Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 5th Oct 2001 15:25 UTC
OSNews, Generic OSes The release of WindowsXP does not seem to discourage the coders around the world to code the operating system of their dreams. Lots of new, simple and complex, embedded and desktop OSes grow like mushrooms very often these days. Not all of the OSes we found by searching the web are active, but we will link to the ones with more activity.
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More small OSes...
by Eugenia on Fri 5th Oct 2001 15:30 UTC

There is always http://www.reactos.com/">ReactOS NewOS" rel="nofollow">http://www.newos.org">NewOS of course, but they are a bit more above the niche, as they are more well known as the OSes I described above. ;)

an OS from Trumpet
by Cliff Beach on Fri 5th Oct 2001 16:24 UTC

There is also PETROS by Trumpet Software http://www.petros-project.com/ Good to see you back and busy..... Cliff Beach

AROS, of course
by Erik Inge Bolsų on Fri 5th Oct 2001 17:04 UTC

There is also <a href="http://www.aros.org/">AROS... a project that basically is a reimplementation of AmigaOS 3.1 from scratch, portable at least to ix86, powerpc and m68k architectures. They've been at it for the last several years, and show no signs of quitting or stagnating. Workbench is not yet functional, but many programs have been ported.

tinyos
by Anonymous on Fri 5th Oct 2001 17:09 UTC
QNX!
by Damien Mc Kenna on Fri 5th Oct 2001 17:13 UTC

<a href="http://www.qnx.com">QNX is my current favorite non-MS OS, now that it is available for free for non-commercial purposes.

Askemos
by Joerg F. Wittenberger on Fri 5th Oct 2001 17:36 UTC

<a href="http://www.askemos.org/">Askemos defines a distributed virtual machine using byzantine protocols. Works on xml document level and most importantly without central authority/administration.

This is UNIX (or its variants Lynux, FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX) distilled into its escense. The use interface work by Rob Pike: ACME and Plumbing and quite amazing. Instead of the GNOME/MONO fascination with cloning the Windows ways, the original father of UNIX (Ken Thompson and friends) show how far the original UNIX envelope can be pushed into networks and user interfaces without creating a Windows like enchilada. REALLY AMAZING stuff, if you really want to learn from real OS Artists, this is it. This is of course an OS by developers for developers, not end users.

Re: Lots of others
by Eugenia on Fri 5th Oct 2001 17:45 UTC

>You didn't mention L4 http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/L4/, EROS http://www.eros-os.org/, FLUX http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux Eros is pretty much dead, being full of documents but little actual code while I left OUT *intentionally* the Research/University OSes. I tried to include only personal/team efforts for this article. I am a romantic I can say... ;) As for TinyOS and Askemos, I know about them, their Sourceforge web page links are either dead of they have not shown activity lately. Don't forget that I only included OSes with good activity rate.

Tunes
by Justin Goldberg on Fri 5th Oct 2001 17:45 UTC

http://www.tunes.org/">Tunes exokernel" rel="nofollow">http://www.lcs.mit.edu/exokernel/">exokernel). The only semblance of a kernel is the hardware multiplexor. There will be a high-level language and a low-level language. To port the OS and all of its applications to a new architecture you simply port the low-level language. No more "fake" portability like unix, which sometimes can require a lot of coding. For right now, it is only in the planning stage. No public code yet.

Visopsys
by Andy Mc on Fri 5th Oct 2001 17:47 UTC

Visopsys (mine). 4 years in development. Multitasking, virtual memory, simple GUI, all that stuff... http://visopsys.org/

AdaOS!
by RPR on Fri 5th Oct 2001 17:47 UTC
Tropix
by Tropix on Fri 5th Oct 2001 17:51 UTC

kernel project for i386 since 1982 http://tropix.nce.ufrj.br (Portuguese)

Roadrunner/pk
by FWMiller on Fri 5th Oct 2001 18:02 UTC

Roadrunner/pk http://www.cornfed.com

Unununium!
by eks on Fri 5th Oct 2001 18:03 UTC

http://uuu.sf.net/ if 92% of activity on sourceforge isn't enough, what is? ;)

Re: Roadrunner/pk & Unununium!
by Eugenia on Fri 5th Oct 2001 18:09 UTC

We have already made a news story about Unununium on OSNews a month ago (which btw is not a "real" OS), while the www.cornfed.com one looks interesting. ;)

Old school
by Byron Servies on Fri 5th Oct 2001 18:11 UTC

I've been disgusted with all the OS's I use and so I dropped back to study a system (not just an OS) from the great Niklaus Wirth: Oberon. Most of the concepts in the os' you mention were done extremely well in oberon a decade ago. http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/">Check .

