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MenuetOS

menuetos.net

209 pointsLorenDB54 comments

What are boot times like?

I see a lot of text-editing environments geared towards "distraction-free, focused editing" but not a lot of innovation on an OS focused on the same experience. I would like to see such a "writing OS" that boots to a text editor in less than a second. Maybe this OS is a candidate?

Faster than you can say "what are boot times like" from what I remember.

But it's not a practically usable OS, it's more like a study in how far you can get with pure assembly. Though if a text editor is really all you want, it might be good enough.

Might be pretty close to enough with a good ssh client and terminal. It’s probably actually real time which is neat for FOSS.

It was also how far you can go running an entire OS from a diskette. And it was really impressive.

CP/M with Wordstar plus dbase all on one 180kB floppy

It was said to boot in 5s twenty years ago...

The hardware compatibility list shows a promising number of machines ( http://www.menuetos.net/hwc.txt ). If you have a spare one, you could try and report. There is a chance that you will achieve a very fast boot time.

AROS (Amiga) could reboot in ~7s, ~15yrs ago. And you can do more than you can with MenuetOS. Again, today you will probably break that record.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yNIuNnBrWg

Edit:

You can see here a recent AROS booting in 3s (it is not clear if it is bare metal though):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s_TfmF-_iE

It was even faster than that. I remember it being almost instantaneous. And you could even play Doom!

Last time I ran it, Lakka (a Linux disto for Retroach emulation appliances) booted in 5s or less on an RPi2, to a usable graphical menu, complete with particle effects or whatever if you have that stuff enabled.

on a 1.44MB floppy?

Nah, but QNX could maybe do it still :-)

1.44 MB floppy read times might prevent sub-5-second boots to a GUI, though. I can’t really remember how fast things like that booted from a floppy, anymore.

I’m pretty sure that 5s time 20 years ago was on a 1.44MB floppy, too. A real floppy! Not something emulated.

> You can see here a recent AROS booting in 3s (it is not clear if it is bare metal though):

The virtualbox window is pretty clear to me :D

Youngsters, bragging about their good eyes... ;)

Anyway: I thought I have here a laptop I have to initialize, maybe I will install IcarOS on it as soon as I will have the time. So, we will see how it behaves on bare metal.

Or just having overly-large screens. Or just going back to the video after reading the comment :p

IcarOS seems like a fun thing to play with. Don't go too deep in the obscure OS rabbithole, it's indefinitely deep.

I used to have a setup where I'd boot the Linux-hosted version of AROS (so not nearly the same as booting from scratch certainly) straight into FrexxEd, and it started AROS + FrexxEd faster than my Emacs install started on the same box...

I don't know if much innovation is really required, honestly. You probably won't find what you're looking for with Mac/Windows, but if you run a tiling window manager like i3 on Linux you'll pretty much just see a clock, some system stats, and whatever applications you have open on the screen. You can pretty easily configure the bottom bar to remove the superfluous system stats, or even the clock if you want.

Is that the kind of experience you'd look for in a distraction-free OS? If not I'd be interested to hear your ideas - I use i3 for work but manage to distract myself anyway because I always have a web browser open.

I'm running XMonad on Linux, and I don't see any clock or system stats, because I don't run that. No bottom (nor top etc) bar for me.

(You can add such bars in XMonad, just like you can remove them from i3.)

If you truly want focused you don't even need a window manager, you aren't even forced to run x11 or wayland but if so just put your favorite text editor desktop file in /usr/share/xsessions is enough.

If you really, really want focused you can just drop everything and replace init with your editor http://informatimago.free.fr/i/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linu...

Yes however I don't think you would have the network in that case[1], which might be handy to automatise backups.

[1] unless you start it from emacs which is also totally possible

you'll be distracted by your eternally changing .emacs configuration file :-)

Would be a good application of a Grub menu option:

a) Boot with all bells & whistles. Or b) Boot straight into editor & type away.

Hell you could even use a customized kernel for that, to strip out all the boot-time consuming features that editor doesn't need.

On any recent PC, I find that more than half the time booting Linux to a GUI is in POST.

[edit]

And 5 seconds for DHCP if you are using dhcp

When I used it (and Kolibri, Floppix, and QNXdemo) in the mid-2000s it was mostly down to the speed of the floppy drive. So about the same as loading Windows 10 from a conventional (spinning rust) hard drive.

You don't need a new OS for that. You can do that as a Linux distribution just fine.

Maybe with heavy hacking, but not ready-made, at least that I’ve found. Certainly don’t seem to be any distros (in the casual searching I do periodically) that focus on 1-second boot times out of the box.

