What OS and programming enviroment do you use?

[Specialist]

As OS developers I consider that you're all interests in the design and aspects of OS . Well, I would be interested in what IDE/Editor - Tools - and moreover, the distribution/OS that you're using and why. Personally I use FreeBSD because It's stable, powerful and I like the package mangement system.

P.S. Sorry if this is in the wrong section, and look forward hearing from you.

[Specialist]

Can I have a reply please, even one or two people briefly. I'm curious because FreeBSD is starting to annoying me with some of the errors in ports, and I want to see the views of other people. Please! One or two replies to help me see the varying views of other people would be useful.

Regards 2slick4sly.

[Dreamsmith]

Well, I use Debian myself. It's stable (even the "unstable" branch), has excellent package management (easiest OS in the world to upgrade and add/remove packages from), and has a huge library of available packages to select from (over 15000 on sid at the moment). I also use Gentoo on one machine, but it's not quite as stable and doesn't have as large a selection of packages to choose from, and I don't do any actual OS dev on that machine.

[zloba]

OS: Linux (any distro that works)
why: i prefer to control things with bash in xterms, and dislike windows, due to crashes, bloat, vulnerabilites, lack of control.

IDE: vim, bash, gcc, make.
why: very versatile.

[chris]

I run NetBSD. It's lean, clean, stable as hell and runs on anything. As for development tools, I use GCC, Vim, BSD make and CVS.

www.NetBSD.org

[2slick4sly]

Sweet, I was tempted to try NetBSD, also started reading the OpenBSD manual which looked like a disaster to set up. FreeBSD has a great community which is what I really love about it. I think I'm going to stick to it . Chris, do you do any hacking (kernel).. I know quite a few NetBSD guys that do.

[Brendan]

Hi,

I use windows 98, because I can "shutdown to DOS" and boot my OS from DOS (saves me one full reboot each time). Linux takes much longer to shutdown & boot. I also find windows is more user-friendly. *nix is more powerful (and therefore more complex), but I don't need any of it's "powerful-ness" (and therefore avoid it's complexities).

Another reason I use windows is that it crashes fairly regularly (although usually not while working on the OS). This is good because each time something crashes and wipes out the entire computer I think "my code could be better than this!" (windows becomes inspiration).

I do have Redhat Linux running on most of my machines, but rarely use it..

As for development tools I use Notepad (occasionally wordpad), NASM, Make (GCC/Cygwin's), my own utility to write boot images on floppies, Bochs (compiled into many different binaries/configurations) and occasionally Qemu.


Cheers,

Brendan

[2slick4sly]

Interesting Brandon, I remember in my Windows experience moving from 98 to XP was dredful, I missed the old GUI and the bluescreens, but it did give me more time to get bored.

[Solar]

Windows 2000 because it gives me less headaches than Linux. (No kidding.) Cygwin because it gives me GCC, binutils, make, CVS et al. in a comfortable package.

GRUB for booting, Bochs for emulating, UltraEdit for editing.

[Colonel Kernel]

I've been using Mandrake 9.2 as a guest OS in VMWare 2.0 (with no GUI whatsoever... debating whether to shell out the $$ for the VMWare 4.5) running on XP Pro. I've been using Jed in my Linux VM and Syn in Windows, but what I really want is Visual Studio Express so I can have my blessed editor here at home (work has spoiled me).

I'm using the Linux VM for OS dev because it has all the GNU stuff handy, and I don't want to trash my real machine. Oh, and I plan to use Perforce for CM (also because work has spoiled me).

[Arto]

I use the GNU toolchain (gcc, GNU make) on top of a Gentoo Linux desktop installation. Usually I develop from KDE with KDevelop or, more frequently, just a terminal window and emacs.

I'm sticking to GRUB as the bootloader, running inside Bochs configured for 4-way SMP; just installed QEMU the other day as well.

Another reason I use windows is that it crashes fairly regularly (although usually not while working on the OS). This is good because each time something crashes and wipes out the entire computer I think "my code could be better than this!" (windows becomes inspiration).

LOL ;D And it gives one an excuse to take a coffee break, too!

[crc]

I use Windows, FreeBSD, and BeOS (depends on my mood on a given day...). The dev tools are FASM and TinyCC (under FreeBSD's Linux emulation). I have a copy of GCC 3.x installed, but I don't use that for OS development.

[Dreamsmith]

I also find windows is more user-friendly.

Heh. I guess it's picky about which users it's friendly to, then. I avoid Windows because I find it too hard to use. When I wish to change how something works, rather than loading up its config file from /etc and searching for the option to change, I have to bounce around through a gazillion different dialog boxes with no way to search for any particular strings in them, and most of the time there is no checkbox for whatever I want to change. I find out that if it's changeable at all, there's some obscurely named option burried in some completely undocumented and well hidden location in the Registry, about 10 levels deep. Bah...

I've never had any trouble figuring out how to make things work under Unix on my own, be it Solaris, Linux, BSD, or even (gods help me) SCO. But the number of times I've had to Google for solutions to problems under Windows, only to find there isn't one, such an such behavior just isn't fixable, or to find instructions involving Registry hacking new values into bizarre places with upteem helpful hex digits in the name...

Bah. I assume anyone who thinks Windows is easy to use is someone who simply accepts it works the way it works and if it doesn't do what you want, you just live with it. But for anyone who actually tried to use their OS, in all my years, I've never found a more difficult to use and unfriendly OS than Windows...

I should note, however, that the GNOME desktop environment is working hard to catch up to windows in terms of user hostility. And they're gaining ground fast...

[Solar]

No offense intended, but could we keep the remarks as to the relative virtues of the host operating systems to a minimum, please?

So far this thread has been somewhat enlightening as to what programming environment people use for OSdeving (as was the intent of the original poster). I'd hate to see this thread degrade into another pro/con Win/Linux debate.

[srg]

I use WinXP (it just works, gave up with linux, don't mind FreeBSD though, BTW solar I thought you were a Gentoo fan), Cygwin (nasm, GCC, binutils) and EditPlus.

srg