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Minoca OS: A new open source operating system
- dewyatt 10y agoThe code gives me flashbacks to working with the Windows API. Cool project though and it's nice that they already have a handful of drivers. EDIT: To clarify, I'm not saying it's bad at all, they're just using a very verbose naming convention that I don't particularly like working with.
- maaarghk 10y agoIt looks like they have basically adopted the coding conventions of windows API code, down to the /++ --/ comments, style of declaring functions, uppercase types etc. Not that it's is a bad thing, just something I noticed. Also things like KeCrashSystemEx look very much like KeBugCheckEx in Windows. There certainly is a lot of inspiration. Edit: I see from Linkedin the OP is actually an ex-MSFTer who worked on Windows' HAL, so this makes sense. I wonder, tho, if this will present legal issues? Could someone say that it is an issue that the API is clearly inspired by the Windows API?
- billytetrud 10y agoWhile there are the usual legal bizzarities ( http://blog.smartbear.com/apis/api-copyright-and-why-you-should-care/ http://blog.smartbear.com/apis/api-copyright-and-why-you-sho... ), there's no reason this should be any different than copyright of code. Design-inspired is not design infringement.
- antarrah 10y agoThat's a fantastic initiative. > Can we achieve parity with what what operating systems are used for in today’s world, but with less code, and with fewer pain points? Can we do better? We’d like to try. I appreciate the uncertainty!
- ghostly_s 10y agoYAOSWVITEBN Yet Another OS With the Vague Impossible-To-Evaluate Benefit of 'Newness' edit: not to suggest I have a problem with people trying new things, but rather...why not write up a little essay on the architectural decisions you've made and their impact before releasing it publicly?
- Zikes 10y agoJust because you're not the target demographic doesn't mean the demographic doesn't exist.
- duaneb 10y agoIf the demographic exists, they wouldn't know it from reading this blog post.
- formula1 10y agoTheir competition is dsl, arch, raspbarrien and other small/IoT OSs. Not to say their product is worse. But why are they forking instead of supporting existing technologies? Not saying their work isnt useful. But theres an argument to be made for "why"?
- agildehaus 10y agoBecause they can. There's your why. Now you get to answer the "why not?".
- formula1 10y agoBecause taking away mindshare instead of consolidating efforts hurts all parties. Competition is often good when done for very good reasons, iojs vs nodejs, proprietary goals vs purely open source. Their goal is the same goal as many other projects however, instead of supporting those projects they are releasing their own which will likely have to go through a LOT of growing pains to compete with current projects. Simply releasing your own OS (written by two guys) seems naive at best and arrogant at worst.
- jklinger410 10y agoI want to see Linus go through this source code and tell everyone what he thinks. That would be a real good litmus test haha.
- snvzz 10y agoVery little information on their site about the actual architecture of the system. Very bad flag there. I'd be interested if it was based on a post-Liedtke microkernel, but I suspect it's yet another boring monolith.
- analognoise 10y agoPlease post a link to your microkernel, papers, and any books you have published on the subject so I can learn why monolithic kernels are boring and how to do it better. Thanks.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoI have such links. I just can't tell if you're being serious or sarcastic.
- analognoise 10y agoIt depends; if gp has actual things to back-up what they're saying, then I'd actually like to read them. I'm interested in monokernels because of Haiku, but I'm definitely not an expert. OTOH, somebody releases a whole OS and the response is "Snore! It isn't a microkernel." - Ok, so...why?
