Visopsys 0.6 introduces a host of new functionality including a cleaned up desktop with icons for browsing the computer, file systems, and administrative tasks, FAT defragmenting, ELF dynamic linking, a built in chain-boot loader and simple MBR formatting, file browsing widgets and dialogs, Windows .ico icon file support, a generic file viewing program, Italian keyboard support, new icons and a new splash screen.
Visopsys 0.6 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I still think this OS lacks a killer feature, but at least it’s moving forward rather rapidly. Amazingly so for a 1-man show. This guy should probably be hired by someone
I don’t think that any hobby activity need to have a “killer feature”. This OS is never going to become commercial or used seriously, it’s a hobby/research. It doesn’t need to “wow” anyone.
“killer feature”? This guy is having fun learning. I agree with Eugenia completely. OS news is about all operating systems, even the hobby ones. This is very well done hobby OS.
Well to tell the truth this ‘hobby’ OS can indeed become my best recovery suite. Just pop in the CD and take on the computer.
Maybe true, but I mean gosh what large strides. Take a look:
http://www.visopsys.org/download/changelog.html
A new release by one man is incredible, and all happen to be somewhat relevent or productive in some way or another for somebody. Man, even his sub releases (5.8 for example) make great changes. Like you said, he probably should be hired by someone for something. Or maybe he’ll get lucky and his OS will find a true place for everyone. I mean, maybe it won’t, but look at all the other OS’es who are giving there shot at it. All pose something neat, and it may come in real handy one day.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=515&slide=4…
Thanks for that! I have a whole new set of screenshots (though these are pretty fine) that I’ll post up in the next day or two, plus I hope to submit a proper write-up about the new features on OSNews.
Thanks to everybody for all their support (particularly Thomas, Jonas, and Davide — you know who you are).
I’m sure everyone knows writing an OS from scratch is a pretty daunting task and it’s great to read all the encouraging comments (and criticisms too).
Cheers everyone, hope you like it.
Andy (visopsys guy).
Can somebody at FreeBSD contact him?
Network support would rock.
Hah! Of course. There are some foundations in 0.6 (DHCP, UDP, ICMP bits) but not enough hardware support and it’s not ready to be featured yet, so it’s disabled by default for now. Hopefully there’ll be at least telnet and FTP clients in the next couple of releases, at least for proof-of-concept sake.
Don’t get me started on networking RFCs. What a way to spend a weekend.
(Symantec pays me to work on Veritas Volume Manager during the week — Linux paritioning and root disk encapsulation, that’s me).
Andy
Hi Andy,
First of all, congratulations, this is great work! I have a lot of respect for operating system developers, it really is a whole different ballgame than any other kind of programming.
I don’t know if you’ve already considered this idea, but if you want to save time on getting networking code into Visopsys, you could always steal, err, I mean borrow some code from the BSDs. Very borrower friendly license and excellent time-tested code. You could get workable FTP and telnet very quickly. That’s just an idea.
Anyway, keep up the great work!
Thanks very much. Certainly there are plenty of good examples of (free) code to be borrowed out there, but then again the nature of the OS programmer is (sensibly or not) to want to code everything from scratch.
But then again, there’s a balance to be struck between “I don’t want to borrow any code” and “this would be really useful to users”. There’s a related project called “Partition Logic” (http://partitionlogic.org.uk) which is just a different configuration of Visopsys, meant to feature the Disk Mananger partitioning tool; people are clamouring for NTFS resizing support and in the end it probably makes sense to just port the Linux ntfsprogs code until I can get my head around NTFS. That porting attempt is underway at the moment.
Networking, on the other hand, I’m sure my initial attempt will be buggy and insecure but I at least want to give it a try!
Andy
Nice job, it’s looking very nice.
Plan 9 just gained Vesa support, making it usable on a
lot of other hardware/gfx cards.
Great seeing it stil beeing developed.
When I try to boot from qemu “qemu -cdrom visopsys-0.6.iso”, a blue screen appear, and it hang in this stage.
I have been following siopsys for about 2.5 years and it just amazes me. I love seeing what this man can do. I dont care that it doesnt have all the features. It is just awsome with the fact that he actualy can and does do these things. I follow this stuff as a hobby. I dont think anyone expects visopsys to be the 5th major os (MS, Mac, Linux, and unix). However it is great that there are people out there who are still intereseted in os development. Thats just great. It has had a partion on my heard drive now for a year and a half. Though only a 500mb partition its still there. Then again i try to have a space for every os i can find.
Keep up the great work and hopefully one day all that knowlege and skill you have gained will come in use and land you a killer career.
Looks nice, especially for one man to code… Wow. I haven’t tried it (yet), but surely looks nice to me. Keep it up,
— jaboua
It’s nice for OS Students in universities to play with hobby OSes like yours, Andy.. thanks.