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Entries tagged 'cat:Software'

HelenOS
This entry is referencing the entry 'Alternative Operating Systems'.

HelenOS

One of those operating systems that is used for operating system research here and there. I think that's also what it was made for. The last releast was earlier this year, which makes it seem one of the more actively developed research OSs. With the release there are also prebuilt ISO for a variety of platforms including the usual, Raspberry Pi, other ARM platforms and older PCs.

There are similarities to UNIX-like systems but it is clearly not a POSIX system. Basic utilities are included as well as some basic console and graphical applications and demos. I didn't look for any additional software, yet. I'm not sure if I will use this os much more. But by booting flawlessly without any changes and effort, this is one of the more usable OSs I've tried. So I might. It has network capabilities, a basic GUI and TUI, window manager and its own shell.

The GUI is optional. Most applications run in the console mode as well, which is a TUI that mimics the GUI with its start menu. Which is good to have because the GUI is really slow to the point that the mouse pointer is lagging behind.

On my desktop PC neither a PS/2 nor a USB mouse worked. But the touchpad in my old latitude worked fine, including the second set of mouse buttons that work in almost no OS. Graphics mode worked with the appropriate resolutions automatically. Above that I haven't tested any hardware.

There are screenshots in the official wiki.

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Alternative Operating System: Haiku OS
This entry is referencing the entry 'Alternative Operating Systems'.

Haiku OS

Haiku OS is a BeOS clone. I didn't use BeOS back in the day (although I wish somebody would have showed it to me). So I'm not sure, but Haiku seems to be pretty much the same experience. But Haiku is open source, still actively developed and compatible with newer hardware. It ran relatively well on the Core2Duo PC I've tested it on. Except for the included web browser. That thing crashed. For a lot of people whether a desktop OS is usable is decided on how good of a web browser is available for it. Haiku OS Beta 3 looked promising with its WebPositive using WebKit 612.1.21. But at least on the old PC I've tested it on it wasn't usable. It was slower than imaginable and kept crashing after one or two page loads. (The simple included help pages at that. I didn't even feed it something complex, like YouTube or Google Docs.) But I've heard others hat a pretty good web experience with it. At least as long as nobody asks about security. The rest of the system is snappy enough. It's no KolibriOS, but on any x86 or x86_64 from the last ten years it should be as fast as anyone wishes their OS to be and much older computers run it just fine. There seems to be a not so small community of users and developers. Every new Beta that is released comes closer to a desktop OS that has everything that people ask about/for. (Let's not talk about big games people are familiar with.) And because of the growing community and the fact that the 32 bit version can still run many applications compiled for the original BeOS this is not just a small OS with theoretical goals bigger than its community. It's really usable already and it looks to me that it has good chances of becoming more important in the future. I'm not sure if I'd have said that five years ago. It's moving slowly (compared to Windows and Linux), but consistently towards its goals.

Edit 2024: The have been two new alpha releases since I wrote about Haiku here. It is definitely capable of being an everyday desktop OS even though the release candidate's version labels are modest. The biggest change recently has been that GTK has been ported to Haiku, meaning that a large number of graphical applications becomes available or portable. Applications that have been written with other operating systems in mind. This has been demonstrated with Inkskape and GIMP. But many more applications will follow, I'm sure. I suspect that this also means that Firefox or some fork of it will be the web browser most people will use on Haiku. It certainly makes it more usable as ther main OS for many people.

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Alternative Operating System: Essence
This entry is referencing the entry 'Alternative Operating Systems'.

Essence

This is one I'm continuasly disappointed to not have been able yet to get running on real hardware. I like what I've seen. But I can't get it to boot, as do others. I don't know too much about the internals of Essence. But it seems to be relatively far in develpment. There is a sleek GUI with tabbing windows in the look of early Chromoium browsers, which looks very inviting, if only I could get it to even try to boot on any computer. The focus has not been on making the OS actually boot on real hardware so far. And unfortunately there has been no release since 2022 and no update to the code for over a year. So I stopped hoping that it might be working soon. I was looking forward to getting to know a knew OS that doesn't take a Unix-like approach and has nice tabbing windows.

