SkyOS 3.9.6a has been released. This version includes new drivers, faster ATA/ATAPI drivers, a new OpenGL
implementation, a new TCP/IP stack and many other new features and bug fixes. You can download the new version from the SkyOS website.
Can anyone tell me what network cards are supported? The “About” page lists: “3c509, AmdPCNet,…” The “…” suggests that other cards are supported, but I can’t find a definative list.
How does it perform as a desktop compared to say Linux/BSD, BeOS, Windows, etc? Whats boot up time like? What is it comparable to? It seems quite interesting, though seems to suffer from some really ugly fonts.
But boy oh boy, is that an ugly GUI or what, I mean, heck, the very least they should have copied the GUI style of Solaris CDE, then atleast it would look presentable and professional. What skyos looks like is a poorly put together hosh-posh of an ugly windows gui and in complete kernel.
1st, why go to all that effort creating a new kernel from scratch? if it was me, I would start with the FreeBSD kernel and work up from there. It would make life a heck of alot easier in terms of hardware support.
“1st, why go to all that effort creating a new kernel from scratch? if it was me, I would start with the FreeBSD kernel and work up from there. It would make life a heck of alot easier in terms of hardware support.”
The point was to build it from scratch. They want to create something different from the rest, and hopefully to avoid some of the most common pitfalls.
This is 99.9% a one man project, and I commend this guy on his efforts. It looks like he’s come a very long way in a short amount of time. Everybody try to remember that this is NEW, and DIFFERENT, and still under DEVELPOPMENT at some very basic levels. As it evovles it will only get better…..
They are currentley putting together a GUI team to redesign and rebuild the GUI in Opengl. And for a second thing. You said that you wouldn’t build a kernel from scratch, but I can tell you one thing and that is that it is much more fun to have done something completley by yourself. And I can agree with you that the FreeBSD kernel contains several things that the SkyKernel don’t but you always have to start somewhere don’t ya? And if you want to do it by yourself you have to do it from scratch.
I love this guy. Coding a new OS from the ground up and getting this far is rare and should be commended. Open GL support? Rock on!
But get away from the windows paradigms. In the little I can see, there is are “file, edit, view” menus, a registry editor, desktop icons lined up in the upper-left hand corner, etc, etc…
The icons can be changed with a new GUI, but a registry is the most unstable, error-prone part of the windows nightmare. Hopefully there will be some changes to this type of thing before the same errors from windows become similarly irrecoverable.
Besides that, good job overall! I can’t think of a better thing to put on a job application than a CD with your own OS.
The registry used in SkyOS is very different than the one used in windows.
First, the registry is just a directory of the global resource manager which handles nearly everything of SkyOS in a hash-indexed tree. (It’s like a filesystem in memory, but it doesn’t store files). This resource manager is used for example the keep track of open windows, files, sockets, registerd protocols, font cache, disk cache,….. Nearly everything is stored there. (So there are no other list, single-list, double linked list, …… implementations in the kernel).
Each directory in this list MAY be accesss by the user if he has enough privileges.
Additional, SkyOS supports an unlimited number of registries. First, there is the global one. Only the kernel and drivers may access this.
Each application can have a local registry, stored in the executable. So if you delete the application, all and “REALLY ALL” registry entries are deleted too.
But you are as negative as you can possibly be! This person and people should be commended, really highly commended. I’m not really a programmer, but I can only imagine the thrill of writing your own kernel and seeing it work! Way to go SkyOS!!
If they are going to rebuild the GUI using opengl won’t that require them to support hardware acc. on at least one card, or will software rendering be good enough? As soon as someone gets a 3d driver for it i’ll be tempted to build a machine and use it for learning ASM since I will have to in the near future.
Just burn all files from the ZIP file on a CD-ROM and select your CD drive as boot drive in the SkyOS setup. SkyOS automatically detect’s that it is running on a read only device and stops serializing.
Would it be possible to get blackdown to port java to this OS? You’d get a lot of apps in a hurry that way.
