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As I told you, you can use all your Linux applications with DROPS. This is the big feature making it usable. At the moment, DROPS is an educational system.

There are a few programs like a presenter and rt-sensors, which are used to show some advantages of our system. The main priority is to show the means of how to develop secure and real-time capable systems, so the user experience isn't the main directive. However, because everything is available in source code on our homepage, you are free to develop programs for your purposes. Actually, we are always searching for hackers to help us ;-).

For an introduction to newcomers we have a Demo-CD, which is bootable and shows some of the great things like the ability to run several L4Linux instances at the same time and more. You are free to download it from our website, boot it, and get a glimpse of what can be achieved with our system. You may get the image from the homepage.

The Demo-CD includes a tutorial browser, which will teach you in short what the current demo is about. But please have a sharper look at the browser, notice how the background widget changes when you move the scrollbar, see how text behind the navigation buttons gets magnified, see how text behind the navigation bar gets blurred and try to resize the window to see its layout policy. And now let me tell you that the whole browser consists of only 3500 lines of code. With all the infrastructure it uses, the whole system depends on only 60.000 lines of code. Do you see how that compares to the millions of lines of code of the Linux kernel and those millions of lines of XF86 code? All in all, you have a trusted computing base of only 60k lines of code.

A screenshot of nitpicker with X11 and DOpE in action.

The demo includes a setup with nitpicker, our new secure windowing system, which can be used as a backend to other windowing systems, which it then merges into one desktop. With this technique it is possible to have the real-time capable DOpE environment (or several instances of it) and (for example) X11 side by side. Because nitpicker has been designed with security in mind, those windowing systems cannot interfere with each other, and through a magic key you can always get into an overlay mode, that reveals which window has the focus and to which windowing system it belongs. There is no way for the client application to fake this information. You see that this defeats all attempts to install GUI-based malware like spyware, keylogger or trojan horses.

L4vfs in action.

To get a better idea about the L4vfs, which I mentioned before, you may try the L4vfs-setup on the CD. Because all the setups make use of the tutorial browser, you can easily get much information about it just by reading and enjoying the great graphics of the browser.

Qt-3 under DOpE.

Another demo included with the CD is our port of Qt-3 (embedded) for our platform, which allows us to easily port Qt applications. There even is a Qt-based game on the CD for you to play.

We even ported libsdl and included some SDL-based games on the CD. Just try it out and have fun.

Of course our system is still evolving at high rates. At the moment we are working at a new kernel specification, adding high security features like means to disable denial of service attacks. The new specification will then be called L4.Sec.

If you would like to help us improve the system, write legacy applications, learn about our system, you may consult our homepage and subscribe to the l4-hackers mailing list.

• Norman Feske
• Micheal Hohmuth
• Alexander Warg
• Michael Peter
• Thomas Schilling
• ... the whole OS-Group for creating this operating system