OS Ideas

[Bunsen]

johnklos:

Why dont you try one of these? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q40

£ 545.00

There's a DIY '020 based QL clone here.

[Cammy]

I'm sorry for resurrecting an older thread, but have you tried MorphOS on your Power Mac G4? It's an exotic, alternative OS for select PPC hardware and it isn't based on Unix/Linux/BSD. You can download the Live CD ISO on the official website, you should be able to burn it to a CD and boot from it to test the OS. If you like it you can install it on your hard drive. Get it here: http://www.morphos-team.net/downloads.html

[Bunsen]

Gee, that's sure come a long way since I last glanced at it

[protocol7]

I'm just hoping it comes along a little bit further so it supports the onboard audio on my Gigabit Ethernet.

[ClassicHasClass]

MorphOS is currently my best hope for a portable Amiga. I am so, so tempted to go buy one of the 440ep Amigas but I don't have the space right now for another desktop box (maybe when I get my house, which hopefully will be in a couple months). But I could run Amiga stuff right on one of my stack of spare Power Mac laptops.

Strangely, they're targeting the PowerBooks first, not the iBooks, which is weird since the jump is smaller from the mini to the iBook. It's not a large gulf between the iBook and the PowerBook G4, but it seems a little weird. Still, that would be worth picking up an old aluminum PB for.

[John Hokanson Jr.]

If somebody were fairly talented and so inclined, I could see a command line OS (like MS-DOS or CP/M) being thrown together in about a month.

Think about it... that's definately something the mouse-centric Macintosh hasn't seen much of.

[ken27238]

I'm sorry for resurrecting an older thread, but have you tried MorphOS on your Power Mac G4? It's an exotic, alternative OS for select PPC hardware and it isn't based on Unix/Linux/BSD. You can download the Live CD ISO on the official website, you should be able to burn it to a CD and boot from it to test the OS. If you like it you can install it on your hard drive. Get it here: http://www.morphos-team.net/downloads.html

good looking stuff. I'm going to try it out this weekend

[CJ_Miller]

If somebody were fairly talented and so inclined, I could see a command line OS (like MS-DOS or CP/M) being thrown together in about a month.

Think about it... that's definately something the mouse-centric Macintosh hasn't seen much of.

I agree with this! I love many of my Mac programs, but I do not understand the appeal of "The Desktop" in Mac and Windoze... it is like training wheels on a bicycle: once one knows their way around mousing through lots of folders definitely seems like the slow and difficult way to go about things. My root disk is a folder which resides on a desktop, which is in turn really a folder on my actual root drive? How does this make any sense? I have been thinking about this lately and have concluded what is heresy in Mac and Windoze communities alike: that DOS-style console applications are the most productive user interface. Sure, they are classically ugly, but they don't need to be. If I can use my tab and cursor keys, and keyboard shortcuts, then I can fly.

I am not kind of real coder, but here are some other OSs that people have put together. They are x86 but cool just the same:
http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/movitz.html
http://www.forthos.org/
http://www.returninfinity.com/baremetal.html

[RebeccaRGB]

I've always wanted to write my own OS, but I've found as I've taken my OS and systems programming classes that it's only certain aspects of OS development that appeal to me, and the rest of it I'd rather have someone else write. The parts that particularly interest me are pretty eclectic: VM instruction sets, file system structures, UI design, application programming. Concurrency in particular is one area that scares me.

[John Hokanson Jr.]

I have much love for my Mac GUI, but think this idea would still be interesting.

The major downside to this is the fact that you'd probably have to write all new applications seeing as most (all?) Mac OS applications rely on things like QuickDraw. Similar to how you can't run Windows apps in DOS.

The good news is that you'd have a super quick command line interface that is as simplistic as MS-DOS, but doesn't have the shortsighted Real Mode limitations of x86 PCs (remember kids: "640K ought to be enough for everybody.")

Oh, and then every Mac user would call you a heathen... but hey...

[Byrd]

Doesn't anyone remember MacDOS?

[Bunsen]

... no?

[Dog Cow]

... no?

Here's a demo if you're too young to remember.