When sun releases the source for java later this year, maybe that would be a decent porting project. . . so you wouldn’t have to “lure” developers to skyos, you’d just be able to take advantage of all the java apps.
To my knowledge, SkyOS is (Mostly) Robert’s own personal work; it is therefore his exclusive right to decide if, when and in what way the source, and yes, even binaries, are distributed. You want the source? Talk to him. He may give it to you under NDA, he may give it to you under a BSD-type licence, or, and probably more likely, he may tell you to go and stick your head in a pig. It’s his stuff, and it’s his choice.
I am downloading the latest SkyOS right now, but am not sure if I will be able to boot it.
From the download page:
“Note: The partition must be a primary partition within the first 8GB of your harddisk”
I would like more info on this. Is that a characteristic of Grub? I’ve used Grub to boot a Linux distro on a logical partition 45GB into the drive…
On my primary computer SkyOS would have to be installed on a logical partition on the slave drive after 10GB. What are the boot options for this location?
Can BeOS Bootman boot SkyOS?
On the backup machine upstairs SkyOS could be installed on a primary partition within the first 5GB, but can SkyOS boot with the Solaris boot tool?
Note to the ungrateful: Robert creates an operating system on his own from scratch and lets you download and use it for free. And someone’s not happy because it’s “ugly,” someone else because they can’t have the source code, and somone else because there’s no stated target audience. Give Me A Break! Constructive critisism should be worded politely with helpful suggestions included, not just bitching.
I’ve been following SkyOS since the floppy version 3.3.4c and am very thankful for the opportunity to try something new.
I’m trying to make cd only SkyOS (without the need of floppy)
and i’ve wrote this into grub menu settings file:
title SkyOS LiveCD (CD0)
root (cd0)
kernel /kernel.sys /bootdevice=”/dev/cd0″
Will it work? I’m asking because the only floppy i had just died (i can’t make image from it for bootable cd) – i’ve managed to burn one cd with it, but made stupid mistake (root (cd0,0) which makes it useless (but it’s cdrw so i’ll jusr format it
BTW can someone make floppy image and put it somewhere on web? doesn’t have to be with special settings (hopefully mounting it on and changing menu settings file on will work
so cd is just a bootfloppy, and i still have to have partition with SkyOS.
i’ve managed to boot it, but on 2/4 screen i can’t do anything because it seems my mouse doesn’t work (PS/2 2 buttons + wheel which is a button also, by “A4Tech”), and i can’t navigate with keyboard
Alright first of all, this has to be said… Matthew Gardiner you are a complete moron. I can almost understand using the freebsd kernel but look at it this way. If everyone used the same kernel where would we be? I hate kiddies.
I have been trying to find a suitable OS for my Car MP3 player that will support 802.11b. Linux sofar has been the only choice as windows boots entirely too slowly.
Is there ANYCHANCE you’ll be working on, or have someone work on 802.11b (wireless ethernet) support? or implement a hack of the drivers alreadly available? I have a Linksys WUSB11 rev 2.6 and the linux driver is more than a little difficult to install for me.
I’m realy not interested in your source code–however, is there anychance you’re goign to release ALL of your API calls, so that 3rd parties can develop software for your system?
I can understand form that point of view, my main case is more or less the idea that if he started off with a FreeBSD 5.0 base, filled in the holes like improving the threading and SMP, then built a lean-mean OpenGL based GUI ontop, it would be one mean little operating system with hardware compatibility almost equaling linux.
At least the source code for the HTML engine of SkyKruzer should be available, since it is a derived work of KHTML.
Not all the app, of course, but at least part of it.
Since I have no interest in this, can someone who downloaded it, check if the source is there? If it’s not, it should include a written offer to get it.
You can boot from CD, as You boot from floppy – You still have to have SkyOS on hd partition somewhere. At least with GRUB (i’ve foun by google, on some linux maillist that GRUB can’t use cd, but there is a patch for that already and it will be implemented with next release. not sure if it’s true, but patch xists . hm.. maybe i’ll try other boot manager
i’ve made it wrong to write “root (cd0)” because i thought it will work BUT i can edit that line in grub, and when i change it to fd0 it “can’t find a file”.
