Release 0.41 of Visopsys is now online at visopsys.org (freshmeat announcement). It is largely a supplemental (and bugfix) release for the recent 0.4 version, but continues where 0.4 left off in terms of improving the overall look and usability, as well as providing a few new user tools to experiment with. Other operating systems can do more than Visopsys; it doesn’t include many applications. Needless to say, it’s not as good as Linux. On the other hand, it’s still a one-person project. From the perspective of a user — the “but what the heck is it good for?” perspective — its primary selling point is a reasonably functional partition management program (the ‘Disk Manager’) in the vein of Symantec’s Partition Magic. It can create, delete, and move partitions, and modify their attributes. It can also copy hard disks, and has a simple and friendly graphical interface, but can fit on a bootable floppy disk (or CD-ROM, if you’re feeling naughty). More about this in a minute.
The bulk of Visopsys is a fully multitasking, 100% protected mode, virtual-memory, (massively!)-monolithic-style kernel. Added to this is a bare-bones C library and a minimal suite of applications — together comprising a small but reasonably functional operating system which can operate natively in either graphical or text modes. It’s been in continuous development for a number of years, though realistically the target audience remains limited to operating system enthusiasts, students, and assorted other sensation seekers. The ISO and floppy images available from the download page can install the system, or operate in ‘live demo’ mode.
It’s not a Windows or UNIX lookalike, nor a clone of any other system. On the other hand, much of what you see in Visopsys will be familiar. There are a number of command line programs that are superficially UNIX- or DOS-like, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding your way around. It is compatible with existing filesystems, file formats, protocols, and encryption algorithms (among other things). The overall design goal is always to cherry-pick the best ideas from other OSes, preferably contribute a few new ideas, and hopefully avoid most of the annoying stuff. ๐
The Visopsys Disk Manager does most of what you’d expect from your basic ‘fdisk’ tool, whilst maintaining safety through MBR backups and ‘undo’ functionality. The slightly more sophisticated features — copying disks and moving partitions — are the beginnings of a project to create a free replacement for certain proprietary tools such as Partition Magic, Drive Image, and Norton Ghost; the same user-friendly GUI environment, yet still small enough to fit on a boot floppy. What it currently lacks are easily accessible ways to create, check, and resize filesystems. There will be more news about this soon, with an associated project based on Visopsys.
A few other simple user applications are provided. These include a simple ‘User Manager’ for administering user accounts and passwords; a ‘Keyboard Mapping’ program which provides a choice between (currently) UK and US English keyboard layouts; a ‘Display Properties’ program for setting graphical boot, screen resolution, colours, background, etc.; and a ‘Configuration Editor’ for modifying the system’s configuration files (since there isn’t any kind of native text editor, yet!). Additionally there are programs for installing Visopsys, viewing bitmap images, and making screen shots, as well as a simple command line shell and associated programs for viewing memory usage, managing processes, and plenty of other simple tasks.
Hardware support is generally limited to devices that conform to popular hardware interface standards, such as VESA, PS2, ATA/ATAPI (IDE), plus all of the standard PC chipset components. Graphics are provided through the (non-performant, but reasonably standard) VESA linear framebuffer interface. At present there aren’t any vendor-specific drivers provided, though this is not so much a design choice as it is the result of limited manpower and time. Memory requirements are small: approximately 5 MB in text mode, and generally less than 20MB in graphics mode depending on screen resolution, etc.
Visopsys supports all variations of FAT filesystem (12, 16, 32/VFAT) as well as read-only EXT2/3 and ISOFS. Upcoming features include support for SCSI, serial mice, resizing filesystems, writable EXT2, and shared libraries. Ports of the Newlib C library, GNU Binutils and GCC are underway and will be available as add-ons.
About the author:
Andy McLaughlin is the developer of Visopsys. During the day he slaves for “the man”, doing development work on Linux kernel modules at Veritas Software in London, United Kingdom. The rest of the time you can find him writing his OS, flying airplanes, riding motorcycles, playing ice hockey, singing in punk bands, or other things like that.
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I think that sums up visopsys for now. Wish them all the best for the future though.
You know, the kind of people who think, “I’m bored; I think I’ll write an operating system.” I would love to be able to have that kind of talent. Regardless of how popular such an OS ever becomes, I still think it’s an absolutely amazing accomplishment.
Meanwhile, I am almost finished coding my revolutionary new program that prints “Hello World!” to screen and then exits. I just have to debug it and then I’ll be done: look for the release on Freshmeat soon! ๐
In development since 1997, nearly seven years later, only a 0.4 release?
People tend to have real jobs you know. My husband’s OS, is still on 0.1 for 3.5 years now for example (he hasn’t touched it since he got another job, 3 years ago).