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Alternative Operating System: Sortix
This entry is referencing the entry 'Alternative Operating Systems'.

sortix

Sortiix is one of the more mature hobby OSs. In fact, the first time I booted it I checked that it really isn't "just" a Linux distribution that's trying to hide that fact on the surface. And it isn't. Sortix is a Unix-like, POSIX compliant OS with it's own kernel, system tools and libraries. It contains packages that have been ported from Debian. But all the most interesting core components are implemented anew.

Sortix has made steady progress over like 15 years. That's probably the biggest difference between it and similar hobby OSs. Version 1.0 was released in 2016. Even in that form it is really usable. It boots without any issues on real hardware. It's stable, comes with all the core unix tools you'd expect, but it didn't have a GUI and network support, yet. It switched to nighly releases after that. Since then, features have been added to the point that not many things separate it from being as useful for daily usage as HaikuOS.

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Alternative Operating Systems

A few years ago I became interested in operating systems that are positioned off the main stream; in other words: That are not Linux, macOS or Windows but still usable as a desktop OS. And since BSD is so well known, I exclude it from the list of systems I will write about here, too. I've started to write about alternative OSs over two years ago. But I didn't find the time and energy to actually look at much and write about it at that time. I've decided to start anew with this entry and put my reviews, tests and introductions of OSs under the topic top:Software:Alternative Operating Systems. You may ignore everything that I've previously written about this topic.

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Alternative Operating System: MikeOS
This entry is referencing the entry 'Alternative Operating Systems'.

MikeOS

A very limited and simple operating system written in assembler for 286 computers (and newer compatible architechtures, obviously). Pretty much what I would imagine as a successful outcome if I would write one to see that I can do it. It works, there's a text editor, a game, you can list, edit and execute files. Not much more though at first glance. I didn't look into writing additional software for it myself, yet. There are many forks of MikeOS. Most of them named after the forker and not under active development. It's a project I'd look into if I'd want to learn x86 assembler. Simple, not looking like any other OS I've seen.

MikeOS is neither UNIX-like in any way nor is it similar to CP/M or DOS. It is closer to being a BASIC interpreter with a program menu. But there is a bit more to it. Everything is in the same text mode in VGA resolution. After booting, you get a box with list of menu items in pointing to submenus or executable programs. Among those programs are a BASIC interpreter, some simple games, a text editor and a file browser. That's about the gist of what you get. It's all very simple and fast. Enough to write your own applications or scripts. And it all fits on a single 3.5" HD floppy. There are third-party applications to be found on the internet. But almost all that I stumbled upon were part of MikeOS forks.

Next to the menu there is also a command line with a very small list of commands. To be honest, from a user point of view, I don't know what to do with it.

There are quite a few forks. It seems to be a great hobby project. And because it's all relatively simple it's a project you can actually finish after a while, not like writing your own UNIX clone with system tools, glibc port and modern GUI. MikeOS forks usually come with some additional apps and scripts and some changes in UI. Some add to the few system calls, add their own menu. Some even started to add network support. One MikeOS fork I have to mention is MichalOS because it overhauled the UI to make it more pleasing and added quite a few simple apps and games that all seem to be very stable. It has an image viewer and a music program. TomOS is a fork that adds support for directories. ShoockOS seems to be about simplifying things even more.

On the MikeOS web site there are handbooks, resources for development and links to software projects for MiikeOS. MikeOS is a great help if you want to learn x86 assembly in a practical way without starting from zero. But it is also useful as an OS for embedded applications or simple hobby projects (interacting with Arduino, other serial communication tasks, …). And it could also be considered useful for everyday tasks if you found a home computer from the mid 80s useful.

tba: creenshots

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SBWG 0.12.8

I've recently published a new version of SBWG, my web site generating bash script. The time that I'm able to allocate to working on SBWG fluctuated a lot in the last year and when I do work on it, I often just feel like doing one type of thing. So, when that is starting a new feature, all the other types of tasks can take on a pile that takes months to resolve. But eventually I managed to test and stabilise the features that I've added and changed, edited the README file and tried out the new version with real web sites. Well, testing could be more professionel, but it's okay for a hobby project, I think.

