water cooler :: Really interesting OS

I've played with MenuetOS, it is really impressive. It is all written in assembly -- that must have been a tremendous effort.

Back when I worked on bootable CD-ROM utilities, I was actually contemplating writing some sort of GUI boot menu shell or maybe even a disaster-recovery-type mini OS (You can, for example, display 640 x 480 x 16 color VGA graphics on any PC with VGA support using only assembly language and BIOS calls with *no* knowledge of video hardware). Today, something like DSL has this pretty well covered.

If you wanted to do all of your development in assembler, you could eventually build up a library of commonly used functions, and I guess after a while the OS would begin to somewhat resemble Linux, with the major differences being the use of assembly code vs. C, and that Linux tries to rely as little as possible on PC BIOS calls in order to maximize architecture portability.

Writing something as complicated as a GUI web browser, though, using only BIOS calls in assembler from scratch would be a monumental task, probably not something that I would want to attempt by myself.

I tried this too.

Very interesting for just a floppy. Fast boot-up, even on my old attic-ware. No sound and no detection of my PCMCIA network card...so no internet.

All-in-all I think it's pretty cool. I can't DO anything with it but it may be something to watch for in the future.

panama

Menuet won't auto config you nic, you have to manually set it up.

And it's a pain to do.

Supposedly, it's better in the newest beta, but it reboots as it's loading the desktop every time for me...

Very Impressive!

I'm going to try this out for sure. I couldn't belive my eyes when I saw the screenshots. I hope these people get that new web browser and the better internet working. If they do, they could have a very solid OS (for a floppy... lol).

Luke

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