Submitted by BlueIllusionOS 0.08 has been released (get it from the download page). The author wrote to us: “It sports a GUI with window composing capability & support for translucent windows, TCP/IP Stack, ext2 FS and ISO 9660 FS, various applications, as well as a program to play mpg1 movies (mpgplay – a port of mpg2player). All the settings in this OS are done via xml files.” The about page tells us a little more about the goals and kernel: “BlueIllusion is a micro kernel based operating system, which operates on the Intel x86 architecture. It uses some features like paging to some excess to get work done. Other things like TSS-based hardware task switching aren’t used. It will – in the future – have a graphical user environment, which I intend to be analogous to the MacOS 9 GUI, with a menu bar that appears when moving the mouse to the upper border of the screen – as well as support for a right-click-popup menu under the mouse at needs.”
If there’s ever an operating system that sorely needs the help of a graphic designer (and FreeType!), this would be it
Seriously, though, it’s clearly early days, but it’ll be interesting how this one pans out.
What a nice and vibrant desktop…
http://www.distantvoices.org/bilder/bi008_GUI_movie.png
…I’m actually thinking about switching from Ubuntu to BlueIllusion.
Theoretically, if the GUI’s XML-based, it should be fairly easy to modify into a less eye-straining theme. If the location and functionality of the GUI can also be modded, you could also make it look like any OS you wanted, or just borrow elements you like from different OSs.
(Of course, an OS with a modifiable GUI would be tech support’s nightmare, but a regular user’s dream…)
This is a very interesting project and I’m currently downloading the ISO for some testing. Has anybody tried this OS yet? What where your impressions if you did?
I’ll hopefully have a first impression in a few hours, gonna try and post some thoughts here.
Great work!
Your OS has made great progress recently, keep up the good work!
Please don’t use a 270KB BMP as a thumbnail on your home page. You could trim that down to a 20KB JPEG easy.
It always worries me whenever I see pictures loading bottom-up. What on earth possess people to upload BMPs? MSPaint has supported saving as JPG and PNG ever since Windows ME
If you view operating systems as gliders; then it leaves me wondering what is the thermal that will prevent this project landing quietly in the back of beyond, never to be heard of again.
I wish them well and hope it takes off in a big way but I am not sure that the clarity of aspiration is there.
Not everything has to be a success. Mostly, people just fly gliders for the sake of it.
At least he is doing something more productive with his time than writing whining comments no-one cares about on a forum.
~Nevermind~
Edited 2007-08-05 16:03
Have amended this. Now its a 34 k png image. Should load way nicer.
@kroc: you are ofcourse right. The screenshot page althou may remain as it is for the next time. I lack the ressources (time especially) to convert all the big stuff to *.jpg or *.png – but this is on the todo list.btw, for your info, I’m working with linux.
Some addons – I should mention this on my web too:
The OS boots fine in vmware. There may be some trouble (big delays) if a hard drive is present.
As for the boot device: I’ve implemented a rather naive probing mechanism, which tests the cdrom drives for something mount-able.
If you assign the virtual machine 256 mb of ram, this should make the OS quite happy. It shouldn’t be that memory hungry (128 mb shall be enough, honestly)
It also probes for a proper graphics mode.
If you try to start the OS in qemu (which supports up to 16 bpp in 1024*768) it finds the proper mode to operate with – the 16 bpp.
If booted up properly – and the login window appears: select any user and click “login” to proceed.
In the shell, you may try out “help” for a rough overview of available commands. 🙂
stay safe
ps:ameasures, either talk plain or leave it at all. Envy is a bitch, are you feeling her stitch?
I have no hankering for decoding dodgy and inept placed metaphors. Thank you but so very much!
pps: To set things straight: I’m the one and only developer for BlueIllusionOS. I’m attending a university of applied science and earn my living on my own, so no wonder that it seems as if I don’t care much about the looks of the web-site. 😉
Edited 2007-08-05 16:32
Just out of curiosity, what made you decide to go in this direction? Why not something more exotic, not that a microkernel isn’t exotic.
Is this based on anything, like L4, Mach, or Minix?
What is the history of this and what made you decide to code you’re own os?
What is the ultimate goal of your os?
Also, I like you web site. It’s not pretty, but it has actual information and is easy to navigate which is what counts.
Best of luck!
@flatland_spider:
sorry for not responding earlier. 😉
<quote>
Just out of curiosity, what made you decide to go in this direction? Why not something more exotic, not that a microkernel isn’t exotic.
</quote>
I’ve decided to go in the micro kernel direction because I’ve found micro kernels to be easier to understand and far cleaner in terms of design and implementation.
As for exotic: I haven’t craved for exotic stuff, just for stuff I can do – and which is engaging the brain. OS Deving for sure is.
