[HN Gopher] Kolibri OS: fits on a floppy disk, programmed using ...
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Kolibri OS: fits on a floppy disk, programmed using interrupts
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 164 points
Date : 2023-11-30 02:25 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kolibrios.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (kolibrios.org)
| dstanko wrote:
| what's a floppy disk? ;)
| peter-m80 wrote:
| the icon from the save button
| Beijinger wrote:
| Do MiGs and Suchois run on KolibiOS?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| They mostly run on copium these days.
| Retr0id wrote:
| "programmed using interrupts" may be true but it's hardly a
| unique selling point of kolibrios
| rijoja wrote:
| It's a fork from MenuetOS, which might be interesting to check
| out as well, if you're interested in this!
| lproven wrote:
| Indeed, a hostile one AIUI, and both projects continue
| separately, which seems like a huge waste of effort to me.
|
| I would love to see a deep and knowledgeable comparison between
| them.
| rijoja wrote:
| hm ... would you know what the differences are featurewise,
| by any chance?
| Retr0id wrote:
| Perhaps I'm selling them short, but I was under the
| impression that both are hobby projects done for their own
| sake, so it's not really "wasted" effort.
| rijoja wrote:
| Well, if someone decides to fork the project in order to
| undermine the original project out of spite ...
| lproven wrote:
| Isn't hobbyist effort still effort? Human labour, being
| duplicated?
|
| This is a feature of many FOSS projects, sadly, and I don't
| really get what aspect of human nature drives it, but it
| must be something.
|
| Not counting efforts where someone forks an old version
| because they don't like where the team are taking the new
| version (Trinity vs KDE, MATE vs GNOME)...
|
| There are 2 current forks of Mandriva doing much the same:
| Mageia and OpenMandriva. (There are others but with deeper
| differences.)
|
| Claws is a fork of Sylpheed, both continuing separately.
|
| Cinnamon, the Zorin OS desktop, and GNOME Flashback are all
| doing more or less the same things with the same codebase.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Isn't hobbyist effort still effort? Human labour, being
| duplicated? This is a feature of many FOSS projects,
| sadly, and I don't really get what aspect of human nature
| drives it, but it must be something.
|
| Curiosity, Joy, learning, status, ...
| Retr0id wrote:
| The other examples you give are all software that people
| use "in the real world" as a means to solve problems. The
| value comes from using them. The developers may also
| enjoy working on them, but that's mostly incidental.
|
| I can't speak for the kolibrios contributors, but I
| imagine that to them, the value comes from the
| development process itself. They do it because they enjoy
| it. Any practical usefulness of the resulting software is
| mostly incidental.
|
| If your goal was to develop useful software in 2023, you
| wouldn't be writing pure x86 assembly within the
| constraints of a floppy disk.
| inportb wrote:
| Hobbyist effort is human labor for the hobbyist's
| benefit, not someone else's benefit.
|
| If the Kolibri OS folks experience unique enjoyment from
| developing this project that they would not obtain from
| Menuet OS, then the labor would not be duplicated.
| anthk wrote:
| - Mplayer/MPV. Mplayer works better on older machines,
| while MPV does work better in the newer ones.
|
| - FVWM from TWM. Much faster and smaller.
|
| - RXVT vs XTerm.
|
| - Slashem from Nethack. You want Discworld references, >
| Nethack 3.4.3. Fullfilling role, mons and object
| additions, Slashem.
| IlliOnato wrote:
| By this logic, playing videogames is a wasted effort,
| too.
|
| "Why all these people playing Prince of Persia fight on
| their own? Why don't they all get together and free the
| Princesse once and for all?" :-)
| WJW wrote:
| Yes! Let's settle the matter now and forever! We could
| probably solve most sports while we're at it, settle who
| is world champion once and for all!
| int_19h wrote:
| The reason why Kolibri forked is precisely because
| MenuetOS stopped being F/OSS when they made the
| transition to 64-bit while simultaneously advertising the
| 64-bit version as "the future" and 32-bit as legacy.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| Really love the wallpaper on one of their screenshots[1], anyone
| knows the source? Is it integrated into Kolibri?
|
| [1] https://kolibrios.org/i/slaid/slaid1.png
|
| EDIT1: Seems to be from an old video game called Cosmic Osmo?
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/dot_tiff/3402910182/in/photost...
|
| EDIT2: Web Archive to the rescue!