Very cool this, it’s really good to so many “really” alterative OSs out there (SkyOS, Syllable, Visopsys …). I wish this project all the best
Definately agree; great to hear of another unique OS.
Also, Eugenia, you have made me curious, how advanced is your husband’s OS? Does it have goals, or was it just intended as an exercise in programming?
It was a hobby of his (and it was already graphical at that point). He doesn’t have the time to deal with it anymore though.
on Bochs?
and this is a spirit of OSNews
“I just have to debug it and then I’ll be done: look for the release on Freshmeat soon! :-P”
Why not turn it into an OS?
Have a look here…
http://www.mega-tokyo.com/osfaq2/index.php/BareBones
Just put your code into the bit marked ‘kernel.c’. You may need to write your own printf and a few other trivial little bits and pieces.
do you have some screenshots of it?
No. It doesn’t run on VMWare, and there is no other way to get shots of it (except with a real camera onto the monitor).
Cool link! But I’m already in trouble with my new OS at the kernel (from the link):
kernel.c
This is not exactly your average int main(). Most noteably, you do not have any library stuff available. As soon as you write so much as #include <, you have probably made the first mistake. Welcome to kernel land.
No stdio.h??? Well, there goes my using printf()!!! ๐
I’m curious about that… If i was to make my own OS it would never have a monolithic kernel… They’re boring ๐ exo-kernels and such are much more interesting..
No, monolithic kernels aren’t boring, and the choice whether to make it a monolithic or micro kernel design – is what the name suggests: a design choice.
My own kernel is a micro kernel by the way.
ah – and why someone calls visopsys ugly? I’m testing it at each release (and do the grim nitpicking) and I don’t find it’s ugly. Just think about it in this way: One programmer and designer canna do each and all at one time. Such kind of magic requires time and patience. And after all, we OS developers have other work to do to gain our life, knowya?
It was a hobby of his (and it was already graphical at that point). He doesn’t have the time to deal with it anymore though.
Well, of course not. He has a wife now.
Bwahahahaha!!!
Andy
> In development since 1997, nearly seven years later, only a 0.4 release?
OS development is not easy. There’s a lot of research, testing, and debugging that has to be done for any useable OS. Also consider that it is the work of one person, so the total amount of time that can be invested is limited. Personally I think he’s doing a great job and I wish him luck as he continues to develop it.
This is what OSNews does best! Downloading right now…
I’ve downloaded and installed most of the older versions as they were released and I can’t wait to see what’s next for Visopsys. Thanks to Andy McLaughlin for allowing free use of his software. Very best wishes to him and his OS.
Thanks!
-Bob
hmmm…. The bootable CD doesn’t. On main computer the boot freezes at the blue screen. On backup machine Visopsys goes through blue screen “Booting” graphic, then stops at black screen with error message regarding unrecognized filesystem.
Downloaded ISO zip file, un-compressed, and burned to CD using Adaptec Easy CD Creator.
Burned .img file to floppy, and that works just fine. Version 0.41 looks good. Sharp appearance, stable apps, and easy to use.
Thanks again. (Any ideas on the ISO problem?)
-Bob
Hi Bob, would have emailed directly but there’s no address in your post;
Thanks so much for trying this out! Sorry the ISO didn’t work for you… Could you post/email information about your hardware configuration (BIOS type, CDROM model, IDE configuration such as master/slave relationships, etc)? It works on all the machines/emulators I have access to, so I’d like to try and reproduce this somehow.
Andy
I sent you an e-mail tonight. For the other readers, here is the info:
First Computer:
Dell XPS T800r; 800 mhz PIII, 384MB RAM, SoundBlasterValue sound card, Nvidia GeForce440MX AGP graphic card
On this machine the CD begins to boot, but completely freezes at the first blue page with the OS info text at top.
Backup Computer:
home-made, Intel D875PBZLK motherboard, 256MB DDR RAM, GeForce256 32MB graphic card, SoundBlaster 16, P4 2.26 Ghz 533 fsb
On this second machine, the computer boots to the blue screen, goes through the “booting” graphic, and ends at a black page with these error messages:
Error:kernelFilesystem.c:installDriver(150)
The system was not able to determine the type of this filesystem
Error:kernelInitialize.c:kernelInitialize(199)
Mounting root filesystem failed.
Error:kernelMain.c:kernelMain(73)
Initialization failed. Press any key (or the “reset” button) to reboot.
Both of these computers succesfully boot from their CD drives, including OS installations and live CD distros. The first computer successfully booted from the Visopsys floppy disks; the backup computer has no floppy drive. Both computers have name-brand modern CD drives.
I hope this info is helpful to you. Hopefully I’m not the only one having trouble with these discs…
Best Wishes,
Bob