The ESP8266 Gets An OS, And It’s Familiar

May 8, 2026 by Jenny List 22 Comments

A couple weeks back we brought you news of KernelUNO, a command line shell and very simple operating system for the Arduino Uno. It’s a neat idea, so it’s hardly surprising to see someone port it to another microcontroller and add more features.

Here’s [hery-torrado], with KernelESP for the ESP8266, which takes the original idea and adds a web console, scheduled jobs, sensor rules, scripting, NTP, and a JSON API. The networking using the ESP’s built-in WiFi takes the original and makes it significantly more useful.

It’s worth suggesting that the ability to call URLs with GET data to pass things to APIs would be useful on a networked processor too, but this is already so well featured it seems rude to ask for more. Yet again though, this project has given a new life to an old chip, and we think it has a way further to go. Perhaps a port to the ESP32 would allow it to reach its full potential, or maybe for a ridiculously cheap and powerful platform, the CH32 series of chips. We look forward to see what more will come from KernelUNO.

Our original coverage can be read here.

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Going 32-Bit With SliTaz In 2026

April 30, 2026 by Jenny List 39 Comments

We’re used to seeing technologies move with the times, and it’s likely among Hackaday readers are the group who spend the most time doing that and are most aware of it. There’s one which we’ll all be aware of which has quietly slipped away for most of us almost without a word, I speak of course of 32-bit computing. For most of us that means 32-bit computing on x86 machines, and since the 64-bit x86 instruction set we all now use has been around for nearly a quarter century, its 32-bit ancestor is now ancient history.

In the world of software that means we’re now in an era of operating systems and browsers dropping 32-bit support, so increasingly keeping a 32-bit machine up to date will become a challenge. That sounds like something just painful and difficult enough to subject to a Daily Drivers piece, so just how practical is it to use a 32-bit machine for my daily work in 2026?

2005 Just Gave Me A Computer

My trusty Dell, showing the SliTaz desktop — Not looking too bad for a 21 year old laptop.

On my desk I have a Dell Latitude D610. It was made in about 2005 in the days when Dells were solidly made, and with its 1.6GHz Pentium M and 2Gb of memory it represents roughly the final throw of the dice for a 32-bit Intel laptop. Just over a year later it would have been replaced by one of the Intel Core series with the 64-bit instructions grudgingly adopted from AMD, but at the time it was a respectably useful machine.

It came into my possession about eight years ago when I used it to test the Revbank bar tab software for my hackerspace, and for the past six years it’s languished unloved in my box there. It’s got an ancient Ubuntu distro on it, so my first task is to pick a 32-bit replacement from 2026. That’s now a dwindling selection, so it’s time to start digging though some minimalist distros. With the supply of those based on mainstream distros drying up as they drop 32-bit support, it’s time to look into more esoteric offerings. This fits well with the ethos of this series, we’re all about the unusual here.

Cutting out the mainstream based distros certainly narrows the field, and out of the promising contenders in the minimalist field, I went for SliTaz. It uses Busybox and the Openbox desktop, that runs from RAM. I was looking for good application support in the repos, and this distro has the things I need. Download it, stick it on a USB stick, and let’s see what it can do. I know one thing, I wouldn’t have been able to download that ISO in five seconds with the internet connection I had in 2005. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Going 32-Bit With SliTaz In 2026” →

KernelUNO, An OS For The Arduino Uno

April 23, 2026 by Jenny List 33 Comments

If you were to point to a single device responsible for much of Hackaday’s early success, it might be the Arduino Uno. The little board from an Italian university with its easy to use dev environment changed microcontroller hacking forever, and while it’s now very much old hat, its shadow lies long across single board computing.

Just in case you thought there wasn’t much more life in that old AVR in 2026, along comes [Arc1011], with KernelUNO, describing itself a “A lightweight RAM-based shell for Arduino UNO with filesystem simulation, hardware control, and interactive shell“. It’s an OS for your Arduino, of sorts.

For flashing it to your Uno, you get a shell with some familiar looking filesystem and system commands, the ability to write to files though no editor, and a set of commands to control pins. It’s extremely basic, but you can see the potential.

If we were to speculate as to how this might become more useful then perhaps it might involve a more permanent filesystem perhaps on a flash chip. If possible, the ability to run script files containing a list of commands would also be very nice. Though we are guessing that maybe the reason these features are not in place lies in the meager specifications of an ATmega328, for which we can’t blame the developer at all. Even if it can’t be extended in this way though, it’s still a cool project.

We have to go back quite a while, but this isn’t the first time something like this has appeared on these pages.

DR-DOS Is Back, But Not Quite As We Knew It

March 15, 2026 by Tyler August 27 Comments

If you weren’t around for the early PC era, or were a little more casual about operating systems, you could perhaps be forgiven for not knowing that DOS is not synonymous with MS-DOS. MS-DOS was just Microsoft’s implementation — or rather, an implementation they purchased — of a Disk Operating System, one that was…let’s just say “inspired by” Digital Research’s CP/M.

Digital Research shot back with DR-DOS, an operating system that was both compatible with and much superior in some ways to MS-DOS. The last version was released in 1991, after Novell bought the struggling Digital Research. Now it’s back, or at least, it’s on its way back with a fully clean-room implementation by a fellow who calls himself [CheeseWeezel] on Reddit.