I’ve read SkyOS instructions and if i understand it correctly it says You can boot from cd but WITH bootfloppy, which is not what i’m trying to do
In your previous post I thought you were saying you could not run the OS off of a CD, I though you were indicating that you had to have it on a partition on your harddrive.
I am going to try and make a boot CD (no floppy needed) on Thursday. If I get it to work I’ll post the info.
Can anyone tell me what network cards are supported? The “About” page lists: “3c509, AmdPCNet,…” The “…” suggests that other cards are supported, but I can’t find a definative list.
Adam
How does it perform as a desktop compared to say Linux/BSD, BeOS, Windows, etc? Whats boot up time like? What is it comparable to? It seems quite interesting, though seems to suffer from some really ugly fonts.
~Christopher
But boy oh boy, is that an ugly GUI or what, I mean, heck, the very least they should have copied the GUI style of Solaris CDE, then atleast it would look presentable and professional. What skyos looks like is a poorly put together hosh-posh of an ugly windows gui and in complete kernel.
1st, why go to all that effort creating a new kernel from scratch? if it was me, I would start with the FreeBSD kernel and work up from there. It would make life a heck of alot easier in terms of hardware support.
“1st, why go to all that effort creating a new kernel from scratch? if it was me, I would start with the FreeBSD kernel and work up from there. It would make life a heck of alot easier in terms of hardware support.”
The point was to build it from scratch. They want to create something different from the rest, and hopefully to avoid some of the most common pitfalls.
This is 99.9% a one man project, and I commend this guy on his efforts. It looks like he’s come a very long way in a short amount of time. Everybody try to remember that this is NEW, and DIFFERENT, and still under DEVELPOPMENT at some very basic levels. As it evovles it will only get better…..
Good luck sky’rs!
They are currentley putting together a GUI team to redesign and rebuild the GUI in Opengl. And for a second thing. You said that you wouldn’t build a kernel from scratch, but I can tell you one thing and that is that it is much more fun to have done something completley by yourself. And I can agree with you that the FreeBSD kernel contains several things that the SkyKernel don’t but you always have to start somewhere don’t ya? And if you want to do it by yourself you have to do it from scratch.
I love this guy. Coding a new OS from the ground up and getting this far is rare and should be commended. Open GL support? Rock on!
But get away from the windows paradigms. In the little I can see, there is are “file, edit, view” menus, a registry editor, desktop icons lined up in the upper-left hand corner, etc, etc…
The icons can be changed with a new GUI, but a registry is the most unstable, error-prone part of the windows nightmare. Hopefully there will be some changes to this type of thing before the same errors from windows become similarly irrecoverable.
Besides that, good job overall! I can’t think of a better thing to put on a job application than a CD with your own OS.
The registry used in SkyOS is very different than the one used in windows.
First, the registry is just a directory of the global resource manager which handles nearly everything of SkyOS in a hash-indexed tree. (It’s like a filesystem in memory, but it doesn’t store files). This resource manager is used for example the keep track of open windows, files, sockets, registerd protocols, font cache, disk cache,….. Nearly everything is stored there. (So there are no other list, single-list, double linked list, …… implementations in the kernel).
Each directory in this list MAY be accesss by the user if he has enough privileges.
Additional, SkyOS supports an unlimited number of registries. First, there is the global one. Only the kernel and drivers may access this.
Each application can have a local registry, stored in the executable. So if you delete the application, all and “REALLY ALL” registry entries are deleted too.
Thanks for the positiv feedback.
Robert S, what is boot up time like, on a Celeron 333a? How about on a Duron 1GHz? or a P4 2.53GHz?
thanks,
Good luck!
Hmm, boot time. Depends.
The part which takes the longest time is the ATA/ATAPI identification and caching of FAT.
Let’s take a system with 2 harddisks (FAT):
Celeron 333: ~10sec
Duron 1Ghz: ~8sec
P4 2.53: 7 seconds. (exactly 7095 msec. Just measured it).