It's been well over a year since I wrote a blog entry about what's new in SBWG. This entry goes through the main new things since version 0.11.1.

A big new thing, at least from the view of the author/me, is that certain options where that makes sense now support multiple arguments. For example if you've edited three entries and want to re-generate just those three, you don't have to run the script three times but rather define the entries like this: sbwg -e ENTRYNAME_1 ENTRYNAME_2 ENTRYNAME_3. The same goes for pages, tagpages, entry attachments and galleries. This doesn't just make it easier and quicker to generate just some changed pieces of content. It also allows the usage of shell globbing (like *, ? and […]) and brace expansion ({…}). For example you can now regenerate all entries that are stored in one subdirectory or all entries whose names start with a vertain string of characters. Another practicle use case is to add external entries and/or to the site that are not stored in the respective directories in the web site's input directory. Using option -E/-P on the contents of an entire directory creates HTML files in the web site's output directory that look like any other of the web site's pages, but without integrating them in the structure of categories and other tags.

There is now a way to create a custom menu in the navigation bar without writing any code in the settings file of a web site. By using the new 'menu:' tag type in the header of a page or entry source file, the page or entry will get added to the menu. This allows for a list of pages you want to link to from the site's navbar, or a nested tree of interesting blog entries. The tag can be used similarly to the 'topic:' tag with the main difference that it doesn't add the entry or page to a list of entries with that topic, but rather directly in the navigation bar. In the default style set that is a drop down menu like the list of categories, authors, languages and topics. But it is just an unordered list, so it can be styled like any web site menu.

The default style set has changed a bit over the year. It basically looks the same but it's a bit cleaner now and is split into more file more logically. It will become even cleaner in the future though. It now also makes use of the new possibility to present the list of categories in the navigation bar in the form of a tag cloud. Audio attachments are better to look at now, especially when there are several audio files attached to an entry. Image attachments are can now be previewed in a modal without loading the (large) original file and without leaving the page. This almost gallery-like display is about as far as I'd like to go without starting to use JavaScript in the default styleset. Some parts of a web site generated with SBWG are now collapsible/expandable. The parts with this new feature are: entry attachments, entire entries on tagpages, entire entries on their own pages, the custom menu, the category list, topic list, language list and author list in the navbar and the entire navbar. By default all of those things are extanded upon page lead and collapsible by clicking/tapping on their titles. But you can add a setting in your settings file for each of those types of things to be collapsed upon page load and expandable by cliking/tapping on them.

Another thing that behaves similarly is content warnings. Hiding the content of an entry, or parts of it, could always be done by hand, e.g. by adding a <details> and <summary> tag pair to the body of the entry. But it is now easily possible by adding a warn: tag to the header of an entry. For example adding warn:This entry contains spoilers. to an entry header results in the entire content being hidden behind a collapsed <details> tag. Initially visible is only the summary "This entry contains spoilers. (click to open)". The default style set makes this warning line very visible but dunking it into a strong red. If the entry has attachments, those will be collapsed and their title marked in red, too. Both the entry content and its attachments will be collapsed by default if the entry has a warn: tag, independently of what your settings for those parts is in the settins file.

New special tagpages: If there are entries that have a language tag and others don't have one, 'nolang.html' will be created that lists all entries that don't have a language tags. Similarly, if at least one entry on the blog has an author tag, but other entries don't, 'noauthor.html' is created and linked to from the navigation bar.

RSS feeds are now created for every tagpage. That means visitors can now subscribe to individual topics or categories or authors or languages. It also means a longer generation time for a complete regeneration process. But permanent caching reduces that to an acceptable amount. Other feed formats are still not created because I reckon that writing those will be particularly fun and satisfying. So I want to get to that when more of the less interesting todo bullet points are done.

