OSDev.org

I like linux from a few perspectives and much dislike it from other perspectives...

Writting a new OS would take a lot of time.. would end up with no drivers, programs and the like

so what I thought.. knowing that more and more ppl are using linux and that corel has its whole production directed towards linux and so many games run on lynux,

Y not changing what I dont like in linux and using the rest as a whole?

what Im up to is a different easyer to use file system, a different command line interpretter(combo of dos and unix commands to make it easyer to use)

and the much desired GUI with integrated command line

thats about exactly what I want

does Linux use OpenGL to run games???

cuz the graphic interface for new video cards is important !!!


and I guess what I just said above would mean making my own distribution...

Whats the diff between the X server, Gnome, and the like???

Do I have to write my own if I want to do the command line integrated thing??? Cuz I dont mind doing it

Now this sounds more DOABLE then doing the whole thing...

and did u know that linux already has binnaries for the IA64 arhitecture??

its pretty cool eh??

I am installing Linux on my comp... no more microsoft... no more problems!!!

I feel relieved...

Now can you give me a rundown of the distributions and what you like better

I know red hat, slackware, corel, suse, and a few more that I dont remember..

red hat is popular but I liked slackware(3.2 I think when RH 5and6 was popular) when I tried it(like 5 yrs ago)

its good to see a linux fan! heh ;D

and yes OpenGL is supported on linux

i would recommend Redhat to start off with, do not automatically log in GUI heh, use the command line more! but the gui is nice to use.

then move on to something like debian or something a little more 'advanced'

have fun!

you can find this url useful: http://www.tldp.org/

anyway, linux is a good alternative to microsoft. However, redhat is maybe not such a good choice (for me, at least).
debian is a good choice too.

if you want the power of unix + compatibility (and no games) freebsd + windowmaker is a good choice. If you want to play games, you'll have to use linux until bsd develops 3d drivers.

opengl and sdl works in both.

now, XFree is the X server for linux/bsd, and it will provide the basic funcionality so an X client can use a gui. over this library (the X library) you have to use some window manager (cde, kde, gnome, windowmaker, etc). kde and gnome demand lot of resources, plus they are not THAT stable. windowmake is simple and gets to the point. it's just a matter of personal taste.

regards.

Writing a your own shell for Linux is an interesting idea, esp. if you use what you learn from it in your own OS. Now, a simple shell for Unix is fairly simple to write; a shell is just another user application, after all. In principle, this algorithm would work:

loop forever
read in a command string
tokenize the string by whitespace
use the first token as the path name, the rest as arguments
fork off a child process
if parent process then
wait until child exits;
elseif child process then
run the file named in pathname, passing the arguments
exit when program finishes
else print out error message "File Not Found"
end loop

How one would use gets(), strtok(), fork() and exec*() to implement this is left as an excercise for the reader. On second thought, perhaps it would be easier done in Perl.

A practical shell, however, is much more complicated, especially since you apparently want to make it look more DOS-like. That's going to be quite problematic, really, but it shouldn't be impossible.

OTOH, it should be noted that it is fairly easy to use shell aliases and a bit of Perl or tcl scripting to make BASH utilities look and behave like those from DOS. Keep in mind that, the utilities like cd and ls are not part of the shell, but are standalone programs which the system rusn as applications. Their names won't be different because of a different shell; however, using an alias to refer to one of them by the equivalent DOS name is simple enough. Try putting this in your .bash_profile script: While it doesn't help with the other differences (the directory structure, for example), it could help you at least get by for a time.

thanks for the help.. thats about hte ideea.. I more want to make it like dos so windows/dos users can work with it easy, and the linux part will be left untouched..

isnt perl and tcl for CGI programing?

I did some stuff like that but servers usually wont let u use CGI.. and I prefer most just plain exes as CGI's in case of windows/dos servers...

but thats another topic