The first time I have sparked the Idea of doing my own os (tm) was during november 2000 whilst attending a course in Operating Systems Interna - a very theory based course, didn't catch everything but taught me enough to get a spark of "i-wnna-know-how-this-works-really". It made me playing around with bootloaders (I have worked on an open surce project ( a neglected gimp printer driver - neglected again because the testing object is broken ) in that time) and in the meantime acquiring quite some books (The mmurtl book, the minix book, messmers indispensable hardware book).
I've researched for about a year ere I 've dared to set down the first lines of code for BlueIllusionOS. *gg*(me shamelessly advertising and not blushing: ];->). Then it's been a struggle to map theoretical concepts (paging, memory management and so forth) to real life - until I grasped: hey, it's memory, do with it what is needed and what you wanna do with the given tools. Take a sheet of paper. Draw sketches about how it looks like in memory. Take the abstraction of virtual memory and draw it. then you'll understand. *gg*
Oh, and the biggest one: grasping, that the kernel is *mapped* into each process address space. this one has caused me quite some months of thinking and thinking again over it - until a knot went open and I saw the big picture. From then on - rather childs play than struggling *gg* well, I admit, i am bragging. *chuckle*
I've got only one advice: First, make something bootable to show off. Then busy yerself with website stuff. *gg*
Now I check brendans stuff.
@brendan: Nice document you have there.
) I'd also put in some general statements about the nature of a kernel. *gg* f. ex. that it is kinda omnipresent shared library. For me that's been the very less obvious of all secrets to discover - althou I'm not computer illiterate (dealing with them since I am twelve). Oh and recommend the noobs: Never start too big. the smallest things can be the biggest endeavour. It's best done like this: fetch a keystroke and translate it. Printout some text. do a task switch. and so forth. Small overviewable entities which fit into the Big Picture(tm).