Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Sat 27th Sep 2008 01:16 UTC, submitted by J
SqueakNOS is an old idea that has gotten the kiss of life again. Squeak is a Smalltalk system built by Alan Kay and SqueakNOS is an attempt to remove the OS underneath Squeak. You can download a VMWare playable image from their sourceforge website or you can get an iso and more details about SqueakNOS from here.
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RE: Finally, but maybe a bad route ...
by sbergman27 on Sat 27th Sep 2008 13:08
in reply to "Finally, but maybe a bad route ..."
Member since:2005-07-24
RE: Finally, but maybe a bad route ...
by renox on Sat 27th Sep 2008 16:55
in reply to "Finally, but maybe a bad route ..."
Member since:2005-07-06
It just feels right to have Squeak running as an OS unto itself.
I bet that's the same reason JNode exist.
Each language foo fan seem to want the whole OS written in foo.
If the language has special security features such as capability, this could be useful otherwise these OS are just toys, which is fine.
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Member since:
2006-09-21
It just feels right to have Squeak running as an OS unto itself. After all, it is pretty much a self-contained development and education environment.
But I must really ask, is it wise to start from Scratch (sorry about the pun). Starting from scratch means that any piece of hardware that is supported for SqueakNOS will have to have a driver written for it. Some of that hardware can use fairly generic drivers, but it will never be optimised (which is fairly important for video in the case of Squeak). My past experience with alternative operating systems leads me to believe that some hardware will always be hit-and-miss (e.g. ethernet).
Maybe it would have been best to just set the danged thing on top of the Linux kernel, then writer squeakvm 'drivers' that interact with high level stuff (like the framebuffer). You get free hardware support that way, even for other CPU architectures. Sure you lose the glory of writing your own OS, but once you strip out everything but the Linux kernel, Squeak VM, image file, changes file, and maybe a few plug-ins; noone will recognise the thing as Linux anyhow.