The time is measured from GRUB until your are in the desktop with applications and all drivers loaded.
But you are as negative as you can possibly be! This person and people should be commended, really highly commended. I’m not really a programmer, but I can only imagine the thrill of writing your own kernel and seeing it work! Way to go SkyOS!!
If they are going to rebuild the GUI using opengl won’t that require them to support hardware acc. on at least one card, or will software rendering be good enough? As soon as someone gets a 3d driver for it i’ll be tempted to build a machine and use it for learning ASM since I will have to in the near future.
Congrats!
How about GUI responsivness/multithreading? How does it compare to BeOS, RedHat and Windows?
Will there be ISO image for download (and maybe “livecd” way – so i don’t have to install it to try
?
I have to say that this looks incredible for the work of (mostly) one person. Kudos Robert Szeleney. You have done a fine job here!
Just burn all files from the ZIP file on a CD-ROM and select your CD drive as boot drive in the SkyOS setup. SkyOS automatically detect’s that it is running on a read only device and stops serializing.
Would it be possible to get blackdown to port java to this OS? You’d get a lot of apps in a hurry that way.
When sun releases the source for java later this year, maybe that would be a decent porting project. . . so you wouldn’t have to “lure” developers to skyos, you’d just be able to take advantage of all the java apps.
Despite all this work, for whom is this project meant? No source release, ever.
SkyOS has a port of a JavaVM.
So SkyOS can run Java applications already, but there is no port for e.g. Swing or AWT.
Despite all this work, for whom is this project meant? No source release, ever.
That leads me to believe that it isn’t meant for lamers who want source for everything.
Lamer? Take the beam out of your own eye.
I mean this project seems to have no altruistic tendancies that I’m able to see. If this is not so, please say why.
To my knowledge, SkyOS is (Mostly) Robert’s own personal work; it is therefore his exclusive right to decide if, when and in what way the source, and yes, even binaries, are distributed. You want the source? Talk to him. He may give it to you under NDA, he may give it to you under a BSD-type licence, or, and probably more likely, he may tell you to go and stick your head in a pig. It’s his stuff, and it’s his choice.
“I mean this project seems to have no altruistic tendancies that I’m able to see. If this is not so, please say why.”
So what’s wrong with that.
If it has to be explained why, the listener could not possibly understand. Such times are these…
I am downloading the latest SkyOS right now, but am not sure if I will be able to boot it.
From the download page:
“Note: The partition must be a primary partition within the first 8GB of your harddisk”
I would like more info on this. Is that a characteristic of Grub? I’ve used Grub to boot a Linux distro on a logical partition 45GB into the drive…
On my primary computer SkyOS would have to be installed on a logical partition on the slave drive after 10GB. What are the boot options for this location?
Can BeOS Bootman boot SkyOS?
On the backup machine upstairs SkyOS could be installed on a primary partition within the first 5GB, but can SkyOS boot with the Solaris boot tool?
Note to the ungrateful: Robert creates an operating system on his own from scratch and lets you download and use it for free. And someone’s not happy because it’s “ugly,” someone else because they can’t have the source code, and somone else because there’s no stated target audience. Give Me A Break! Constructive critisism should be worded politely with helpful suggestions included, not just bitching.
I’ve been following SkyOS since the floppy version 3.3.4c and am very thankful for the opportunity to try something new.
Thanks Robert!
-Bob
1st: THX for answer Robert
I’m trying to make cd only SkyOS (without the need of floppy)
and i’ve wrote this into grub menu settings file:
title SkyOS LiveCD (CD0)
root (cd0)
kernel /kernel.sys /bootdevice=”/dev/cd0″
Will it work? I’m asking because the only floppy i had just died (i can’t make image from it for bootable cd) – i’ve managed to burn one cd with it, but made stupid mistake (root (cd0,0) which makes it useless (but it’s cdrw so i’ll jusr format it
BTW can someone make floppy image and put it somewhere on web? doesn’t have to be with special settings (hopefully mounting it on and changing menu settings file on will work
>> BTW can someone make floppy image and put it somewhere on web?