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130727123433/http://futurestac...
|
| EDIT3: Looks cute :) https://imgur.com/a/j9XAWjN
| ngoldbaum wrote:
| It's a screenshot from Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the
| Mackerel.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| Yeah, thanks! Found the name of the game at around the same
| time you answered me, and was able to access the actual
| screenshot with Web Archive. The original includes a small
| spaceship which is missing on the KolibriOS version.
| ngoldbaum wrote:
| If you like the art you should try and play Cosmic Osmo! It
| was my favorite game to play on the Performa PowerPC macs
| my elementary school had. It's a very short and silly game
| made with hypercard. The creators later made Myst using the
| same technology.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| I should, yeah, just saw that it's available on Steam :)
| Would probably be the oldest game I've ever played. Well,
| except Pong, Tetris etc.
|
| > The creators later made Myst using the same technology
|
| Tried to play Myst as a 10 year old, but wasn't smart
| enough to figure it out. Maybe Cosmic Osmo is more on my
| level ;) Really want to try it out this weekend,
| according to Wikipedia it was a pretty revolutionary
| game. Also never heard of Hypercards before today (the
| last Hypercard update was released the year I was born).
| RolloTom wrote:
| You can also find it here
| https://sid.ethz.ch/debian/kolibrios/kolibrios/res/wallpaper...
| https://sid.ethz.ch/debian/kolibrios/kolibrios/res/wallpaper...
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| Oh, very nice :) Even higher-res than what I found. Thanks!
| Didn't expect someone at ETH Zurich to host these wallpapers.
| I like this version without the spaceship a bit more.
| pmcjones wrote:
| Is it inspired by the baobab trees in Antoine de Saint
| Exupery's _The Little Prince_? See page 15 of
| https://blogs.ubc.ca/edcp508/files/2016/02/TheLittlePrince.p...
| IlliOnato wrote:
| I believe it's inspired by illustrations for Little Prince by
| Saint-Exupery. The style and pixellation are very cool,
| regardless!
| refactor_master wrote:
| This project takes a very high level concept and sells it with a
| lot of low level stuff. Yet, I'm none the wiser.
|
| _Why?_
| benj111 wrote:
| Well 8mb ram and fits on a floppy disc suggests to me old
| computers.
|
| Or as an exercise in minimalism. Why does there have to be a
| point? Can't it just be art for its own sake?
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| Because the people building it find value in doing so.
|
| Why does someone learn woodworking and make a chair when they
| can buy one from a store? Or why do they come up with their own
| design when they could follow someone else's plan?
|
| Creativity can be a lot of fun, particularly when not bounded
| by practical concerns.
| petespeed wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27249075
| Rochus wrote:
| > _KolibriOS (kernel and drivers) are written entirely in FASM
| assembly language_
|
| Nice and impressive, but don't they essentially have to start
| from scratch if the OS with apps should run on another
| architecture?
| The_Colonel wrote:
| The solution is to simply not do it. Contrary to many's
| doomerism, x86 is likely here to stay for decades/centuries.
| Rochus wrote:
| Even if so, ARM or RISC-V are more attractive architectures
| in many respects; and there are proof of concepts
| demonstrating that very lean operating systems with GUIs can
| be built with high-level languages, even with GC (see e.g.
| https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3/); so writing
| such a thing in assembler is certainly impressive, but also a
| cul-de-sac.
| BanazirGalbasi wrote:
| When the original project, MinuetOS, was started, RISC-V
| didn't exist yet and I don't think ARM was common enough.
| Even when this was forked from MinuetOS four years later
| the status quo hadn't really changed. If anything, it was
| moving more toward x86 because Apple was switching away
| from Power at the time.
|
| I don't think the lack of portability is much of a
| hindrance tbh. Portability doesn't seem to have been a goal
| of the project at all, so I'm not sure why we're judging it
| on a criteria they don't care about.
| fl0ki wrote:
| Trying it out in https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=kolibrios ,
| it's also clearly a love letter to Windows 95 in
| particular. That could be an unstated goal here, create a
| very particular PC experience under very particular
| constraints.
|
| I don't know anything about the creator but it's very
| possible that this kind of work was actually their career
| in the 90s. Most of the people who built those
| experiences are still around today, and not all of them
| have the visibility of Dave's Garage.
|
| It's incredible how much work was done. Maybe this should
| be an internet curiosity like how TempleOS has become,
| though Terry's personality was a unique factor.
| Rochus wrote:
| > _so I 'm not sure why we're judging it on a criteria
| they don't care about._
|
| It's not judging, but wondering and regretting that
| architecture independence was not a requirement.
| Personally, I have started in the late nineties to free
| my projects from the dependencies (or rather "shackles")
| of specific platforms and vendors. This has more than
| paid off. Otherwise, a large part of my many years of
| work would have been lost.
| philistine wrote:
| You're absolutely right to do it. There's one platform
| that's for all intents and purposes not portable
| (Windows) that has been extremely successful, but outside
| of that no one has survived by being wedded to only one
| architecture.
|
| I guess its a lesson for all those companies on ARM:
| always have a plan B.
