There’s been a few new releases since the last time we talked about MenuetOS, back in March of this year when version 1.50.00 was released, so I figured it was time to take a look at what the project’s been up to. And just in case you don’t remember – MenuetOS is 64 bit operating system written in assembly that fits on a single 1.44 MB floppy disk. There’s also a 32 bit version that’s no longer being developed – I think.
Weirdly enough, the 1.50.00 released is no longer listed, but recent changes include Mplayer being part of the disk image, further updates to the included X-Window Server, the usual bugfixes, and a few more things. The X server is quite cool – with it, you can run, say, Firefox on your Linux installation, but have the MenuetOS X server render the UI. In addition, thanks to MenuetOS now including a basic POSIX layer, it’s possible to create basic applications that run unmodified on both MenuetOS and a Linux distribution like Ubuntu. Neat.
I am truly astonished by this, even though I suspect that the Xserver is written in C. Or am I wrong? Anyway, it is very cool!
To be fair… the orignial x server and kdrive x severs are not that big, and can run in pretty low ram (like 4-8Mb).
Open source 32bit development continued here: http://kolibrios.org/
But sadly a slow development.
The Git-Links forward there to Gitea instead of KolibriOS.
And in the forum the most comments are written in russian then in english. So you don’t understand much there,.
The problem of MenuetOS is, that it is a one-man-show and it isn’t OpenSource.
What happens when Ville stops improving MenuetOS?
Then big steps like the now added X-Server for MenuetOS will no longer comming.
I first saw MenuetOS a little less than 25 years ago. He’ll stop developing it when he’s dead.
I hadn’t explored MenuetOS far enough to discover that it isn’t open source; that is a bad indicator. However, remember that Linux started as a one-man-show!
Linux was a solution to the problem of a PC based UNIX. MenuetOS has very little practical use, and is just “neat”