XO/2
by Roberto Brega on Fri 5th Oct 2001 18:18 UTC

It's a shameless plug, as I'm the main developer, but feel free to check out XO/2 (http://xo2.org/), a real-time operating system written in the Oberon-2 language.

Vortex
by Aage Kvalnes on Fri 5th Oct 2001 18:31 UTC

I'll be releasing version 1.0 of Vortex in a few months. Vortex is designed to host server apps running on medium/large scale SMPs (IA-32). Scalable event architecture, scalable asynch I/O architecture, scalable memory architecture, robustness against DoS etc. etc. You have threads, processes, virtual memory, TCP, UDP, IPv4/IPv6, 100 Mbit ether, MyriNet ++++ The entire system has been implemented from scratch over a period of 5 years. Promise you will find something new here. Just gotta finish those last 100 pages on my PhD... ;) You can find more info at http://vserver.cs.uit.no/Vortex These pages are quite outdated though...

How about some Java action
by Adam on Fri 5th Oct 2001 18:57 UTC
MorphOS
by Sam Dunham on Fri 5th Oct 2001 19:03 UTC

A AmigaOS binary compatible OS for the PowerPC. Was at one time being considered by Amiga Inc. as AmigaOS 4.0. http://www.morphos.de/">MorphOS -Sam Dunham

AtheOS, OpenBeOS and V2?
by mlk on Fri 5th Oct 2001 19:05 UTC

I can't remeber all the urls...

EROS
by Matt Marsh on Fri 5th Oct 2001 19:20 UTC

The EROS project has been moved to Johns Hopkins University, where I'm a student. While I am not working on the project myself, I have a friend who worked on the OS this summer along with 10-15 other students under Jonathan Shapiro's direction. (Shapiro is the head of the project and teaches the operating systems courses here.) Apparently things are happening with the OS, though I don't know many specifics as far as advances go.

BozOS
by Robert on Fri 5th Oct 2001 19:21 UTC

BozOS (http://bozos.sf.net) is another free operating system. The whole system it about 5% of the size of MS Notepad in my Win98 installation :-)

Next version of OS/2
by Nathan on Fri 5th Oct 2001 19:35 UTC

www.ecomstation.com Runs DOS/Win3.1/Win9x/OS2/Linux/Unix applications. A heck of an operating system if you ask me. It's not free, but well worth the price.

You forgot my favourite!
by RMS on Fri 5th Oct 2001 19:54 UTC

HURD!

The List
by Omer Hickman on Fri 5th Oct 2001 19:57 UTC

For a much more complete list of OSes checkout: http://tunes.org/Review/OSes.html" http://tunes.org/Review/OSes...

EROS still alive
by Ansible on Fri 5th Oct 2001 20:05 UTC

EROS (http://www.eros-os.org) is still alive. It's currently going through a massive re-write, and they're ripping out all the C++ code from the kernel (going back to C). It is the most recent attempt at a pure capability-based OS, and a follow-on to KeyKOS.

EROS, mentioned by Matt Marsh, is the Extremely Reliable Operating System. Web site is http://www.eros-os.org . I haven't followed it in a while, but some of my friends are very enthusiastic about it. It's based on Capabilities, which are authentication tokens that processes can hand each other, and which control access to everything on the system - If you don't have a capa, you can't do anything, so it's possible to build extremely secure operating systems. The file system does journaling, so if you have to reboot the machine, FSCKs are nearly-instantaneous. (I forget if it does conventional files or objects, but I remember that it does lots of checkpointing - failure recovery is really fast.)

Pliant... a meta OS?
by elmlish on Fri 5th Oct 2001 20:55 UTC

I've been reading into the Metaprogramming language Pliant. at http://pliant.cx/ . It seems they are also developing an OS based upon the language. Looks like they do this on top of the linux kernel. Interesting site.

