OSDev.org

Hi all,

Just thought I'd drop a line, and see what people think about the idea of writing an OS (thingy) that runs inside an HTML document.

I tried it originally in 2004 using Perl CGI, but it didn't work too great. Since then I've been learning various AJAX techniques and have met with some sucess this year.

It's really hard to describe, beyond the fact that it works like an OS (*nix-style, can be multiuser when served from a webserver). For the most complete demo, you can see it in action at http://www.avidus.ca/wajax/console.html

(Sorry, only the Firefox browser is supported at the moment)

After the page loads, type startWM, double click the Console icon, and run ls -lh /

The demo (code named WAJAX) was written in on single monolithic file and became unmanageable. The solution was a rewrite that incorporates a build system. If you'd like to see the new one (no GUI yet), you can find it (demo and source tarball) at http://atomos.sourceforge.net

Please note that this is mostly written in JavaScript using AJAX techniques.

If anyone's interested in looking, suggestions an/or constructive criticism would be most appreciated. I'm having a very difficult time finding *programmers* that know both JavaScript and have *experience* in OS development.

A bit about me:
My experience in writing OS code was a series of small x86 real mode OS experiments written in assembly using nasm. Then I read Tanenbaum's book on Minix, turned to game programming, then linux perl and web development, and now finally back to operating systems,

Looks great so far.

I dont like the fact your root account has no password But it did kick me out into an 'undefined' user (/home/undefined)

The GUI doesnt fully fit in my browser window (1024x768, tabbed windows) and the CLI seems wierd have lots of stuff down the bottom of the screen (scroll down.)

It would probably be better if you allowed window dragging using the titlebar.

Overall, I'm very impressed. Good work.

Try to become say, a competitor to YouOS

The concept here is definitly interesting... although I don't know if it's really an operating system, or a very expansive web application. I guess this depends on your definition of an operating system -- and I'm not the one to ask -- as far as I'm concerned, Pluto is still a planet.

I've thought about this sort of a setup before, and where I think this kind of technology would shine would be in a "client-server" style setup, where the client is a bare-bones style OS, with web capabilities, and the server is the main OS portion similar to this or, as mentioned, YouOS.

This definitly relies on a high speed connection, but allows for files, applications and anything else to be store online, accessable anywhere. Essentially, this takes the "dumb terminal" topology to the extreme -- everyone's PC becomes a dumb-terminal, and the internet itself becomes a large mass of servers (much like it already is).

Wide spread use of a system like this creates a few interesting possibilities:
1. who needs to upgrade when all the apps are run on a server? (which some processing power on the client if javascript where to be used, yes...)
2. who needs these massive HDs and memory combinations when everything is stored online?
3. don't throw out that 386... it still fits in this topology.
4. the fact remains that all of these massive computers already exist... why not apply a distributed network, such as OpenMOSIX, to the client, and use these spare cycles whenever possible?

Anyway... some random thoughts... a lot of these of the top of my head, so there may be massive holes here, but... very interesting possibilities, no?

--Jeff

MIT so beat you to it by like 6 months.
http://www.youos.com

saecula wrote:MIT so beat you to it by like 6 months.
http://www.youos.com

I already linked to this. Your post sounds derrogitory.
Look, theres already popular OS' (Windows, BSD, Linux, Unix) - but we're still trying to code our own little OS. Linux started off as a Minix clone, and look at it today!

Just because someone has done it before doesn't mean he should give up.