After several months, we’re very proud to finally bring you the result of the OSNews Alternative OS Contest. It took us a while to publish them all, but we are done now. Read on for the results. We received many submissions and chose to publish 15 stories that fit the criteria. We’ve very proud of the results and may run another contest like this sometime again in the future. For now, here is a run down of the entries:
The Grand Prize
The winner of the grand prize, which includes a two year subscription to OSNews and an MP3 player is Kroc, whose August 24th GEOS article not only was a huge hit, it made the front page of digg.com.
Honorable Mention
Honorable mention goes to Andrew Hudson, who brought us an excellent review of Plan 9 entited “Investigating the Plan 9 Operating System“. Andrew also wins a two year subscription to OSNews.
Entries
Here’s a review of the articles that met the qualifications and were posted:
Introduction to MINIX 3
by Andy Tanenbaum on 2006-09-25
AROS: Onboard the Last Train to Amiga Neverland
by Dmitar Butrovski on 2006-09-13
Introduction to TUD:OS
by Michael Voigt on 2006-09-12
The Slightly Strange World of RISC OS
by Chris Wraight on 2006-09-11
FreeDOS 9 Review
by Marti van Lin on 2006-09-07
A Look at Syllable 0.6.1
by Daniel W. Steinbrook on 2006-09-07
Another Quickie: ReactOS
by Jeff Rollin on 2008-08-31
A Quickie: ReactOS on VMWare Player
by Leroy on 2006-08-30
What Is QNX?
by James Ingraham on 2006-07-24
OpenVMS – a System of Structure
by Robert Gezelter on 2006-07-18
MorphOS: The Lightning OS
by Fulvio Peruggi on 2006-07-17
A Developer’s Insight Into DROPS
by Steffan Liebersgeld on 2006-07-13
Review: Syllable 0.6.1
by Christopher Nelson on 2006-07-11
The Outsider’s Tale: a RISC OS User’s Apology
by Gavin Wraith on 2006-07-05
The kaneton Microkernel Project
by Julien Quintard on 2006-06-27
All of the above submitters will receive a 1 year subscription to OSNews. Thanks for your hard work!
Thanks again to our submitters and also to the many readers who left great comments and inspired discussion about the above stories.
I made an entry. I had an unstable version posted–maybe that’s why you didn’t publish. Currently, a decent, but not perfect version of LoseThos is available at http://www.losethos.com .
Who is the crowd for LoseThos? What type of user are you aiming for? I know it’s a hobby OS of yours, and appears to do what you want it to, so I applaud you for that.
But honestly, this is a direct quote from your website: “I love my operating system the way it is and don’t give a crap what you think.”
Who are the people using this operating system besides you? If people are providing you feedback and you’re simply not interested, why would anyone want to use this OS? Operating Systems THRIVE on feedback. This is why Linux and FreeBSD are growing.
LoseThos is for home computers. Security is not an issue. Everybody on this site obsesses on security. LoseThos is for programmers. Security means lack of freedom as a programmer. In losethos, you have kernel priviledge at all times, so you can turn-off interrupts or do other protected instructions. Needless to say, most people on this site find it an affront.
I do not understand your point of view.
I am a programmer and I like to program for the PEOPLE or for other programmers which will program for the PEOPLE.
Programmers doing programs just for programmers does not make sense.
If your Operating System is oriented for programmers… the people which program for your operating system, what orientation must have?
I personally share your point of view, but programming is also a bit of work of art. Programming for programming’s sake makes sense: it’s fun, it is a learning experience, it makes you test and learn new programming techniques (that you can apply to useful programs later). I prefer to code with a pragmatic target, but I appreciate elegance and fun in programming, and I’d just like to be good enough to participate to the International Obfuscated C Contest.
In addition, more often than note “just-for-fun” projects have later became important for people. No one would have given a dime on a monolithic hobbish hacked Unix clone tightly tied to i386 architecture that was done just for fun by an IT student. But now I’m running Linux.
I don’t say that only the end user has to be the target of your work, but at the end of the chain, one end user will be at front of what you did (using an application that uses a library that uses another library that uses the library you have programmed).
If LoseThos does not have the vision to reach to the end user, his work will be useful for a tiny community of programmers.
Anyway, I hate the “I will not hear you, I do whatever I want” style of the owner of this proyect.
Needless to say, most people on this site find it an affront.
I think you might be placing your own point of view on my thoughts. What bothers me is the constant spamming of your site/OS. While I am honestly impressed with what you seem to have done (I am not a programmer, so these skills are something I do not posess), I am personally very annoyed at your actions of spamming, arguing and insinuating insults at other members here. A look at your past posts shows this is a habit of yours.
Perhaps you ought to consider this as another possible (and more likely) reason to the poor response you seem to get.
I’ll second that. I don’t really have much of a desire to use his OS, but I can certainly appreciate what it does and what he has done. His attitude on these forums has been a real turn off though.
Off topic tho.. i wonder what is your aim/goal for your own OS. what advantage does your OS provide to programmers better than (Free/MS)DOS? I am wondering because there’s no information on your website whatsoever. BTW, I think it doesn’t look good that you are complaining here that your article has not been published. If you can publish your article somewhere, maybe on your losethos website, I will definitly have a look.