- nickpsecurity 10y agoStart with this paper which lays the reliability benefit out pretty well with specific examples: http://cs.furman.edu/~chealy/cs75/important%20papers/secure%20computer-2006a.pdf http://cs.furman.edu/~chealy/cs75/important%20papers/secure%... Start at "The Paper" here to skip past Linus vs Tannenbaum politics stuff. He describes the common counterpoints and shows with evidence, including existing systems, that they're not as big a deal as people say. http://www.cs.vu.nl//~ast/reliable-os/ http://www.cs.vu.nl//~ast/reliable-os/ Example from high-assurance world that has many features & assurance activities a FOSS attempt at secure microkernels should consider copying: http://www.ghs.com/products/safety_critical/integrity-do-178b.html http://www.ghs.com/products/safety_critical/integrity-do-178... Animats and I think QNX is probably best of commercial ones in balancing all kinds of tradeoffs. It's been used for decades as a self-healing RTOS with good performance. First link is their description of it with second a demo of a product with QNX inside showing how fast it can be on non-desktop hardware. http://www.qnx.com/content/qnx/en/products/neutrino-rtos/neutrino-rtos.html#benefits http://www.qnx.com/content/qnx/en/products/neutrino-rtos/neu... https://youtu.be/vPo6gl8N0wM?t=1m20s https://youtu.be/vPo6gl8N0wM?t=1m20s Open-source one aimed at reliability & legacy compatibility you can play with. Took UNIX decades to get reliable despite all the labor but Minix 3's foundation did it with a handful of people over a few years. That's saying something. http://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=www:documentation:features http://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=www:documentation:feature... Another FOSS one that aims at high-security integrating many best-of-breed components from CompSci like Nitpicker GUI and seL4 microkernel. First link is descriptive slides with second the actual site. This one is still new so will have bugs. https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/genode_os_security_by_design/attachments/slides/728/export/events/attachments/genode_os_security_by_design/slides/728/genode_FOSDEM2015.pdf https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/genode_os_sec... https://genode.org/about/ https://genode.org/about/ Finally, it's worthwhile to throw in an exemplary one from capability-security that further isolates things with self-healing properties. Based on commercially successful KeyKOS system on mainframes. No longer maintained but docs and GPL code still available for study or revival. Paper also describes other capability kernels. https://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~chris/teaching/cs290/doc/eros-sosp99.pdf https://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~chris/teaching/cs290/doc/eros-sosp9... So, there's you a few days worth of reading and a few years worth of thinking to do. Hope it helps shed light on why almost every safety- or security-critical system that ever did well in reliability or security was a microkernel-based system. These days, high-assurance is looking at eliminating even it with CPU's with built-in security, compiler techniques for automated safety/security, and DSL's for easy formal verification of OS or system components. Until that's finalized & while using traditional hardware, it's best to build on methods that already worked for decades.
- CalChris 10y agoOh please. You have to start somewhere and this is where they're starting. By comparison, Linus' first announcement was: Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things). I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-) Linus (torv...@kruuna.helsinki.fi) PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(. Good luck, guys. Post some docs to read.
- rayiner 10y agoHosting Node and Python already is a hell of a first release announcement.
- gh02t 10y agoI don't think this is a first release announcement, it's been around for several years. This is the announcement that they are releasing the code under GPLv3. Previously it was closed source.
- no_protocol 10y agoMinoca was previously posted about 6 months ago [0], but it was not open source at the time. I guess this is kind of like a re-release after not generating much buzz and seeing a lot of comments asking for open source. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662057
- StavrosK 10y agoI'll second this. I'm sure the same comments here could be made about Linux when it started, and I don't see any point in negativity. Good luck to these people, I hope this becomes one of the major OSes in ten years.
- alistoriv 10y agosounds like it could be interesting, looking forward to seeing more is it a monolithic kernel or a microkernel? hybrid? :P
- no_protocol 10y agoI ran `cloc` on the minoca/os repository, here are the results: github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.70 T=22.43 s (84.3 files/s, 63498.9 lines/s) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Language files blank comment code ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C 1023 296251 262652 530443 C/C++ Header 438 93833 117592 69529 Assembly 95 9588 7773 13383 make 270 2236 6402 4784 Bourne Shell 38 799 1198 2787 JSON 4 4 0 1367 Pascal 4 232 28 718 Python 4 194 257 589 yacc 2 99 4 481 awk 3 25 11 263 Markdown 3 27 0 172 Windows Resource File 3 18 0 86 lex 2 44 142 84 Perl 1 7 10 35 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SUM: 1890 403357 396069 624721 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- rattray 10y agotl;dr, ~625k source lines of code, mostly C, with a bunch of C++ and Assembly too?
- GrinningFool 10y agoAnd about 2:1 code to comment ratio in the C side, which seems pretty good to me (without poking at other projects for comparison)
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- neonbat 10y ago"lean, maintainable, modular, and compatible with existing software." - i wonder how long that will last.
- nwrk 10y ago"Minoca OS was written by two developers, Evan and Chris, over the course of a few years." Big kudos. Going to look at it when time allows
- dschuetz 10y agoAh, yes, as if Linux is not enough as a community driven OS. Let's make other one! Where anyone can make crappy software and be offended if someone pointed it out! I appreciate the idea of making a difference (I badly want to have and use an unproblematic OS), but making an OS out of the lack of another major alternatives is just... a waste of time!
