OSDev.org

Hi all,

I have been browsing the web to find the source code to the older versions of the SkyOS kernel.
I believe that older versions (up to V3.x.x) were open source and after that SkyOS went closed source.

The sad thing is that these older kernel versions are nowhere to be found.

Does anybody have a copy of these older kernel sources lying around? If so, i'd like to have a peek at them

Thanks in advance and i'll be crossing my fingers

As far as I can see it was never open source, although older binaries were distributed free of charge. What makes you think it was open source?

iansjack wrote:As far as I can see it was never open source, although older binaries were distributed free of charge. What makes you think it was open source?

I think the very earliest releases from the 90s were open source, long before any of the really interesting stuff happened.

@iansjack:
There are several sources that make me believe that. For example if you read: https://software.fandom.com/wiki/SkyOS
"Szeleney's full-time job was in automation programming, and he already had a fair understanding of operating system design. But he continued to use SkyOS as a learning device, releasing four versions under an open source license.
The project reached the height of its popularity in 2004, when Szeleney decided to close the source of SkyOS and begin work on the fifth version."

That combined with the fact that I once had the source code on my laptop a few years back, but lost it when transferring to a newer one. So I know it exists .

@klange:
True, it's not the latest and greatest but there were a few things in there that I remember that i'd like to have another look at.

I just checked my older files, to see if I had a copy of it somewhere; I found a disk image for it, but I don't know if it has the code on it or not. I doubt it, but it may. I'll see if I can mount it, and I'll post it to GDrive later.

I've posted the archive file I had to GDrive, as promised: here. However, I also mounted the image inside it, and I couldn't find any source code for the OS in it, unfortunately.

Schol-R-LEA wrote:I've posted the archive file I had to GDrive, as promised: here. However, I also mounted the image inside it, and I couldn't find any source code for the OS in it, unfortunately.

Here's an overview of SkyOS 4.0:
- This predates all of the "interesting" features that the media in 2000s was raving about: SkyFS, the GTK and Firefox ports, the indexed system search.
- This was the first release with USB support, which I think is pretty neat as someone who still hasn't gotten around to it.
- The web browser in this release is a port of KHTML and seems to have been hacked together by removing a ton of stuff from the old KDE web browser of a similar vintage (early Konquerer). I miss those days when web browsers didn't have a million system dependencies to run their Javascript engines...
- The binary format is PE32. This is interesting because the 5.0 betas switched to ELF.
- Text rendering is with Freetype, despite the lack of antialiasing (was this still when all antialiasing was mistakenly believed to be patent infringing?)
- The CD comes with a few third-party libraries, and apparently there's runtime dynamic linking: Freetype (two versions, 2.0.8 and 2.1.4 for some reason), ffmpeg, libdvdcss, mesa...
- Pretty much nothing actually works on the "live" CD because it doesn't set up an in-memory filesystem.

I'm an old fart and a hoarder, so of course I have a copy :D

I'd love to upload it here, but this forum has an annoyingly low size limit for attachments. I hope this link works:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4s3l0cqynsw24 ... 0.zip?dl=0

Note that the archive does not contain any license information, so we have to assume that the code is proprietary.

uri wrote:I'm an old fart and a hoarder, so of course I have a copy

I'd love to upload it here, but this forum has an annoyingly low size limit for attachments. I hope this link works:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4s3l0cqynsw24 ... 0.zip?dl=0

Note that the archive does not contain any license information, so we have to assume that the code is proprietary.

Something appears to have gone wrong with your Dropbox upload, not only is the listed file size far too small (859.17 KB), but DB is giving the following error message: .zip files are supported but something went wrong. you probably should check the archive, and maybe re-upload it.

Schol-R-LEA wrote:I've posted the archive file I had to GDrive, as promised: here. However, I also mounted the image inside it, and I couldn't find any source code for the OS in it, unfortunately.

Thanks for looking up and uploading that archive. Interesting to see the huge leap between v4 and v5 .
Indeed, sadly no source code .

uri wrote:I'm an old fart and a hoarder, so of course I have a copy

I'd love to upload it here, but this forum has an annoyingly low size limit for attachments. I hope this link works:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4s3l0cqynsw24 ... 0.zip?dl=0

Note that the archive does not contain any license information, so we have to assume that the code is proprietary.

In this case, hoarding pays off ... thank you .
Is this the latest version you hoarded or do you happen to have a later version as well?

Schol-R-LEA wrote:Something appears to have gone wrong with your Dropbox upload, not only is the listed file size far too small (859.17 KB), but DB is giving the following error message: .zip files are supported but something went wrong. you probably should check the archive, and maybe re-upload it.

Weird, when I follow the link, Dropbox shows me the contents just fine. The file should have a size of 879.785 bytes and its MD5 checksum is 9b5dfe4c885dfd5caf624a51ff77a355 . If you download it and get something else, let me know - I'll send a bug report to the Dropbox folks :)

FooBar01 wrote:Is this the latest version you hoarded or do you happen to have a later version as well?

I believe this version (V.2.1.1a) is the only version of SkyOS for which the source code has ever been released. IIRC Robert originally planned to make the sources of the 3.0 line public as well - he even put up some placeholder text on his homepage, along the lines of "will be available for download soon" - but then he changed his mind.

When I try to download the archive (.zip), I get virus alerts from Windows 10.

It's basically complaining about the file TOOLS\RMHEADER\RMHEAD~1.VIR

What's up with that?

kzinti wrote:When I try to download the archive (.zip), I get virus alerts from Windows 10.

It's basically complaining about the file TOOLS\RMHEADER\RMHEAD~1.VIR

What's up with that?

Funny, according to virustotal.com that file actually contains an old DOS virus ("Tai pan"). The archive has not been modified by me in any way, so the virus must have already been in there when I downloaded it from the SkyOS website back in the day. If you want to play around with the code, it's probably best to rebuild all the executables from source.

klange wrote:Here's an overview of SkyOS 4.0:
- The web browser in this release is a port of KHTML and seems to have been hacked together by removing a ton of stuff from the old KDE web browser of a similar vintage (early Konquerer). I miss those days when web browsers didn't have a million system dependencies to run their Javascript engines...

Me too! I used to run an old Opera binary with almost no dependencies with an ancient Linux root on Plan 9's LinuxEMU. It was a bit tricky to set up, what with the separate X server process, but now I think of it, that separate X server process was a nuisance for me in real Linux too.

klange wrote:- Text rendering is with Freetype, despite the lack of antialiasing (was this still when all antialiasing was mistakenly believed to be patent infringing?)

I don't remember that. I do remember some concern about patents in TrueType's hinting bytecode. I like Freetype's auto-hinter better anyway. Some of my friends hate anti-aliasing, so maybe the author of SkyOS does too. (I could write paragraphs on it. I bought a 4k monitor so I wouldn't have to care whether antialiasing was on or off! It works.) Or it could be GTK+ 1.x not supporting it, but 2004 seems a little late for that.