Kolibri OS: fits on a floppy disk, programmed using interrupts
kolibrios.org
kolibrios.org
But what if you could run Kolibri on a tiny, DIY, microcontroller-based computer? An ATmega or Cortex-M0, throw in some SRAM and I2C peripherals, run it off a couple of AA batteries and browse the web on that? That'd be ludicrously cool.
Perhaps not every OS needs to be portable like Linux...
Extremely hard indeed, probably more like a 95% rewrite. Might however make sense as a killer application for small ARM or Risc-V boards where Linux would be either overkill or too demanding.
Would certainly enjoy have an GUI-based OS like this running on it.
Nowadays we can use LVGL and C++ to write apps, or run script based C code using interpreters like Wrench: https://github.com/jingoro2112/wrench
What I'm missing is an GUI-based OS like Kolibri to launch apps.
Modern display signaling takes a lot of compute power simply due to the sheer complexity of it and even emulating something like VGA over I/O pins would eat most of not all the compute power available on an MCU.
So you’re essentially stuck with a terminal over the network with an ESP which if you again make graphical would cost more in rendering and stream compression than there is compute so you’re stuck with text based terminals.
Nowadays you can buy ESP32 boards that include touchscreen displays, memory card readers and so on for 13 euros with shipping included: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006110360174.html
Don't even understand what you mean with "a lot of compute power". We've been using LVGL for GUI apps and playing movies on these devices since a long time just fine. Here is a demonstration of that board: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AVyvwv0agk
This stuff even has mesh networking, and yet we still don't have Cybikos!
...but I want a link anyway
You don't need a machine with exactly 8MB. Nowadays having 1GB RAM is under-powered enough that you'll probably have more fun with Kolibri than with a regular OS.
I remember finding outrageous that Linux required at least 8MB to run X Window System back in 1995. How far have we come.
What sort of "opportunity" did authors miss? They're not a business.
Or is writing ARM assembler necessarily more fun than writing x86?
From GP:
> Except you're not going to find a lot of PC hardware this under-powered; these kinds of systems are actually getting more expensive, as they're slowly getting relabeled as "vintage"
Super cool project though of course
I thought someone could enlarge the design to a more modern architecture when I found an old Compaq internal documentation showing the internal design of the first commercially available 80386 computer (Compaq Deskpro 386). I have just posted the reference on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38480275
Such new re-created computers would certainly be interesting to run legacy software, but it would also be very interesting to have modern and light-weigth software like KolibriOS (I know it requires a Pentium or more, but there is certainly little to change to downgrade to 80386).
[1] https://kolibrios.org/i/slaid/slaid1.png
EDIT1: Seems to be from an old video game called Cosmic Osmo? https://www.flickr.com/photos/dot_tiff/3402910182/in/photost...
EDIT2: Web Archive to the rescue! https://web.archive.org/web/20130727123433/http://futurestac...
EDIT3: Looks cute :) https://imgur.com/a/j9XAWjN
> The creators later made Myst using the same technology
Tried to play Myst as a 10 year old, but wasn't smart enough to figure it out. Maybe Cosmic Osmo is more on my level ;) Really want to try it out this weekend, according to Wikipedia it was a pretty revolutionary game. Also never heard of Hypercards before today (the last Hypercard update was released the year I was born).
I would love to see a deep and knowledgeable comparison between them.
This is a feature of many FOSS projects, sadly, and I don't really get what aspect of human nature drives it, but it must be something.
Not counting efforts where someone forks an old version because they don't like where the team are taking the new version (Trinity vs KDE, MATE vs GNOME)...
There are 2 current forks of Mandriva doing much the same: Mageia and OpenMandriva. (There are others but with deeper differences.)
Claws is a fork of Sylpheed, both continuing separately.
Cinnamon, the Zorin OS desktop, and GNOME Flashback are all doing more or less the same things with the same codebase.