- BinaryIdiot 10y agoThis is a really narrow minded point of view. "Ford already made a car! Making another one is a waste of time!" "IBM already made a computer! Making another one is a waste of time!" "Nokia already made a phone! Making another one is a waste of time!" People choose projects they're passionated about. The majority will likely be a waste of time in the grand scheme of things. Who cares? It's what they want to work on. Is it likely to overtake Linux? No. Is it likely to gain enough adoption to merit taking a look at it? Maybe. You don't even know if the way its architected would provide a better way at doing something another existing operating system cannot and yet you're immediately writing it off?
- Koshkin 10y agoI think I have already heard this somewhere: "<something something> should be enough for everybody". In fact, I wish we had more diversity as far as operating systems are concerned. For example, BeOS/Haiku would seem to me a saner choice for a desktop than an OS primarily designed for servers. (Windows and Mac OS used to be purely desktop OS, but not any more.) RISC OS is another interesting example.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- qz_ 10y ago>Under the hood, Minoca contains a powerful driver model between device drivers and the kernel. The idea is that drivers can be written in a forward compatible manner, so kernel level components can be upgraded without requiring a recompilation of all device drivers. This sounds really smart and it looks great overall <3
- staticfish 10y agoSo true. it really is my biggest problem with the monolithic Linux kernel.
- notalaser 10y agoThere is nothing that prevents a monolithic kernel from using the same model -- no theoretical barrier to it, in any case. Linux doesn't do this because its developers don't want it to.
- drewg123 10y agoRHEL/ Centos defines a stable driver ABI, and even has tools that devs can use to check that their binary drivers don't use any symbols outside the ABI.
- cyphar 10y agoSUSE does too. As far as I'm aware, most stable distributions use a kABI checker. This is the same reason that Android doesn't have many kernel updates -- because proprietary driver authors don't feel like keeping up to date with kABI changes.
- bonzini 10y agoThat's the "port driver"+"mini port driver" model of Windows.
- cpeterso 10y agoNot surprising considering the Minoca founders both worked on the Windows kernel team, according to Linked In. :)
- mwcampbell 10y agoHow does this compare to Minix 3? THat's a microkernel-based OS, so drivers are isolated, and it's also pretty small.
- photonios 10y agoThis is impressive. I'll give this a shot :-)
- bjt2n3904 10y agoAny images out there for Beaglebone? Quite interested! Edit: Haaa, use your eyes and you shall see! http://www.minocacorp.com/download/#beaglebone-black http://www.minocacorp.com/download/#beaglebone-black Edit: Boo :( I haven't gotten it to boot yet. Boot messages are as follows: Minoca Firmware Loader Boot Device: 00000008 Launching bbonefw.bin. Jumping to 82000000... !
- ccstevens 10y agoChris from Minoca here. What you're seeing is the serial output. If you plug in an HDMI monitor, you'll hopefully already be at the shell prompt. Email me (chris@minocacorp.com) if you run into further issues.
- bjt2n3904 10y agoHey Chris! Very excited about the potential for a lightweight embedded OS. I think I understand my confusion now, I was hoping for a shell on the serial port. Most of the work I do with BBB's is headless. Does the exclamation point mean it's finished booting to userspace? Do you think you could rig up the serial port with a shell? How does Minoca handle GPIO's, and other things like RTC's and SPI? I'm sure you know of device tree and sysfs drivers for GPIO, but I can write you a quick overview!
- paxcoder 10y agoTook a look at the github page. Sounds really impressive, lads. I only wish it were a microkernel and licensed with an 'or later'. In fact, given how well copyleft works for system software, I'd consider AGPL. Anyway, it definitely deserves a closer look.
- teilo 10y agoI wish them well, but I'm rather surprised to see no support for 64-bit architecture. Seems an odd place to start.
- raymond_goo 10y agowell, like they wrote, they want to support small, power limited devices as well.
- jwatte 10y agoI would love to see architecture and comparison to other kernels described! Also, I wonder if this can be made to run on Cortex M4 with "MPU" but not "MMU" hardware? Something to run on the Teensy 3.6 would be interesting. BTW: Binary compatible function driver interfaces are great! They served us well on BeOS. The Linux "recompile everything under the sun" approach really gets in the way for many real world situations. Finally, I'm sick and tired of POSIX I/O. It's a really old model, and a really bad match to modern hardware and use cases. Someone needs to develop and popularize the callback/messaging based kernel/application interface of the future, complete with something other than the main() entry point...
