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I think that sums up visopsys for now. Wish them all the best for the future though.

You know, the kind of people who think, "I'm bored; I think I'll write an operating system." I would love to be able to have that kind of talent. Regardless of how popular such an OS ever becomes, I still think it's an absolutely amazing accomplishment.

Meanwhile, I am almost finished coding my revolutionary new program that prints "Hello World!" to screen and then exits. I just have to debug it and then I'll be done: look for the release on Freshmeat soon! :-P

In development since 1997, nearly seven years later, only a 0.4 release?

People tend to have real jobs you know. My husband's OS, is still on 0.1 for 3.5 years now for example (he hasn't touched it since he got another job, 3 years ago).

Very cool this, it's really good to so many "really" alterative OSs out there (SkyOS, Syllable, Visopsys ...). I wish this project all the best

Definately agree; great to hear of another unique OS.
Also, Eugenia, you have made me curious, how advanced is your husband's OS? Does it have goals, or was it just intended as an exercise in programming?

It was a hobby of his (and it was already graphical at that point). He doesn't have the time to deal with it anymore though.

on Bochs?

and this is a spirit of OSNews

"I just have to debug it and then I'll be done: look for the release on Freshmeat soon! :-P"

Why not turn it into an OS?
Have a look here...
http://www.mega-tokyo.com/osfaq2/index.php/BareBones

Just put your code into the bit marked 'kernel.c'. You may need to write your own printf and a few other trivial little bits and pieces.

do you have some screenshots of it?

No. It doesn't run on VMWare, and there is no other way to get shots of it (except with a real camera onto the monitor).

Cool link! But I'm already in trouble with my new OS at the kernel (from the link):

kernel.c

This is not exactly your average int main(). Most noteably, you do not have any library stuff available. As soon as you write so much as #include <, you have probably made the first mistake. Welcome to kernel land.

No stdio.h??? Well, there goes my using printf()!!! ;-)

I'm curious about that... If i was to make my own OS it would never have a monolithic kernel... They're boring :-P exo-kernels and such are much more interesting..

No, monolithic kernels aren't boring, and the choice whether to make it a monolithic or micro kernel design - is what the name suggests: a design choice.

My own kernel is a micro kernel by the way.

ah - and why someone calls visopsys ugly? I'm testing it at each release (and do the grim nitpicking) and I don't find it's ugly. Just think about it in this way: One programmer and designer canna do each and all at one time. Such kind of magic requires time and patience. And after all, we OS developers have other work to do to gain our life, knowya?

It was a hobby of his (and it was already graphical at that point). He doesn't have the time to deal with it anymore though.

Well, of course not. He has a wife now.

Bwahahahaha!!!
Andy

> In development since 1997, nearly seven years later, only a 0.4 release?

OS development is not easy. There's a lot of research, testing, and debugging that has to be done for any useable OS. Also consider that it is the work of one person, so the total amount of time that can be invested is limited. Personally I think he's doing a great job and I wish him luck as he continues to develop it.

This is what OSNews does best! Downloading right now...

I've downloaded and installed most of the older versions as they were released and I can't wait to see what's next for Visopsys. Thanks to Andy McLaughlin for allowing free use of his software. Very best wishes to him and his OS.

Thanks!
-Bob

hmmm.... The bootable CD doesn't. On main computer the boot freezes at the blue screen. On backup machine Visopsys goes through blue screen "Booting" graphic, then stops at black screen with error message regarding unrecognized filesystem.

Downloaded ISO zip file, un-compressed, and burned to CD using Adaptec Easy CD Creator.

Burned .img file to floppy, and that works just fine. Version 0.41 looks good. Sharp appearance, stable apps, and easy to use.

Thanks again. (Any ideas on the ISO problem?)
-Bob

Hi Bob, would have emailed directly but there's no address in your post;

Thanks so much for trying this out! Sorry the ISO didn't work for you... Could you post/email information about your hardware configuration (BIOS type, CDROM model, IDE configuration such as master/slave relationships, etc)? It works on all the machines/emulators I have access to, so I'd like to try and reproduce this somehow.

Andy

I sent you an e-mail tonight. For the other readers, here is the info:

First Computer:
Dell XPS T800r; 800 mhz PIII, 384MB RAM, SoundBlasterValue sound card, Nvidia GeForce440MX AGP graphic card
On this machine the CD begins to boot, but completely freezes at the first blue page with the OS info text at top.

Backup Computer:
home-made, Intel D875PBZLK motherboard, 256MB DDR RAM, GeForce256 32MB graphic card, SoundBlaster 16, P4 2.26 Ghz 533 fsb
On this second machine, the computer boots to the blue screen, goes through the "booting" graphic, and ends at a black page with these error messages:

Error:kernelFilesystem.c:installDriver(150)
The system was not able to determine the type of this filesystem
Error:kernelInitialize.c:kernelInitialize(199)
Mounting root filesystem failed.
Error:kernelMain.c:kernelMain(73)
Initialization failed. Press any key (or the "reset" button) to reboot.
Both of these computers succesfully boot from their CD drives, including OS installations and live CD distros. The first computer successfully booted from the Visopsys floppy disks; the backup computer has no floppy drive. Both computers have name-brand modern CD drives.

I hope this info is helpful to you. Hopefully I'm not the only one having trouble with these discs...

Best Wishes,
Bob