A Brazilian project...
by Mamaeh on Fri 5th Oct 2001 21:02 UTC

There is a project at a brazillian university for an OS *nix-like. <a href="http://allegro.nce.ufrj.br/tropix/index.html">Tropix's page is in portuguese.

Atheos, GPL OS running on x86...
by Remi on Fri 5th Oct 2001 21:12 UTC

Homepage: www.atheos.cx (the web server runs on Atheos ;)

COLDFORTH
by charles esson on Fri 5th Oct 2001 21:17 UTC

coldforth.teegra.net/ Multitasking, TCP/IP stack, assembler, compiler, interpreter. NFS telnet HTTP server, routing. All in less than 512kbytes. Self recompiles. Source in HTML ( see above URL)

GazOS's REAL webpage
by Gareth Owen on Fri 5th Oct 2001 22:15 UTC

Kurt seems to have assumed control of the project, which I still own??? Hows that? http://gaztek.sourceforge.net Is the real website!! Also Kurt has made only tiny changes to it. Thanks Gareth Owen GazOS Author

missed two more
by coward on Fri 5th Oct 2001 22:29 UTC
Summary of links...
by FWMiller on Sat 6th Oct 2001 00:01 UTC

I have put together a web page that summarizes the links mentioned here today. The page is at <a href="http://www.cornfed.com/os.html">www.cornfed.com/os.html</a&g.... FM

Hello Eugenia, hello Dave ;) Remember me from #BeOS Eugenia? The website of Cefarix OS is gonna move and have a new look once I get the time. Keep up the work on this site Eugenia, and perhaps we can chat once again at #BeOS ;)

... and SkyOS too ...
by Moutaz Haq (Cefarix) on Sat 6th Oct 2001 01:11 UTC

And don't forget SkyOS (http://www.skyos.org/). One heck of an operating system!

AmigaOS
by Rodney MCDonell on Sat 6th Oct 2001 04:26 UTC

AmigaOS hasa nich market. Quite a large one compared to some of the other OS's on this list, and no doubt will grow a lot bigger soon. AROS was mentioned above. But what about MorphOS. Which was the attemp to bring AmigaOS to the PPC before Amiga Inc came on to the sceen and announced what their pans were. AtheOS? I dont think i saw it mentioned there. ummm... Yer, thats about it for me.

KallistiOS
by Dan Potter on Sat 6th Oct 2001 04:33 UTC

I'm surprised people are only posting about PC operating systems... <a href="http://dcdev.allusion.net/">KallistiOS is a quite active project providing an embedded OS for hobbyist Dreamcast console development, and it'll probably spread to other platforms as time allows =)

by Fx on Sat 6th Oct 2001 08:35 UTC

You only mentioned hobbyist toy OS. Have a look on current research systems, like: - L4Ka, www.l4ka.org - Sawmill Linux (multi-server OS on L4) - GNU Hurd (multi-server OS on Mach or L4) - Nemesis (QoS SASOS) - Exokernel - EROS (fast capability system, www.eros.org) to name a few. Have a look at the SOSP proceedings of the last years.

A word from Clicker Development team
by Sylvain Martin on Sat 6th Oct 2001 08:47 UTC

Now our OS support multiple address space (process) and a first user-level program has been run in version 0.7.10 Any help from any kind is welcome. Visit us on http://clicker.sourceforge.net

RE: Next version of OS/2
by Javar on Sat 6th Oct 2001 21:14 UTC

What all about ecomstation? Does it run natively on an x86? or it's running on top of OS/2?

RE: Next version of OS/2
by Anonymous on Sun 7th Oct 2001 01:49 UTC

AFAIK Ecomstation _is_ OS/2

Self/R (Merlin)
by Jecel Assumpcao Jr on Mon 8th Oct 2001 22:59 UTC

I am still working on Self/R (previously known as Merlin), a reflective operating system based on the pure object oriented language Self. Since I am doing other things at the same time, such as designing hardware and a new processor architecture, results are still a few months away. http://www.merlintec.com

eh.. does it need to be x86 related?
by MarcoF on Tue 9th Oct 2001 12:00 UTC

if not, try http://www.riscos.com .. still very active. Runs on RiscPCs (running (strong)ARM CPU).

and don't forget NextStep .. still used and going strong
by MarcoF on Tue 9th Oct 2001 12:03 UTC

IMO one of the most underrated OS-es .. shame it was scrapped by Apple