Look in the sky396a.zip file under:
systemootimgfloppygrub
there you will find:
floppy.img
ups… sorry.
should be:
system/bootimg/floppy/grub
hope this works now…
heh, i’m stupid ;] THX
i changed root to cd0 but grub can’t handle that
so cd is just a bootfloppy, and i still have to have partition with SkyOS.
i’ve managed to boot it, but on 2/4 screen i can’t do anything because it seems my mouse doesn’t work (PS/2 2 buttons + wheel which is a button also, by “A4Tech”), and i can’t navigate with keyboard
Alright first of all, this has to be said… Matthew Gardiner you are a complete moron. I can almost understand using the freebsd kernel but look at it this way. If everyone used the same kernel where would we be? I hate kiddies.
I wonder if Robert is ever going to successfully fix these damn problems with the fat filesystem.
Same problem as I was having with the last 3.9.5 release: It can see and mount my fat partition that has SkyOS, but it can’t load setup.app
Robert S.
I have been trying to find a suitable OS for my Car MP3 player that will support 802.11b. Linux sofar has been the only choice as windows boots entirely too slowly.
Is there ANYCHANCE you’ll be working on, or have someone work on 802.11b (wireless ethernet) support? or implement a hack of the drivers alreadly available? I have a Linksys WUSB11 rev 2.6 and the linux driver is more than a little difficult to install for me.
I’m realy not interested in your source code–however, is there anychance you’re goign to release ALL of your API calls, so that 3rd parties can develop software for your system?
I can understand form that point of view, my main case is more or less the idea that if he started off with a FreeBSD 5.0 base, filled in the holes like improving the threading and SMP, then built a lean-mean OpenGL based GUI ontop, it would be one mean little operating system with hardware compatibility almost equaling linux.
Why not start a Mozilla port?
Its so inspiring to see such hard work.
Many Congratulations. SkyOS looks brilliant.
I have the same problems and already made a bug report on SkyOS Homepage
I hope that Robert get that fixed soon
(I lost the 3rd CD now 😉 grr )
At least the source code for the HTML engine of SkyKruzer should be available, since it is a derived work of KHTML.
Not all the app, of course, but at least part of it.
Since I have no interest in this, can someone who downloaded it, check if the source is there? If it’s not, it should include a written offer to get it.
Please those trying to boot SkyOS on CD: give us the results so we can try 😉
You can boot from CD, as You boot from floppy – You still have to have SkyOS on hd partition somewhere. At least with GRUB (i’ve foun by google, on some linux maillist that GRUB can’t use cd, but there is a patch for that already and it will be implemented with next release. not sure if it’s true, but patch xists
. hm.. maybe i’ll try other boot manager 
Good work, Robert, keep it up.
Ignore the dissenters on here, you’re doing a spectacular job and have one of the leading hobby os’s.
I hopefully will get round to trying it sound enough!
Daryl.
Are you sure. An extract from the skyos website follows (http://skyos.org/downloads/ins396.php -> bullet 5.):
If you want, you can create a CDROM containing everything from the ZIP file.
This CD-ROM can be booted from the SkyOS installation program when booting with the bootdisk.
Boot kernel from floppydisk:
title SkyOS Floppy kernel. Root on CD-ROM
root (fd0)
kernel /kernel.sys /bootdevice=”/dev/cd0″
Combine that with Robert’s comments about the OS auto detecting not to serialize and I think it becomes clear you can run the OS of the CD.
I’m sure. CD works ok, it boots to grub.
i’ve made it wrong to write “root (cd0)” because i thought it will work BUT i can edit that line in grub, and when i change it to fd0 it “can’t find a file”.
I’ve read SkyOS instructions and if i understand it correctly it says You can boot from cd but WITH bootfloppy, which is not what i’m trying to do
In your previous post I thought you were saying you could not run the OS off of a CD, I though you were indicating that you had to have it on a partition on your harddrive.
I am going to try and make a boot CD (no floppy needed) on Thursday. If I get it to work I’ll post the info.
Let me know if you you get it to work.