Many small changes make web sites with different structures than mine cleaner. Empty directories or menu entries aren't created. There are new hooks for the various different new functions and loops which a user might want to hook into. Various changes around the default language being used for RSS feeds and HTML documents in order to abide by the standards. Many bugs around all sorts of things have been fixed. The logging option works pretty reliable now. It may still be completely removed one day because it's a large chunk in the code, makes the script slower when enabled and can now be entirely replaced by redirecting output from the script on the shell level. The new flags 'hideinfeeds', 'noshow', 'nogal', 'noatts' and 'noheader' control how and where entries are presented and which parts are visible. See the README for descriptions of those flags.

Reading these update blog posts shouldn't be seen as a replacement for reading the CHANGELOG file. If you have a SBWG web site and consider updating SBWG, at least check the CHANGELOG for lines marked with ! since your current version. That makes it much much less likely that you miss something that you should change upon updating SBWG. I mean, I don't think anybody except me uses any version of SBWG. But I've always approached this project working as if it would be used by others in order to produce something that is practically usable without reading and understanding the codebase first.

The list of things that I'd like to do with SBWG is still long and includes heavy changes on how content is placed in the website's input directory. I reckon that it would take me something like 10 - 16 years to get there is I would continue advancing through the todo list at the pace at which I have in the last year. But if I would loose interest at any point along this path, I could feel okay for at least have gotton as far as testing and publishing version 0.12.8 because it's getting closer to looking how I want it to look in regards to the results it produces.

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SBWG 0.11.1

I'm glad to have this version done and published. Even though it has new features compared to the last published version, I've used it enough to feel relatively comfortable saying it is also more stable and has fewer bugs than the last version. There are known bugs still left. But those aren't new.

Caching options and settings are slowly getting a bit elaborate, but also close to what I imagined them being able to do. There are new cachegroups and parts of entries can now be chosed as individual cachegroups, giving the user more control over what is cached and what caches are used. The lifetime of caches can now be set to make sure that no matter how the caching options are used, no outdated content, tags, attachments, etc. will stay on the web site for too long because cache files have been forgotten to be purges. The cache lifetime can be chosen from 1 second to unfinite. The directory used for persistant caches can now be chosen via command line option. I think the caching options are now in a state in which they can seriously be used reliably. Changes to existing cachegroups, like in previous versions, will probably not be made anymore. Just more cachegroups will be added.

The README file has grown a lot. Not only from new features and options. It's now also more complete. A lot of bugs have been fixed. And some general little code quality improvements took place. The stylesheets of the example web site have been improved a bit.

The messaging and logging system has been completely rewritten. It's not really an important part of the script and strictly doesn't matter for its functionality at all. But I decided to have a messaging system and a logging option that doesn't rely on shell redirects. So I did want to redo it properly. Different message types can now be redirected using file descriptors. The option parser has also been party re-written. It's approaching a state in which it's close to what I think personally a complete option parser for Bash should be like.

Alternate styles can now be defined in a web site's settings file. That way alternate style sheets will be offered to the web browser. If the browser supports alternate style sheets, the visitor can select from them to view the page in a different style. There is now an option to change the tagstyle, enabling a web site to have tags of the same type grouped for a more readable look of the entries' headers. Tags now show in parenthesis the number of entries that carry that tag. The number of file attachments is also displayed below entries.

The options for generating a single entry, page or gallery that is not located in the input directory/isn't actually part of the web site can now be used. They were very buggy or nonexistant before. Entries (and other items) with duplicate names are handled in defined ways now. Text files can now be used as file attachments to entries. But if the script determines one to look like a SBWG source file, it is omitted/not displayed/not linked to.

There are still big plans for future versions. Small and big features as well as a complete re-thinking of how the input directory is structured. Nicer looking web sites, more flexible command line options, more options for speeding up the script in cases where a complete website is updated/re-built. A pause like the one before this release will probably occur more often in the future.

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