Curiosity, Joy, learning, status, …
I can't speak for the kolibrios contributors, but I imagine that to them, the value comes from the development process itself. They do it because they enjoy it. Any practical usefulness of the resulting software is mostly incidental.
If your goal was to develop useful software in 2023, you wouldn't be writing pure x86 assembly within the constraints of a floppy disk.
If the Kolibri OS folks experience unique enjoyment from developing this project that they would not obtain from Menuet OS, then the labor would not be duplicated.
- FVWM from TWM. Much faster and smaller.
- RXVT vs XTerm.
- Slashem from Nethack. You want Discworld references, > Nethack 3.4.3. Fullfilling role, mons and object additions, Slashem.
"Why all these people playing Prince of Persia fight on their own? Why don't they all get together and free the Princesse once and for all?" :-)
I didn't have to dream, I actually owned an Amiga.
An early Archimedes booted directly into the GUI from ROM and was even faster.
i'm not going to win11 until there is a similar 'debloated' build....
Tiny11 shrinks Windows 11 23H2 down to pocket size
https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/27/tiny11_2311/
Reportedly pretty much stable after a few earlier iterations - there's no mention in The Register article about boot time - but I'd imagine crap stripping has to speed things up.
But just because you can does not necessarily mean you should. For one, Tiny11 2311 is not free – you will need a Windows 11 license. Microsoft also does not support it, and the company could easily roll out an update that comprehensively breaks the project.Got a bit freaked by that, trashed the usb stick, but it changes the partitions on you and LOCKS them. turned a nice sandisk 64GB into a 126 Mb stick.
computer management would not fix it.
I ended up going oldschool with diskpart, and good old delete part override cleared up the shenanigans.
USE AT YOUR RISK.
at the very least, run whatever .7z you choose through virustotal.
Does Nero Burning ROM still exist? It's years since I heard mention of it, and probably a couple of decades since I last had a copy.
Nice and impressive, but don't they essentially have to start from scratch if the OS with apps should run on another architecture?
I don't think the lack of portability is much of a hindrance tbh. Portability doesn't seem to have been a goal of the project at all, so I'm not sure why we're judging it on a criteria they don't care about.
I don't know anything about the creator but it's very possible that this kind of work was actually their career in the 90s. Most of the people who built those experiences are still around today, and not all of them have the visibility of Dave's Garage.
It's incredible how much work was done. Maybe this should be an internet curiosity like how TempleOS has become, though Terry's personality was a unique factor.
It's not judging, but wondering and regretting that architecture independence was not a requirement. Personally, I have started in the late nineties to free my projects from the dependencies (or rather "shackles") of specific platforms and vendors. This has more than paid off. Otherwise, a large part of my many years of work would have been lost.
I guess its a lesson for all those companies on ARM: always have a plan B.
By relying on x86 standardization (BIOS, VESA, ACPI...), KolibriOS can run on pretty much any PC without having to write a lot of platform-specific code. OTOH take some ARM machines - MacBook, PineBook, Raspberry Pi - what do they share in common besides ISA?
Do you know authors goals? My impression is that portability was not their goal, and therefore it was by definition not important.
Why?
Or as an exercise in minimalism. Why does there have to be a point? Can't it just be art for its own sake?
Why does someone learn woodworking and make a chair when they can buy one from a store? Or why do they come up with their own design when they could follow someone else's plan?
Creativity can be a lot of fun, particularly when not bounded by practical concerns.
Have you ever wondered why your modern computer makes you wait for so many things? ... while you or other people were doing so many of the same things like 30 years ago on computers hundreds times slower.
Is it that your computer is getting old? ... No way! Hardware does not slow down when aging: software does. And it does because most developers have no idea of what happens under their feet in lower software and hardware layers - or worse, they just do not care.
I am so sure we would get so much better software if most developers were skilled in so-called "low level" stuff... Because "low level" skills are exactly the opposite: they are high level skills.