NewOS now features automatically created bootable images on its web site. Users who would like to try out the latest version of the NewOS kernel can easily rawrite/dd it on a floppy disk and boot with it. NewOS is the preffered kernel for OpenBeOS, but OpenBeOS uses a modified older version of NewOS.
Disk Images Now Available for NewOS
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Its nice to see that the new VM is finished. Will the OpenBeOS people be backporting the new features to their version?
PS> Great website! Nice, simple, and good-looking. More websites should be like that
Aren’t they patching with Travis (is that his name?)’s updates?
Does NewOS differentiate itself from other free operating systems in a meaningful way? If so, how?
I don’t think OBOS is going to use the NewOS’s updates. OBOS and NewOS have the different goals/directions. OBOS forked NewOS kernel source way back and they are working independent from Travis. That’s what I know.
That’s right. Travis Geiselbrecht is his name.
And back on the topic. It is nice to see that NewOS is progressing.
“Does NewOS differentiate itself from other free operating systems in a meaningful way? If so, how?”
No, it’s simply a hobby OS.
There is a crossover of features/bugs moving from OBOS to NewOS, as well as from NewOS to OBOS. Where it makes sense to reuse a component, it is reused. If NewOS does something radically different, then OBOS does it’s own thing – OBOS need to be BeOS compatible, after all.
Nice to see there’s still a few fans out there.
The Pessimist is largely right, it’s mostly a hobby os that I and a few others hack on to have fun. The general direction the project is taking is to implement a modern, modular, portable, stable kernel + user space upon which a variety of systems can be built. Of course, it’s big claim to fame thus far is the connection with the OpenBeOS project.
Development was pretty slow last year, as I’ve been pretty busy at work. However a few new projects have been started/completed in the last few months:
-implemented a pcnet32 driver (can network to/from in vmware)
-started workn on a usb stack. OHCI is working, bus enumeration in the works.
-ported to PPC32. It now can boot on an ibook, though no mac specific drivers are written, so you can’t really interact with it. Next task is to get it working fully on a Pegasos board.
-general posixy stuff: signals, process groups, better tty support
-more work finishing off the back end of the VM.
-real FAT driver started, pending some VM/fs cache work.
-RTC support
Anyway, if anyone’s interested in poking at the code and even contributing, we’re totally open to it. Stop by #newos on irc.freenode.net. You should be able to catch a few of us around.
Travis
I’m glad to see the project isn’t dead, it’d almost been a year since your last update.
What about the GUI?
How is it going?
There is litle information on the NewOS page.
Awww nuts, I downloaded it and rawrote it to a floppy. Rebooted the machine to boot from floppy but much to my displeasure it kept going into an infinite reboot loop
I was really hoping to try this out too.
Same here, for several images. So I went back to the page and noticed that these floppy images are generated automatically whenever someone commits new changes to the source server. So they’re probably not tested and I would be surprised if every single one worked straight out of the automatic process.
Do you think that the authors would like to know about these failures? If they had an official, fixed-version, booting floppy disk image, then I would say that they would probably like feedback… but on automatic ones?
Hmm, bummer they aren’t booting for you guys. BuckRogers is right, they are just built from the tip of the source tree and may or may not work on all hardware. One of the reasons it’s been so long since I put up any disk images is before I was being super paranoid about it and testing the heck out of every image that went up and in general spending a lot of time on it. I finally decided the other day to just have it automatically build em, because I obviously wasn’t getting around to manually hand building an image (last one was 7/2002).
As far as reporting failures in general it’s useful to know that it’s not working on some boxes out there. However, usually the reporter isn’t prepared to give me as much info as I’d *really* like. (full specs on the machine, debug output from com1/115200/n/8/1/no flow). If you can get me the log of com1, that’d be awesome!
Have fun!
Travis
Downloaded the images a bit ago, love it. I’ve followed this project for years now, glad to see it hasn’t turned into another Tunes!
Hi geist, I wanted to ask in which areas of newos there’s work to do.
Another question is wether the direction is a Operating System or just a working kernel.
I’d love to have an i/powerbook with (open)BeOS that’d be really great. Then it’s goodbye x86 for me.
Paul