You might like https://www.benjamin-schieder.de/nethacklinux.html

Replace nethack with your favourite editor, and it might just work. (Well, also replace the floppy disk with something faster.)

Faster than the BIOS. Under a second

Haven't tested recently, but FreeDOS (or SvarDOS) boots in a couple of seconds. The kernel is ridiculously minimal. From there, you could launch a text editor via autoexec.bat and voila. It is a fun system, too.

Years ago, I found a bootable USB project on Github with a tiny custom Linux kernel that only launched vi. IIRC, my computer's fan was always running full speed with it, though.

I gave it a try many years ago and its speed was jawdropping. Too bad that a port to ARM would require a complete rewrite; those cheaper lower end *Pi-like embedded boards seem just the perfect platforms to take advantage of such a small and fast OS.

If I'm not mistaken, both are written in FASM (Flat Assembler). And unfortunately FASM won't run in recent MacOSes because it's a 32-bit app. No problem with Windows/Linux, though.

You can run 32-bit Windows tools in macOS with Wine.

I thought that Wine only works up to macOS 10.14

I'm on Monterey 12.6.9, and confirm can run the latest FASM. Current problem is how to configure the include path so I can build programs.

On Windows it's very easy: check "Environment Variables", create an "INCLUDE" variable (if not exist), then set "C:\FASM\INCLUDE", for example.

For ARM32, RISC OS is probably the closest to the value proposition offered by Menuet, albeit with a decent amount of high level code and a lot more support from developers for applications, languages, and games.

It's such a pity that the 32bit version is open source and the 64-bit version proprietary.

The open source alternative is KolibriOS.

My understanding is that Kolibri is a hostile fork of Menuet, and that Menuet's author closed it in retaliation.

> KolibriOS has forked off from MenuetOS in 2004, and is run under independent development since then. All our code is open-source, with the majority of the code released under GPLv2 license.

https://kolibrios.org/en/

You are correct.

http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=22194

(MenuetOS is Ville's project)

The code was GPL, but kolibri did replace copyright headers and that was Ville's main gripe. Whether or not that breaks the GPL, I cannot say (they kept his name in the license file).

Ville, in response to who forked it: "Coders from Ukraine's eastern neighbor. And closed source seems to be a quite good way of getting rid of their forum spamming (to use a polite expression)."

If BSD had to split apart their additions with the original unix code, then that means copyright headers should be avoided/obsoleted and only a vcs based historical viewing (who committed what) should be allowed. Since whatever anybody writes contains a copyright itself.

It's kinda difficult to believe that the copyright headers were the core of the issue to close down the project. They also talk about spamming the forums. There must have been other major disagreements / antipathy.

Open source software can be forked, that's how open source works.

To me, as an outsider to these projects, making the 32-bit version open source and the 64-bit version proprietary feels hostile.

How many years should pass until it doesn't matter if a fork was "hostile" or not and only open source software remains?

>Open source software can be forked

But that isn't all that took place; please read the linked post.

I think the author's wishes should be respected above all. Don't you?

This was epic! I used to bring this to school on a floppy and was absolutely shocked at the quality of the experience after booting. It's a pretty full featured desktop environment.

Amazing this is still around! I remember playing with this back when I was playing with toy kernel development as a teenager back in the mid 2000s! It was pretty amazing to see even back then given how out of my depth I was with the little bits of assembler you needed to get to set things up (protected mode etc.) before jumping to the C entry point!

Used this 20 years ago when working on my CS degree in our assembly class and wrote a file copy utility for it as a homework assignment.

IJS before all those “extra layers” in operating systems we used to do stuff like escalate privilege to admin using POKE in BASIC. (OS: Oasis, later ‘c/os’ a Z80 multiuser os from the mid-80s)

This was so small back in the day (one floppy I believe), that I proposed it for firmware or boot manager before EFI became ubiquitous or coreboot came along.

Wonder how that would have played out.

i had similar thoughts, and in modern times "just enough for containers" would be the business i guess.

baremetal os might be it the one tho

https://github.com/ownmac/BareMetal-OS

This is probably a better link:

https://github.com/ReturnInfinity/BareMetal

The one you linked to is a fork that is 83 commits behind a repo that is no longer maintained.

I forgot about this OS, nice to see it still being developed. I will have to keep it in mind for use somewhere.

The first time I read about Menuet OS was on Dr.Dobbs a long time ago.

woah, what a throwback. haven't thought about this in a couple decades

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