OSDev.org

heylo!
i was thinking..you know, all the managed OS projects being undertaken currently, are all CLI. no GUI to speak of. of course, the primary consideration right now is to have a safe, stable kernel. but later, when that is achieved...then what?
do we write a completely new GUI?
i don't think that's feasible.
possible, yes.
but feasible, no.
i mean, we'd have to create an entirely .NET-based GUI library...man, that would take ages!
so, to get back to the point at hand...
...do you guys think it's possible to port existing GUI libraries into such an OS?
like, maybe port X11, and then try and port existing linux environments such as GNOME and KDE, to have a working GUI?

this may sound downright stupid...but then, i had to ask!


thanking ye!

redoktober wrote:heylo!
i was thinking..you know, all the managed OS projects being undertaken currently, are all CLI. no GUI to speak of. of course, the primary consideration right now is to have a safe, stable kernel. but later, when that is achieved...then what?
do we write a completely new GUI?
i don't think that's feasible.
possible, yes.
but feasible, no.
i mean, we'd have to create an entirely .NET-based GUI library...man, that would take ages!
so, to get back to the point at hand...
...do you guys think it's possible to port existing GUI libraries into such an OS?
like, maybe port X11, and then try and port existing linux environments such as GNOME and KDE, to have a working GUI?

this may sound downright stupid...but then, i had to ask!


thanking ye!

I think I found yer problem, yessirre!! 'at's a big'un right der.

right.
that's the only way, then?
aww.

Doesn't porting X11 also mean POSIX support. I mean, recoding the entirety of X11 to work on the specific system calls of an OS without such support seams rather, HUGE. And look at some of the great OS's that have GUI's (or at least a great TUI) not based on X11:
- Dexos
- SolarOS
- CakeOS
- Netbas OS
- LikeOS

This is nothing like an exhaustive list, just a few pictures I came across in the screenshots thread. I believe one of these was coded in ASM but I could be wrong. And besides, a lot of people still long for the days of command line interfaces (I often use them, sometimes I prefer lynx over a big browser such as FireFox), those people probably won't have GUI's on their list or way below. I furthermore agree .NET might be a great problem in GUI (Or any) development

Well, you can write your own GUI windowing engine, then provide a compatibility layer for running X11 apps. Going with my usual design philosophy, I would just write something as flexible and low level as possible (i.e. basic blitting and line drawing, with some sort of simple secure multiplexing like windows), then build up overridable abstractions as libraries or loadable modules - at least that's my eventual plan, but that's also just me.

Still, it would probably be much easier to just set up enough POSIX compatibility to port X11/X.org itself... it all depends on if you think you have a design for a graphics system that will be more advantageous for your OS. It's kind of the same decision as between actually writing an OS from scratch or just making another Linux distro.

I would suggest manually translating some X clone (Wayland?) from C to C# or whatever you use (because real X is huge I hear). But no, Ferrariuswas right - your managed system would have to be a POSIX one (Is that even possible?), or you'd have to have some emulation or blah. And also NickJohnson has a point - why port it when you can have your own GUI?
Umm... I thought I had something to say, but no, it's been said. Then I'll conclude this by saying: fail.

At MOSA we began porting the AGG Graphics Framework to C#. We'll use this as a base for an own kind of X-Server.
Later on we're planning to provide a Wrapper around System.Windows.Forms so that some existing .NET apps can run on Mosa without any problems.

Some parts are already running inside our emulator (The theme is crap, just hacked together for testing) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEZZGkCK0Kw