| Rochus wrote:
| Well, at least there are many independent chip providers,
| and that they use the same ARM architecture (i.e. detail
| design specifications, etc.) even has the advantage that
| tools and know-how are re-useable by the companies using
| these chips (and that each of these chip providers has
| the ARM detail design at hand is even an advantage
| compared to RISC-V, where "only" the ABI is open source);
| in contrast MS is indeed a single provider keeping the
| source code of most of its products closed (which
| virtually makes it a potential "single point of failure"
| for a large market).
| broken-kebab wrote:
| There are different philosophies regarding software
| development. The project as it seems follows Chuck
| Moore's idea which says one must re-write more often (vs
| abstract away, patch over, extend above etc.), and be
| more focused on particular usages (vs betting on
| hypothetical future cases) to keep software unbloated,
| quick, and truly navigable by developers. Apparently,
| this approach is far from being popular (majority of devs
| probably doesn't even know such thing exists) because
| programmer's time has been very expensive for decades. So
| code quality, speed, and especially size became much
| lesser concern compared to time spent. But people do
| practice it as an art form in non-commercial projects,
| and to enhance their skills in optimization. Writing a
| whole OS with GUI, and apps in FASM apparently is one of
| such exercises.
| Rochus wrote:
| You can (and in some cases should) also rewrite and
| simplify code written in a plattform independent high-
| level language. And even Forth has re-usable parts not
| written in assembler (though re-use and generality aren't
| Chuck's thing).
| The_Colonel wrote:
| In some ways, ARM and RISC-V are also way less attractive
| architectures. The level of platform standardization is
| very small compared to x86. Market penetration (in personal
| computer market) is still small.
|
| By relying on x86 standardization (BIOS, VESA, ACPI...),
| KolibriOS can run on pretty much any PC without having to
| write a lot of platform-specific code. OTOH take some ARM
| machines - MacBook, PineBook, Raspberry Pi - what do they
| share in common besides ISA?
| Rochus wrote:
| Thus it's even more important that the software is
| designed for good portability.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Why is it important?
|
| Do you know authors goals? My impression is that
| portability was not their goal, and therefore it was by
| definition _not_ important.
| Rochus wrote:
| It's fair to assume portability was not their goal,
| unfortunately.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Yes, but it will likely be relegated to the legacy enterprise
| contract extortion graveyard of technologies.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Not just enterprise - industrial / embedded applications,
| retrocomputing / gaming. Did you know 386 clones are still
| produced today?
| unixhero wrote:
| Well it runs glxgears and doom. I am sold!
| rollcat wrote:
| While this is ridiculously cool, I think the project missed an
| opportunity by tying itself so tightly to x86 assembly. A system
| that is usable with 8MB of RAM? Hell yeah. Except you're not
| going to find a lot of PC hardware this under-powered; these
| kinds of systems are actually getting _more_ expensive, as they
| 're slowly getting relabeled as "vintage". You can of course run
| this on a much more powerful machine (say 1GB of RAM and maybe
| even a second core), but at that point you could also opt for a
| more featureful OS like OpenBSD or Haiku, which will actually
| make better use of the extra resources.
|
| But what if you could run Kolibri on a tiny, DIY,
| microcontroller-based computer? An ATmega or Cortex-M0, throw in
| some SRAM and I2C peripherals, run it off a couple of AA
| batteries and browse the web on _that_? That 'd be _ludicrously_
| cool.
| anta40 wrote:
| Yep. I imagine adding support for different CPU architectures
| will be... well good luck with that.
|
| Perhaps not every OS needs to be portable like Linux...
| diffuse_l wrote:
| This reminds me the time when Linus said that linux will be
| hard to port to other architectures, since it is tightly
| coupled with the 386 architecture...
| seanw444 wrote:
| Certainly would've been less easy without large community
| contributions.
| wang_li wrote:
| Just shows that he didn't have much knowledge of other
| platforms or didn't have much vision about where his
| project would go. Fact is if you squint enough every modern
| system looks like a VAX. The same abstractions fit nearly
| every architecture.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| At the time he said that he was not wrong. There were huge
| chunks of .s files that did interesting asm things.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > Yep. I imagine adding support for different CPU
| architectures will be... well good luck with that.
|
| Extremely hard indeed, probably more like a 95% rewrite.
| Might however make sense as a killer application for small
| ARM or Risc-V boards where Linux would be either overkill or
| too demanding.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Would it be possible to make a "naive port" by replacing cisc
| instructions with essentially risc microcode (almost like how
| processors work now)?
| nunobrito wrote:
| A typical ESP32 S3 nowadays comes with 4 to 8 MB of RAM. Very
| likely more. Already comes with bluetooth and Wifi for 5 to 10
| USD.
