me.
(You can add such bars in XMonad, just like you can remove them from i3.)
Re: MenuetOS
#25Used this 20 years ago when working on my CS degree in our assembly class and wrote a file copy utility for it as a homework assignment.
Re: MenuetOS
#26I forgot about this OS, nice to see it still being developed. I will have to keep it in mind for use somewhere.
Re: MenuetOS
#27I 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.
If I'm not mistaken, both are written in FASM (Flat Assembler). And unfortunately FASM won't run in recent MacOSes because it's a 32-bit app. No problem with Windows/Linux, though.
Re: MenuetOS
#28Amazing this is still around! I remember playing with this back when I was playing with toy kernel development as a teenager back in the mid 2000s! It was pretty amazing to see even back then given how out of my depth I was with the little bits of assembler you needed to get to set things up (protected mode etc.) before jumping to the C entry point!
Re: MenuetOS
#29This was so small back in the day (one floppy I believe), that I proposed it for firmware or boot manager before EFI became ubiquitous or coreboot came along. Wonder how that would have played out.
i had similar thoughts, and in modern times "just enough for containers" would be the business i guess. baremetal os might be it the one tho https://github.com/ownmac/BareMetal-OS
This is probably a better link:
https://github.com/ReturnInfinity/BareMetal
The one you linked to is a fork that is 83 commits behind a repo that is no longer maintained.
Re: MenuetOS
#30I 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.
If I'm not mistaken, both are written in FASM (Flat Assembler). And unfortunately FASM won't run in recent MacOSes because it's a 32-bit app. No problem with Windows/Linux, though.
You can run 32-bit Windows tools in macOS with Wine.