A basic OS Development question (noob)

[ckj]

i think that a lot of people would agree beacuse they would have advantages. but the linux-community will not agree. but they are not the target group.

[Solar]

Note that it is the inherent disadvantage of developing things under GPL or similar licenses, that such projects are forked every which way whenever you make an unpopular decision. Meaning, when you've done all the basics and decide to go for KDE, someone will fork your project and go Gnome instead...

[ckj]

found something:

To the Linux kernel, however, the filesystem is flat. That is, it does not (1) have a hierarchical structure, (2) differentiate between directories, files or programs or (3) identify files by names. Instead, the kernel uses inodes to represent each file.

http://www.bellevuelinux.org/filesystem.html

If by "File system hierarchy", you mean the concept of having a root directory and all other filesystems mounted under it, ie.
/
/mnt/floppy
/mnt/cdrom
/usr
/home

That is also part of the kernel, again inseperable, and also possibly part of POSIX (UNIX compliance specification) without which you would not be able to run Linux programs without rewriting every one of them. The ones that work on Windows were specifically designed to handle how Windows does the drive management, it is not simply something you can change on a whim.

The only thing that makes this less usable then Windows' method is that people are used to the concept of A:/C:/D: but otherwise it is not significantly different.

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[JoeKayzA]

Well, let's say that's the internal view of the filesystem. But I believe that those parts of the kernel which don't have to do with vfs or filesystem drivers also refer to files with their pathnames. And from the userspace perspective, every application gets the filesystem presented as a hierarchical directory tree, AFAIK.

I think when you want to use GNU software where possible, you'll probably have to stick to certain rules and agreements which make up GNU/Linux (the FHS, POSIX, the shell as the center of the system....). And yes, this is exactly what the 'common' distros (like suse, red hat, ubuntu, sorry when I forgot to mention yours ::) ) were trying to do for so long already. But all of them seem to run into a certain set of problems (which I don't want to enumerate here and now).

I believe that it is theretically possible to build something like MacOS X (at least, something comparable) on top of a linux kernel, taking advantage of the great hardware support and a lot of other useful features - but not with GNU software only. I mean, you could change the directory layout, or even hide away the unix-style filesystem tree completely, but this requires you to replace quite everything on top of the kernel: provide your own system APIs, system libraries (no more glibc), probably also your own GUI and desktop services (since X.org requires POSIX). When you ensure that these GUI services are started at the very beginning of the boot process, your user would never need to see a textmode screen again.

Although this is a very interesting thought, it is at least as much (if not more) work as writing your own operating system from scratch, and compatibility to GNU/Linux software won't be there out of the box, obviously.

cheers Joe

[ckj]

OK let's start

[ckj]

today i tried to reduce a debian installation. it should be part of the tests what is mandatory, and what do i need. now the system is dead >:(

happy installing

[Solar]

Look for "Linux from Scratch", or (more comfortable) Gentoo Linux. Both allow you to build up a Linux from the bare bones, and leave any extensions to that "skeletal" setup in your hands.

I think that will be much more successful than stripping down a "complete" distro installation. More educational, too - especially LFS.

[ckj]

thank you, i've already started with LFS in an virtual enviroment (VMWare and Virtual PC). this will allow to "rollback" to an old version without compling.

[Candy]

You could also try slackware with the expert install option, however, there's no dependency checking so you should know what you want on it and what libraries go with that. You can also strip a slackware install with swaret.

[NotTheCHEAT]

This is more of an OS-using question than that of an OS-development question. If you want to make an OS simply because you want to be able to do all that stuff, then you are probably doomed to fail. Trust me, OS dev is not fun and games.

But good luck accomplishing whatever you want to accomplish.

[ckj]

@notthecheat

so MAC OS X is'nt an OS? As I know they took a BSD basic system.

but perhaps you're right. I'm not able to develop a totally new system. My Goal is to develop a very homogeneous system with a GUI and without a (visible) shell.

The last two weeks i had a lot of fun with LFS (linux from scratch). and i'm sure that i'll need a few month to build my first working enviroment.

CKJ