anthony_pacitto3 wrote:can a multitasking os be created on windows xp? and i am wanting to write a OS which looks and runs like linux ubuntu....would this be very difficult to complete what would the time spand be roughly?
Yes, you can create a multitasking OS within Windows XP.
It is only as difficult as your requirements are to implement and test. You'll want to know all the requirements that Linux Ubuntu has from a top level, then derive lower level requirements for configuration items within your own OS. Consider each requirements analysis phase as part of development and design of your OS, it isn't only coding.
You can spend years on an OS and never be done. You have to plan based on a set of requirements. Your requirements will focus your work and give you an idea of how long it will take to implement. Then, you have to determine how much time you expect to work on your OS. I spend on average 0.25 hours per day on my own and have been working on it for over three years. If you have thousands of folks working on it for 0.25 per day, you could get it done in a couple of weeks I suspect, but then you'd have to have on hell of a systems engineering team to coordinate (contedn with) the fury of workers working in parallel. This really isn;t the end al be of this part of your question as it is difficult to say without knowing your requirements, specifically.
Are you on a learning curve? Do you have to learn some things in order to implement your OS? You'll have to factor that it.
Do you have enough hardware to test all the permutation for implementation?
Do you intend on using an emulator instead of real hardware? If so, you will want to test all avialable and make a decision as to which one to use, a kind of trade study in order to get the best vaule out of your tools (this goes towards all of your design decisions too, trade studies). Please don't base your decisions on what people write here, but on your empirical evidence from your own testing. This also adds time to your already increasing timeline (I suggest basing your plan on hours spent, some tasks can be done in parallel, which will compress your calendar time).
Just from my post, it isn't so simple a task to understand and implement. There are a lot of things to be done without coding alone. Your platform for coding isn't too big of a deal. Knowing and understanding the requirements will go a long way in devloping a plan to get to where you want to be, then you'l know how long it will take. Each OS is unique and thus has unique timelines.
Regards Sandeep