Back to the topic, I’ve read GEOS article very interestingly too. I was really interested in Ensemble long long time ago when I was using DOS on XT. But I had no chance to play with it. Anyway, congratulations, Kroc!
If he doesn’t give a crap about what you think, I guess your feedback about feedback (meta-feedback?) won’t have that much effect…
Cool initiative and cool submission overall… The GEOS review was indeed outstanding.
Anyone?
I found the AROS article to be a very interesting read, and I thought it was part of the contest at the time I read it. This seems not to be the case because its summary doesn’t mention the contest. On the other hand, the FreeDOS article summery doesn’t either, so maybe Adam simply forgot about the AROS article or somehow thinks it didn’t meet the qualifications?
see topic
I really enjoyed reading all the great articles. Thank you, osnews and submitters!
Excellent
Kudos!
Congratulations to Kroc and Andrew. This was a very nice contest and goes back to what OSNews is about. I hope we see some other contests similiar to this, or maybe the same kind in a year to see how these alternative OS’s have progressed. I’d like to get a shout out to James Ingraham for his QNX article.
Me too. It was a really nice idea, a great response by everyone who wrote in, and some very good reads. Quite right to give something to everyone who was published also. It was partly the sheer variety that made it so interesting.
Why not run a contest like this every so often (quarterly would be nice)? Make a rule that you can’t submit a review on an OS that was done in the previous contest.
Heck, the prizes wouldn’t even have to be that interesting. It would just be nice to see reviews like this more often.
Bravo to the contributors and the OS devs.
I think the winner was well-deserved. The article/review is a good model for anyone intending to write about an old OS.
It’s been over thirty days since being published on OSNews.com, so I can now link you to the original article (without paging) which you may enjoy
http://camendesign.com/kroc/stuff/geos/
paging is necessary for EMT64 on Intel.
The self-imposed limitations of our CMS, written to work in ALL brosers, prevented us from publishing the article unaltered. I’m glad people can reference your original work now.
I didn’t properly take into account the limitations you have; at the same time though, it gave me the room to write the article as I wanted it to be, and you poor guys worry about the limitations XP.
I felt that the original article was suitable in the middle, and quickly paced; where as on OSNews, the 14 pages meant that the middle seemed slow and uneeded (my own fault). The other contestants seemed to do a much better job of suiting their article to OSNews.
9.8.5 Initializing IA-32e Mode
On IA-32 processors that support Intel EM64T, the IA32_EFER MSR is cleared on system reset.
The operating system must be in protected mode with paging enabled before attempting to
initialize IA-32e mode. IA-32e mode operation also requires physical-address extensions with
four levels of enhanced paging structures (see Section 3.10, “PAE-Enabled Paging in IA-32e
Mode”).
Operating systems should follow this sequence to initialize IA-32e mode:
1. Starting from protected mode, disable paging by setting CR0.PG = 0. Use the MOV CR0
instruction to disable paging (the instruction must be located in an identity-mapped page).
2. Enable physical-address extensions (PAE) by setting CR4.PAE = 1. Failure to enable PAE
will result in a #GP fault when an attempt is made to initialize IA-32e mode.
3. Load CR3 with the physical base address of the Level 4 page map table (PML4).
4. Enable IA-32e mode by setting IA32_EFER.LME = 1.
5. Enable paging by setting CR0.PG = 1. This causes the processor to set the
IA32_EFER.LMA bit to 1. The MOV CR0 instruction that enables paging and the
following instructions must be located in an identity-mapped page (until such time that a
branch to non-identity mapped pages can be effected).
64-bit mode paging tables must be located in the first 4 GBytes of physical-address space prior
to activating IA-32e mode. This is necessary because the MOV CR3 instruction used to initialize
the page-directory base must be executed in legacy mode prior to activating IA-32e mode
(setting CR0.PG = 1 to enable paging). Because MOV CR3 is executed in protected mode, only
the lower 32 bits of the register are written, limiting the table location to the low 4 GBytes of
memory. Software can relocate the page tables anywhere in physical memory after IA-32e mode
is activated.
The processor performs 64-bit mode consistency checks whenever software attempts to modify
any of the enable bits directly involved in activating IA-32e mode (IA32_EFER.LME, CR0.PG,
and CR4.PAE). It will generate a general protection fault (#GP) if consistency checks fail. 64-bit
mode consistency checks ensure that the processor does not enter an undefined mode or state
with unpredictable behavior.
I couldn’t get it to work, but can try some more stuff, except my new computer broke.
Maybe that’s where I went wrong–I have 3 levels, not four for paging–didn’t try that combination. Don’t have a machine to work with, though.
Edited 2006-09-26 20:47
You suggesting something’s a crock of sh*t?
You don’t have to install losethos to a hard drive–it’s live. It’s a modern operating system, not something from the 70’s or 80’s.
I bought a pentium D from dell with linux and the CPU load tool only showed one CPU. Does Linux support more than one. LoseThos does, in a limited, but effective way.
Edited 2006-09-26 22:33
Congratulations to the winners, I have particularly enjoyed the article about GEOS. Most of the contributions were very interisting, thanks to all participants, I learnt much!
I hope to see such contests again on OSNews. It was définitely worth the efforts