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago> Finally, I'm sick and tired of POSIX I/O. How do you feel about kqueue or I/O completion ports? Are those something like the "interface of the future", or just greasing the old machinery?
- amelius 10y agoPerhaps a stupid question but where is the architecture doc? (I think that should be the starting point, especially if you want help from a community.) I'm also interested in what theoretical results from the last 25 years are being used. Some references to papers would be nice. Since the biggest hurdle is separation and thus security, I can imagine the OS has an embedded theorem prover, but I see no mention of it.
- jzymbaluk 10y agoThis link was posted elsewhere in the thread: http://www.minocacorp.com/documentation/developers/knowledge/kernel/ http://www.minocacorp.com/documentation/developers/knowledge...
- jwatte 10y agoAlso, GPL3? Not my favorite license. (MIT/BSD are the best IMO)
- karussell 10y agoIndeed. GPL makes sense in the short term, but in the long run an permissive licensed project forces its branches to contribute back to avoid divergence. GPL makes it harder for commercial entities to invest into it and also a permissive licensed project makes a bigger competition to e.g. Linux.
- cturner 10y agoI felt this way as well (since the mid nineties) until a couple of weeks ago when I read _Social Architecture_ by Pieter Hintjens. It has a strong idealogical flavour. He stresses that you should focus on building a community, with the code and platform as happy side-effects of that community. For that reason, you want GPL because it forces everything back into the community. He gives examples of a friend of his who slaved on a BSD project that got forked with the friend having nothing to show for it. And NT adoption of much of the code from the BSD sockets API.
- SysArchitect 10y ago> He stresses that you should focus on building a community, with the code and platform as happy side-effects of that community. Exactly, so license shouldn't matter that much. I'd probably be a lot more interested in it were it BSD licensed, as it is now I have no real desire to play with this new OS.
- X86BSD 10y agoSeconded on the BSD license being the way forward.
- throwawaysjshs 10y agoCan you explain why you prefer BSD as a contributer (I'm assuming you're not running an OS company) so much that you won't help a GPL project?
- MrZipf 10y agoNT coding style and some similarities with naming. Very clean looking in what I've seen so far. Nice work guys.
- dimman 10y agoHave to agree about the good work part. Sadly my personal opinion is that I really, really dislike the NT coding style. Now that makes me wonder how coding style affects peoples will to contribute. Compare this to the Linux kernel coding style and they're on different sides of the scale, I wonder how it will affect contributions.
- mycall 10y agoWindows can do this with its subsystems (Win32, POSIX, OS/2, Linux). Perhaps they will reuse some of that idea so your preference might be swayed.
- zeveb 10y agoHow cool! I happen to have an interest in OS development myself: it seems that two things have combined to make bespoke OS development practical again. First, the world has mostly standardised on amd64, UEFI &c. None of these standards may be terribly good (e.g. I've always x86 and its descendants tasteless compared to 68000, MIPS and others), but they're good enough, and now there's a critical mass of community support out there for them. Second, readily-available virtual machines have made it easier than it ever was to rapidly iterate on an OS concept. My own interest is in non-POSIX, non-Unix-inspired, non-consumption-oriented systems: I think that there's some huge headway to be made in building computers meant to augment the human brain, rather than to just reproduce the past or serve as an entertainment-enabler. But Minoca OS sounds pretty neat in itself. Kudos to the guys for putting in the work, and kudos for releasing it as open source. I hope that they're able to make some money from it too — good work deserves to be rewarded.
- wangchow 10y agoI would like to see a built-in natural-language interface so I can, for example, "ps -elf | grep something" with a voice command. In the future we will need these interfaces so if this is built in to the OS that would be nice advantage :)
- overcast 10y agoUse of that phrase was my nice way of saying, being an asshole. Which is why I couldn't believe he wrote that. I guess that's what fame, and power gives you.
- bronson 10y agoDo you think that 100% of Linus's emails are vitrolic spew? He writes kind emails too, you know. Even today.
- overcast 10y agoI didn't say 100% of anything he says is vitriolic spew. There is no denying the man is a genius with C, but he's certainly built a reputation with his attitude.