<quote>
Is this based on anything, like L4, Mach, or Minix?
</quote>
There may be some similarities to Minix in the micro kernel for I’ve used Minix as a reference (the “geez, how’s that done … gonna have a look and think it over” way).
<quote>
What is the history of this and what made you decide to code you’re own os?
</quote>
Oh, history … This has a fine story of it’s own which starts back in November 2000 (that time, the osdev virus hit me, but I’ve still had a lot to learn). That time I’ve attended a school in the evening to learn about computers and programming. This has earned me my nowadays job. In that school they’ve also brought a course about operating systems – which has been about semaphors, schedulers critical sections and so on … but this all has been quite unsatisfying so I’ve started to fetch knowledge on my own – which led to a bootloader and from the bootloader to the first attempts of task switching (with hard ware task switching in the beginning).
<quote>
What is the ultimate goal of your os?
</quote>
To be stable and useable – maybe I’ll do it the visopsys way and specialize on a certain task to attract users to it, and from that on build up to render it to a more complete os.I don’t have neither time/ressources nor hankering to overthrow or outsmart Linux/Windows for I like the both of them.
Besides, thanks for your comment on my website. I admit, I like it straight and clean.
@hybrid:
It uses iso9660 to load stuff from cd and ext2 for hard disk or floppy drive. I can easily add FAT support too, this ain’t that difficult.
Edited 2007-08-07 06:43
No problem. Thanks for taking some time to answer some questions.
Hopefully this feature on OS News will get you some more help. I think your on a very good track with the OS’s design, especially having the entire configuration XML based. I like the fact that your OS is GUI based and well integrated.
good to see developers having the balls to go new ways. kudos to DistantVoices for his work, keep it up!
Agreed. It’s nice something that isn’t a monokernel. The only operating system I found was microkernel and free was Minix.
I wish I had the talent to create anything even remotely similar to this.. I’ve always wanted to learn how to create an OS of my own, but I simply have no idea where to start and I don’t know anything about multi-tasking or such.. :/
I didn’t let not knowing what I was doing stop me. Now, I’ll be frank in that I’m not near as far along as this OS is, but I’m much further than when I started.
If you seriously want to start, and don’t mind forcefeeding yourself a skill or two along the way, why not try a tutorial? Here’s where I was going when I first started:
http://www.osdever.net/
Many of their tutorials are well-made, even though their website might not look it. Additionally, a particularly good tutorial is available for offline viewing here:
http://www.osdever.net/bkerndev/bkerndev.zip
Nice! By a quick look that seems just perfect! I don’t mind at all having to learn new skills, after all, that’s why I would want to try developing an OS of my own
So, thank you very much, and good luck with your own one!
Good link. Thank you
That’s nice work, dude. I’m always dubious about uKernels since they invariably suck performancewise, but at least you have a clean design and nice source.
Keep it up!
This is running on physical hardware, rather than virtual hardware. Unfortunately, it stops booting after:
vm86 task loaded …
fssrv: init….. done
guisrv: init … done
I checked the website for any sort of bug reporting utility or user forums but didn’t come across anything along those lines.
Adam
@adamk: do you mind mentioning the configuration of the hardware you’ve tested it on?
I remember having trouble with certain cdrom drives – gonna clear out the bugs as time permits. 😉
as for bug reporting: I’m gonna include a service to fease easy mail sending for bug reports. That’s a good idea.
It’s a dual core xeon (3.2 Ghz) with 2 gigs of RAM, with a radeon x850. Interestingly, I was able to hit enter and cause the console output to scroll after it stopped booting. When I switched video cards to a nvidia GF7900, though, I was unable to scroll the console output by hitting enter. It looked completely locked up.
dmesg in linux shows the cdrom drive ass a TSSTcorp TS-H192C cdrom drive.
I’m not sure if there’s a way to turn on serial debugging, but I do have a null modem cable running to another box, so I can grab all the console output if it’s possible to redirect it to a serial port.
I also tried in vmware workstation 6.0 but ran into a separate issue. The OS boots up, but the mouse is completely unusable. As I move the mouse around, the pointer goes wild in the virtual machine.
Adam
Edited 2007-08-07 12:16
nice, boots quickly in qemu, but the mouse didn’t work for me.
Sweet…a new microkernel based OS…
A word of advice to this gentleman or any who choose to tread on new ground: Ignore anyone who whines about the microkernels/performance line of thought… nowadays hardware can handle it, and if not, screw the hardware people…
You have an itch to code…scratch it with whatever backscratcher you want…and enjoy the scratching!
I am curious about what filesystem it will be using or compatible with…or will/does it use its own….
Edited 2007-08-06 17:07