|
| Would certainly enjoy have an GUI-based OS like this running on
| it.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| Check out the Parallax Propeller, there is a GUI-based OS for
| it. And Forth, at the same time.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Doesn't look promissing, sorry. Was looking and looking,
| but where is the GUI-based OS?
|
| Nowadays we can use LVGL and C++ to write apps, or run
| script based C code using interpreters like Wrench:
| https://github.com/jingoro2112/wrench
|
| What I'm missing is an GUI-based OS like Kolibri to launch
| apps.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| ESP32 has no display hardware even if it is more powerful
| than many computers of the 80's those did come with dedicated
| graphics/display cards.
|
| Modern display signaling takes a lot of compute power simply
| due to the sheer complexity of it and even emulating
| something like VGA over I/O pins would eat most of not all
| the compute power available on an MCU.
|
| So you're essentially stuck with a terminal over the network
| with an ESP which if you again make graphical would cost more
| in rendering and stream compression than there is compute so
| you're stuck with text based terminals.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| You can run a passable GUI over SPI using displays with an
| integrated frame buffer. LVGL in particular is a GUI lib
| optimized to render strips of updated data rather than full
| frames and it performs well with such devices.
| mysterydip wrote:
| What about a use case of VMs? You could run hundreds
| potentially on a single host.
| creshal wrote:
| For that use case, you have a lot of far better specialized
| unikernels to choose from.
| dizhn wrote:
| Can you provide some examples please.
| eyberg wrote:
| I work with https://nanos.org && https://ops.city - we
| can run thousands of these on commodity hardware.
| creshal wrote:
| It's a shame that the embedded x86 market died with the Geode
| and the C7, for a while you could legitimately find fairly
| cheap embedded devices with x86 chips under the hood.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Did it, though? Apparently you can buy i586-on-a-SoC boards,
| they seem to be quite popular in the retro/vintage gaming
| community.
| rijoja wrote:
| Cool, does anyone have any recommendations?
| creshal wrote:
| Oh, that is not something you should tell me right before
| Christmas...
|
| ...but I want a link anyway
| blueflow wrote:
| > Except you're not going to find a lot of PC hardware this
| under-powered
|
| You don't need a machine with exactly 8MB. Nowadays having 1GB
| RAM is under-powered enough that you'll probably have more fun
| with Kolibri than with a regular OS.
| sedatk wrote:
| > A system that is usable with 8MB of RAM? Hell yeah.
|
| I remember finding outrageous that Linux required at least 8MB
| to run X Window System back in 1995. How far have we come.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I ran X on 4MB. It was heavily dependent on swap but it was
| just about usable for basic things especially if the
| application was a remote client.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > I think the project missed an opportunity by tying itself so
| tightly to x86 assembly.
|
| What sort of "opportunity" did authors miss? They're not a
| business.
|
| Or is writing ARM assembler necessarily more fun than writing
| x86?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > What sort of "opportunity" did authors miss? They're not a
| business.
|
| From GP:
|
| > Except you're not going to find a lot of PC hardware this
| under-powered; these kinds of systems are actually getting
| more expensive, as they're slowly getting relabeled as
| "vintage"
| The_Colonel wrote:
| I think that not having enough x86 hardware is the least of
| authors' worries ...
| Cannabat wrote:
| Yeah but it's hard to find the hardware this OS is
| designed for. There's little need for it. Compared to the
| oodles or low powered arm boards out there that would
| love this. So the missed opportunity is just that a lot
| of effort has gone into a very narrow platform that would
| probably be more appreciated on a diff platform
|
| Super cool project though of course
| yashasolutions wrote:
| the hard part here is to find a floppy disk... (or something to
| read it) but it is refreshing to see some effort done to have
| some some small size OS for general use.
| tyingq wrote:
| Fits on a floppy, doesn't require it. The download page has
| images for cdroms, memory sticks, etc.
|
| https://kolibrios.org/en/download.htm
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Any touch screen drivers for it?
| agent327 wrote:
| > Have you ever dreamed of a system that boots in less than few
| seconds from power-on to working GUI?
|
| I didn't have to dream, I actually owned an Amiga.
| layer8 wrote:
| The Workbench disk still took a minute or so to load.
| abainbridge wrote:
| Not if you had a hard drive. I can't find a decent video on
| YouTube showing how long booting from a hard drive took. Does
| anyone know of one? Otherwise I might have to get a pile of
| junk out of my loft and record a video myself. From memory,
| I'd say my A1200 with IDE disk took about 10 seconds to boot
| - from power on to sitting idle in the Workbench GUI.
|
| An early Archimedes booted directly into the GUI from ROM and
| was even faster.
| giamma wrote:
| I tried running it on MacOS Sonoma on Intel using UTM but it
| always loads to a black screen, regardless of the video settings
| I use. Did anyone have better luck with UTM?
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(page generated 2023-11-30 23:01 UTC)