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Solved! I now have sound coming out of the speakers - it just took that one command to wake up the external amp. Thanks for leading me to the solution. (The volume keys still do nothing, by the way, but that's not a serious problem and will be fixed by supporting acpi some day.)

Asper wrote:Win key -> Shutdown or Ctrl+Alt+F12

Ah, I never thought of pressing the Win key, but it certainly makes a lot of sense once you know.

The only reason is that the floppy is slower for reading and not so reliable as a flash drive, but if you want and have the HW you can try it.

I've run out of flash drives that I can experiment with, unless I can put it on one that I'm already using for something else. Where is the loader stored if you put KolibiriOS on a flash drive, and can it be booted from any standard MBR? I'm wondering specifically whether I can put KolibriOS in the FAT32 partition of a flash drive (a flash drive which contains my own OS in a different partition) and use my own multiboot MBR to boot it up.

High Definition Audio Specification Revision 1.0a June 17, 2010 wrote:Strongly recommend the default value for EAPD to be „1‟ in “EAPD/BTL Enable” section.

I came to this by myself after probing different ways to enable sound output on several computers.

Yes, I just read that very bit half an hour ago while preparing for the successful test. It was one of the many parts of the specification that went over my head before, though I also ignored it because one of the tables in the codec datasheet made it look as if it didn't apply to any of its widgets, but deeper in the datasheet it does make it clear that it applies to two of them.

Kolibri now supports FAT12,FAT16,FAT32 for reading and writing, and NTFS,ISO9660,Ext2,Ext3,Ext4 for reading only.

I found that out on Wikipedia within the last hour too. I'm happy that it's safe, so if it's useful to you for me to test any specific part of it, feel free to ask.

The system application "board" (which icon you can find on the desktop) writes the log to /rd/1/boardlog.txt by default, but you have to run it to get the file of course.
There are two possibilities to see your flash drive inside Kolibri:
1. If USB legacy support is enabled in the BIOS and you have inserted flash drive to a USB port before BIOS POST, you would see it as one of /bd disks.
2. There is a working USB stack, which requires special kernel and drivers. It works on the most tested hardware, but still under development and is not part of the trunk yet. If the first option won't work I can make special image with USB stack for you.

The first option should work - I typically use two or three USB flash drives and occasionally a floppy disk drive and SD card all at the same time while running by OS, doing all the loading and saving via the BIOS, so the machine should be able to handle it.

Btw I can sure you that Kolibri will not make any harm to your hardware or the data on it, I have used it as my main OS for about half a year.

I can see that it has a very good reputation, so I trust it. Let me know if you still want me to send you a copy of the log.

DavidCooper wrote:Solved! I now have sound coming out of the speakers - it just took that one command to wake up the external amp. Thanks for leading me to the solution. (The volume keys still do nothing, by the way, but that's not a serious problem and will be fixed by supporting acpi some day.)

Congratulations!

DavidCooper wrote: Asper wrote:
Win key -> Shutdown or Ctrl+Alt+F12

Ah, I never thought of pressing the Win key, but it certainly makes a lot of sense once you know.

You also can click "MENU" button on the panel instead of Win key, it should be obvious for a Windows, Linux or whatever popular OS user.

DavidCooper wrote:I've run out of flash drives that I can experiment with, unless I can put it on one that I'm already using for something else. Where is the loader stored if you put KolibiriOS on a flash drive, and can it be booted from any standard MBR? I'm wondering specifically whether I can put KolibriOS in the FAT32 partition of a flash drive (a flash drive which contains my own OS in a different partition) and use my own multiboot MBR to boot it up.

Kolibri uses its own bootloader to boot from the flash drive, bootloader stored in the boot sector of the flash drive. This bootloader makes your flash drive able to boot Kolibri saving you ability to use it as usual to read/write any files.
You can also use GRUB, instructions should be in the "install.txt" file. I don't know what is your multiboot MBR is, but you can try to do it.

DavidCooper wrote:I can see that it has a very good reputation, so I trust it. Let me know if you still want me to send you a copy of the log.

Thanks. It is not neccessary, though you can try it if you want to.

Good luck with your OS development!

Asper wrote:You also can click "MENU" button on the panel instead of Win key, it should be obvious for a Windows, Linux or whatever popular OS user.

I've discovered what the problem is - I work on a netbook (1024x600 screen), and Bochs is only displaying 1024x600 of the 1024x768 screen that it's allowed KolibriOS to use, so it doesn't show your menu button at all (and I still have to use Windows Task Manager to shut it down). When I press the Window key I see the top few entries of a list appear, and if I run down it with the cursor-down key it goes through several steps out of sight below the bottom of the screen before returning to the top of the list.

Kolibri uses its own bootloader to boot from the flash drive, bootloader stored in the boot sector of the flash drive. This bootloader makes your flash drive able to boot Kolibri saving you ability to use it as usual to read/write any files.
You can also use GRUB, instructions should be in the "install.txt" file. I don't know what is your multiboot MBR is, but you can try to do it.

It says the bootloader needs 2K of space, so I'm guessing it goes after the VBR (after modifying the VBR), but what I'll do is wait till I've got a new flash drive and then experiment with it on that to see what it actually modifies and where it puts everything. Then I'll be able to work out how to install it on a drive along with my own OS (primarily to experiment with booting up KolibriOS from my OS, which should be possible). In the meantime I'll just run it from a floppy disk, and hopefully I'll find time to try that tonight - I just have to be sure I'm not covering anything important first.

DavidCooper wrote:I can see that it has a very good reputation, so I trust it. Let me know if you still want me to send you a copy of the log.

Thanks. It is not neccessary, though you can try it if you want to.

Well, I'll certainly give KolibrOS a good workout to see how well it handles my netbook, and I'm now keen to explore all the things it can do.

Good luck with your OS development!

Thanks - I expect I'll need a lot of that for the next stage, and again after that for USB.

[This is more like a little review than anything else, so it feels a little out of place, but I've decided it still fits better here than anywhere else.]

I spent a few hours last night exploring KolibriOS. It was able to play several .wav files from a flash drive at the same time. It also played mp3s from the NTFS disk (which all started up instantly instead of taking the ten seconds to get going that they would take in Windows Media Player), though it doesn't appear to be able to cope with filenames with "ñ" in them, displaying them with a long dash instead and refusing to play them altogether. The machine also tripple faulted when I clicked on another file from the same batch (that file did not have an "ñ" in its filename, but the ones that did may already have destabilised the OS by then). When I plugged in external speakers it quickly switched to playing music through them without bothering me with a menu asking if I wanted it to do so. Overall, it was very impressive.

Колибри set up an 800x600 screen instead of the available 1024x600, so photos were stretched - that should be fairly easy to fix, assuming that everything else is already designed to be able to handle whatever screen size and shape is thrown at it, as it should just be a matter of identifying the highest available screen resolution available rather than choosing the biggest of a limited set of standard sizes. It didn't appear to make the games look stretched though (they may have been, but I didn't notice) - I spent quite a while trying not to get addicted to some of them (such as Pipes, which I've never had a go at before).

Anyway, I'll certainly be running it again, and I look forward to getting hold of future versions of it too.