[openbeos] Re: Open BeOS

Hello Michael,

IIRC, hitting space bar during the "icon" start up screen will allow you to set this as an option. I haven't had to do it in a long time. :-)

Great, I could see the boot up and safe mode options.

In the same way that the linux kernel loads and starts init which
bootstraps the rest of the GNU system, does the OBOS kernel load and
starts a bunch of daemons and then desktop?  Is there an online document
detailing the boot up process at all?

It is far simpler than that - there is a shell script. If you look in /boot/beos/system/boot, there is a script called Bootscript.

Ok, just reading it.

If the OBOS kernel is POSIX compliant, I don't see a reason why it could
not be used with the GNU system.  I'm really interested in learning what
is done better in the OBOS kernel than the Linux kernel and also the way
the OS manages processes etc etc.

It wouldn't necessarily be easy. One could fairly easily change the bootscript to take out all of the servers, write a text based terminal tool using x86 text mode and boot with that. AFAIK, though, all of the X ports use app_server and networking. So you would need at least those. Then you would need to port the linux sound system to use BeOS style drivers, CUPS, etc. It would be *way* more work than it is worth, IMHO. But it could be done.

Interesting. I was thinking more along the lines of using OBOS kernel with the GNU system.. rather than setting up OBOS in a terminal fashion.


OTOH, I guess I don't undertand what the point is. Are you asking if we use the GNU tools (gawk, etc)? Yes. Are you asking if you could put the OBOS kernel in your RedHat distro and reboot and have it work? Not a chance. Something in between?

I am only considering the kernel. I'm just interested in how the OBOS kernel works. If it is good it would be interesting to hack on it a little and try it out with the GNU system. I develop some stuff on Mandrake and Debian distros already, it would be interesting to compare OBOS kernel with linux or the NetBSD kernel.

Writing a complete replacement for BeOS5 must be a very large task.
Will OBOS take advantage of mature free software, like the GNU C library
etc?

Wherever possible, yes. For example - our font rendering is done with FreeType. At least a couple of our translators are using libXXXX from the OSS community. We build with GCC as does every application.

I noticed the gcc with BeOS5Max distro is now rather old. Has anyone tried the latest gcc3.3.1 and binutils 2.14 ? Are there patches that were needed to be applied? (I just used ver 2.9-beos-991026, which seems to be egcs version).


Kind regards


JG





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