He’s gone so far as to purchase the trademark, so this re-creation is the official DR-DOS. In any case [CheeseWeezel]’s DR-DOS is considered version 9.0, and is currently in Beta. The clean-sheet re-implementation of DR-DOS’s API was sadly necessary due to the rather tortured history of the IP after DR was bought by Novel, who sold DR-DOS to Caldera, who briefly open-sourced the code before retracting the license and selling on. Some of you may remember a controversy where a previous rights holder, DR DOS INC, was found purloining FreeDOS code in violation of the GPL. Perhaps because of that, [CheeseWeezel] isn’t using any old code, and isn’t open-sourcing what he’s done. Right now, the beta of DR-DOS 9 is free for non-commercial use, but as is standard for EULAs, that could change at any time without warning. [CheeseWeezel] is still working full compatibility, but at this point it at least runs DOOM.

Still, given the origins of DOS in Digital Research’s early work on CP/M, it warms the heart to see what many of us thought of as the “true” DOS survive in some form in the 21st century. Arguably it already had, in the form of SvarDOS, but you can’t use that to make smug jokes about your operating system having PhD instead of a measly master’s. If you did not like DOS, we recall the joke from Mac users was that those were the degrees needed to operate the PC. Speaking of DOS, you don’t necessarily need a retrocomputer to run it.

Thanks to [OldDOSMan] for the tip!

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Haiku R1/beta5

December 11, 2025 by Jenny List 17 Comments

Back in the mid 1990s, the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system cemented the Redmond software company’s dominance over most of the desktop operating system space. Apple were still in their period in the doldrums waiting for Steve Jobs to return with his NeXT, while other would-be challengers such as IBM’s OS/2 or Commodore’s Amiga were sinking into obscurity.

Into this unpromising marketplace came Be inc, with their BeBox computer and its very nice BeOS operating system. To try it out as we did at a trade show some time in the late ’90s was to step into a very polished multitasking multimedia OS, but sadly one which failed to gather sufficient traction to survive. The story ended in the early 2000s as Be were swallowed by Palm, and a dedicated band of BeOS enthusiasts set about implementing a free successor OS. This has become Haiku, and while it’s not BeOS it retains API compatibility with and certainly feels a lot like its inspiration. It’s been on my list for a Daily Drivers article for a while now, so it’s time to download the ISO and give it a go. I’m using the AMD64 version.

Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Haiku R1/beta5” →

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: ReactOS 0.4.15

November 4, 2025 by Jenny List 32 Comments

When picking operating systems for a closer look here in the Daily Drivers series, the aim has not been to merely pick the next well-known Linux distro off the pile, but to try out the interesting, esoteric or minority OS. The need remains to use it as a daily driver though, so each one we try has to have at least some chance of being a useful everyday environment in which a Hackaday piece could be written. With some of them such as the then-current BSD or Slackware versions we tried for interest’s sake a while back that’s not a surprising achievement, but for the minority operating systems it’s quite a thing. Today’s choice, ReactOS 0.4.15, is among the closest we’ve come so far to that ideal.

For The N’th Time In The Last 20 Years, I download A ReactOS ISO

A Windows-style ReactOS desktop with a web browser showing Hackaday — It’s fair to say there are still a few quirks, but it works.

ReactOS is an open-source clone of a Windows operating system from the early 2000s, having a lot on common with Windows XP. It started in the late 1990s and has slowly progressed ever since, making periodic releases that, bit-by-bit, have grown into a usable whole. I last looked at it for Hackaday with version 0.4.13 in 2020, so have five years made any difference? Time to download that ISO and give it a go.

Installing ReactOS has that bright blue and yellow screen feeling of a Windows install from around the millennium, but I found it to be surprisingly quick and pain free despite a few messages about unidentified hardware. The display driver it chose was a VESA one but since it supported all my monitor’s resolutions and colour depths that’s not the hardship it might once have been. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: ReactOS 0.4.15” →

C Project Turns Into Full-Fledged OS

October 14, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

While some of us may have learned C in order to interact with embedded electronics or deep with computing hardware of some sort, others learn C for the challenge alone. Compared to newer languages like Python there’s a lot that C leaves up to the programmer that can be incredibly daunting. At the beginning of the year [Ethan] set out with a goal of learning C for its own sake and ended up with a working operating system from scratch programmed in not only C but Assembly as well.

[Ethan] calls his project Moderate Overdose of System Eccentricity, or MooseOS. Original programming and testing was done in QEMU on a Mac where he was able to build all of the core components of the operating system one-by-one including a kernel, a basic filesystem, and drivers for PS/2 peripherals as well as 320×200 VGA video. It also includes a dock-based GUI with design cues from operating systems like Macintosh System 1. From that GUI users can launch a few applications, from a text editor, a file explorer, or a terminal. There’s plenty of additional information about this OS on his GitHub page as well as a separate blog post.

The project didn’t stay confined to the QEMU virtual machine either. A friend of his was throwing away a 2009-era desktop which [Ethan] quickly grabbed to test his operating system on bare metal. There was just one fault that the real hardware threw that QEMU never did, but with a bit of troubleshooting it was able to run. He also notes that this was inspired by a wiki called OSDev which, although a bit dated now, is a great place to go to learn about the fundamentals of operating systems. We’d also recommend checking out this project that performs a similar task but on the RISC-V instruction set instead.