- sctb 10y agoWe detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12840413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12840413.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- exabrial 10y agoI have to say... the code is beautiful: Full English descriptive variable names and nearly every function is documented. As AngularJS has shown, cleaner, consistent code and architecture style = more contributors. Take a look here for example: https://github.com/minoca/os/blob/master/kernel/io/iobase.c#L959 https://github.com/minoca/os/blob/master/kernel/io/iobase.c#...
- pavlov 10y agoWhy the initial capital on local variable names? I don't think I've ever seen that in C code. (Usually types and exported functions are capitalized.) It kind of makes the code look like Pascal. Nothing wrong with that, really.
- cpeterso 10y agoThis looks like the NT kernel coding style, especially with the pointless typedefs for things like PVOID and the PascalCased function names with prefixes like `IopPerformIoOperation`. I looked up the Minoca founders on Linked In and, behold, they both worked as engineers on the Windows NT team. :)
- 13of40 10y agoNT source code typically (and I say typically, because it's a mish-mash of tens of thousands of people's work over 35 years of development) has local variable names in first-letter-lower camel case. If these guys worked on Windows, it's kind of surprising they didn't follow that convention.
- bonzini 10y agoUsually it's uppercase with a lowercase "Hungarian notation" prefix. Without the prefix, it starts with uppercase.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- 10y ago
- imode 10y agothis should be interesting. POSIX support? I'm game. I hope they don't try to compete with Linux. just do their own thing and see where it goes. usually the competitive edge kills projects like these. happy to see new kernels popping up!
- jlebrech 10y agocan it run on raspberry pi?
- JL2010 10y agoYes, they have pre-built images for RPi: http://www.minocacorp.com/download/ http://www.minocacorp.com/download/
- fiatjaf 10y agoMINHOCA
- jprzybyl 10y agoI'm very excited about this! Minoca is an interesting system, and I applaud any attempt to make driver-writing less inherently horrible. Minoca OS has been around for a while, but the news is that they're GPLv3. I think that's a great thing! The MIT license is good for software that wants to permeate through everything, but for building a community, the GPL is a good idea. It seems that for any operating system to be successful, it has to carry around POSIX compatibility like an extremely expensive entry pass. I wonder when we will leave that behind? Or if we ever will? I'm glad POSIX is just a layer in Minoca, and not the base of the system, because these days it really should just be treated like a big wad of glue. PS: I love the object manager. I don't see any particularly ground-breaking networking stack, though. A plan9-inspired networked file system approach would have been amazing, but it seems this project is content with today's more typical approach. Perhaps it is just trying to be less opinionated about network structure than plan9 was? PPS: I'm terrible at organizing a comment. Maybe I need a blog.
- barbs 10y ago> It seems that for any operating system to be successful, it has to carry around POSIX compatibility like an extremely expensive entry pass. Curious - what are your main objections with POSIX? Is there another system you prefer?
- JasonSage 10y agoI mean, it sounds like his objection is that an operating system that doesn't have POSIX compatibility is dismissed out of hand. If we think of POSIX compatibility as something which is required in order for an operating system to be viable at any level, it means that there's a lot of energy in pioneering a new OS devoted to building up this compatibility simply so it can get some exposure. If we really want to encourage a fresh approach and disseminate new ideas, we need to move away from criterion like this and look more specifically at the principles and work being put forth and whether or not those are objectively successful or have merit. That's a much better way to move forward.
- caf 10y ago
- walrus01 10y agoa barebones debian install of debian-testing or debian-unstable, running no services takes about 68MB of RAM, whether in i386 or amd64 kernel versions, and with a very recent v4.7 or v4.8 series kernel... how much more lightweight do you need?
- vardump 10y agoOn a PC, 68 MB is nothing. But in embedded space, 68 MB RAM just for the system is pretty big. Many systems have a fraction of RAM of that. 1 - 256 kB RAM is common. Of course embedded systems can also have gigabytes of RAM. It's a wide spectrum, so as small as possible is preferable.
- owaislone 10y agoExciting times. First http://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/ http://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/ and now this
- dreamdu5t 10y agoThe goals for this new OS are quite vague and uninteresting. It seems set to repeat most of the problems with existing OSes. Let's take the package manager for example. Wouldn't it be great if instead of yet another package manager that is a glorified system of install scripts... we had a declarative functional system ala NixOS? That's just scratching the surface.
- majewsky 10y agoSince Minoca seems to be a Corp., does anyone know what their business strategy will be? I could imagine a) a paid enterprise edition, b) paid support or c) paid consultancy (as in "contract the actual maintainers to implement device drivers for your servers"). Whenever a project is corporate-backed, I like to know the business plan upfront before I consider contributing to it.
- ufo 10y agoRight now it seems that the business model is the MySQL one: provide the code as GPLv3 and sell licenses if someone wants to use it in a proprietary context. And correct me if I am wrong but I think the corp is just the 2 developers right now.
- qznc 10y agoThey are hiring [0], so they have money from somewhere? [0] http://www.minocacorp.com/careers/ http://www.minocacorp.com/careers/
- qz_ 10y agoFrom the CONTRIBUTING.md: >We at Minoca are trying to make open source work as a business model. One of the ways we're doing that is by offering Minoca OS source for sale under more proprietary licensing terms. To do this Minoca needs to own the copyright to its source. In order to support this business model while also allowing community contributions, we ask that contributors sign a Contributor Assignment Agreement. We're using Harmony Agreements. Before submitting patches, please fill out the CAA for individuals or companies.
- delinka 10y ago"...it’s simply not in widespread circulation." And won't be under GPLv3. If your goals are to prevent others from locking up your code in proprietary products, and to give your code to the world, then this license is for you. If your goal is "widespread circulation," this is not the license you want.
- slgeorge 10y agoIs Linux more widely used than any of the BSD's? Yes. So license doesn't seem to be a sufficient impediment if the functionality advantages are sufficient. This meme "seems" right, but I see less evidence for it in the field.
- delinka 10y agoLinux is not GPLv3 for a reason[1]. Not to mention it's only a kernel, not an entire OS. Basing your OS on a Linux kernel doesn't expose your other code to the GPL. Writing apps to run on a Linux system doesn't expose your code to the GPL. The Minoca OS folks are asking for the community to contribute code to their OS that's licensed under GPLv3. GPLv3 supporters are necessarily a subset of open source supporters. I contend that the subset is small enough that a Minoca OS licensed under GPLv3 will continue to experience a lack of widespread circulation. 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU
- c-smile 10y agoQuestion to authors: do you have any graphics layer in-place? Or at least thoughts about its future architecture? I am thinking about porting my Sciter [1] HTML/CSS UI Engine to an OS that can be used on small (IoT) devices. I think that HTML/CSS as a UI definition/declaration language is quite convenient. [1] http://sciter.com http://sciter.com
- EvanGr 10y agoOP here. Sciter looks cool, nice site too. Currently Minoca has support for a basic framebuffer, which we use to display our green terminal. Our biggest obstacle to having a GUI now is the lack of accelerated graphics drivers. We'd like to add them, but it will be a very large undertaking and probably require cooperation from one of the major graphics vendors.
- mwcampbell 10y agoOnce you get at least one accelerated graphics driver implemented, would you design your own GUI framework/toolkit, or use an existing one like Qt?
- anta40 10y agohttp://www.minocacorp.com/community/ http://www.minocacorp.com/community/ Windows Environment - If you're looking to develop on Windows, you may find this repository helpful, as it contains a native MinGW compiler, make, and other tools needed to set up a Minoca OS development environment on Windows. Nice to see that development on Windows is supported :)
- ThomPete 10y agoYou need design help?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- noja 10y agoWhy's it written in C? :(
- pix64 10y agoWhat would you rather?
- Zekio 10y agoWould be amazing to see DotNet Core run on Minoca
- tmescic 10y agoVery cool. Is it possible to run it in VirtualBox/VM Ware?
- tonyg 10y agoIs it able to self-host?
- Klibarchu 10y agoInteresting take! If I were developing a new OS, I certainly wouldn't have a default text terminal... That just looks gross. But my interests differ. I would focus on the graphical user interface as my number one concern. It would always run in a OpenGL type graphics mode, where you could spawn any number of text terminal-style windows, but I would definitely skip a full-screen text mode. Its just never needed. Does that make sense?
- arcbyte 10y agoYes and no. There are so many dofferent parts to an operatong system that you quickly favor the text console because its so easy to do. If you are going to work on a GUI first thing, you might as well forgo the operating system bit and just write it as a program in some other OS while you perfect it
- athenot 10y agoMacOS Classic was GUI first. There was no terminal; the closest thing that came to a console was the MacBugs debugging interface to inspect the assembly instructions.
- nerdponx 10y agoSince it runs well on ARM, you guys might want to consider reaching out to the Raspberry Pi organization for collaboration.