Jenny’s Daily Drivers: FreeBSD 13.2

August 1, 2023 by Jenny List 28 Comments

Last month I started a series in which I try out different operating systems with the aim of using them for my everyday work, and my pick was Slackware 15, the latest version of the first Linux distro I tried back in the mid 1990s. I’ll be back with more Linux-based operating systems in due course, but the whole point of this series is to roam as far and wide as possible and try every reasonable OS I can. Thus today I’m making the obvious first sideways step and trying a BSD-based operating system. These are uncharted waters for me and there was a substantial choice to be made as to which one, so after reading around the subject I settled on FreeBSD as it seemed the most accessible.

First, A Bit Of Context

A PC with the FreeBSD boot screen — Success! My first sight of a working FreeBSD installation.

Most readers will be aware that the BSD operating systems trace their heritage in a direct line back to the original AT&T UNIX, while GNU/Linux is a pretty good UNIX clone originating with Linus Torvalds in the early 1990s and Richard Stallman’s GNU project from the 1980s onwards. This means that for Linux users there’s a difference in language to get used to.

Where Linux is a kernel around which distributions are built with different implementations of the userland components, the various BSD operating systems are different operating systems in their own right. Thus we talk about for example Slackware and Debian as different Linux distributions, but by contrast NetBSD and FreeBSD are different operating systems even if they have a shared history. There are BSD distributions such as GhostBSD which use FreeBSD as its core, but it’s a far less common word in this context. So I snagged the FreeBSD 13.2 USB stick file from the torrent, and wrote it to a USB Flash drive. Out with the Hackaday test PC, and on with the show. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: FreeBSD 13.2” →

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Slackware 15

July 10, 2023 by Jenny List 50 Comments

As a recent emigre from the Ubuntu Linux distribution to Manjaro, I’ve had the chance to survey the field as I chose a new distro, and I realised that there’s a whole world of operating systems out there that we all know about, but which few of us really know. Hence this is the start of what I hope will be a long-running series, in which I try different operating systems in my everyday life as a Hackaday writer, to find out about them and then to see whether they can deliver on the promise of giving me a stable platform on which to earn a living.

For that they need an internet connection and a web browser up-to-date enough to author Hackaday stories, as well as a decent graphics package. In addition to using the OS every day though, I’ll also be taking a look at what makes it different from all the others, what its direction and history is, and how user-friendly it is as an experience. Historical systems such as CP/M are probably out of the question as are extremely esoteric ones such as the famous TempleOS, but this still leaves plenty of choice for an operating system tourist. Join me then, as I try all the operating systems.

A Distro From The 1990s, Today

A desktop mini tower PC with monitor showing the Slackware boot screen — The Hackaday test PC gets its first outing.

When deciding where to start on this road, there was an obvious choice. Slackware was the first Linux-based distribution I tried back in 1995, I’m not sure which version it was , but it came to me via a magazine coverdisk. It was by no means the first OS that captured my attention as I’d been an Amiga user for quite a few years at that point, but at the moment I can’t start with AmigaOS as I don’t have nay up-to-date Amiga-compatible hardware.

July 2023 also marks the 30th anniversary for the distro making it the oldest one still in active development, so this seems the perfect month to start this series with the descendant of my first Linux distro. Slackware 15 comes as a 3.8 GB ISO file download for 64-bit computers, and my target for the distro was an old desktop PC with an AMD processor and a big-enough spinning rust hard disk which had been a high-end gaming system a little over ten years ago. Not the powerhouse it once was, but it cost me nothing and it’s adequate for my needs. Installed on a USB Flash drive the Slackware installer booted, and I was ready to go. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Slackware 15” →

Is MINIX Dead? And Does It Matter?

June 2, 2023 by Jenny List 51 Comments

Is MINIX dead? OSnews is sounding its death-knell, citing evidence from the operating system’s git log that its last updates happened as long ago as 2018. Given that the last news story on the MINIX website is from 2016 and the last release version, 3.3, came out in 2014, it appears they they may have a point. But perhaps it’s more appropriate to ask not whether or not MINIX is dead, but whether indeed it matters that the venerable OS appears no longer in development. It started as an example to teach OS theory before becoming popular in an era when there were no other inexpensive UNIX-like operating systems for 16-bit microcomputers, but given that its successors such as Linux-based operating systems have taken its torch and raced ahead, perhaps its day has passed.

No doubt many of you will now be about to point out that MINIX lives on unexpectedly baked into the management engine core on Intel microprocessors, and while there’s some debate as to whether that’s still the case, you may have a point. But the more important thing for us isn’t whether MINIX is still with us or even whether it’s a contender, but what it influenced and thus what it was responsible for. This is being written on a GNU/Linux operating system, which has its roots in [Linus Torvalds]’ desire to improve on… MINIX.

Read more about the tangled web of UNIX-like operating systems here.

Can Hobbyists Bring SGI’s IRIX OS Back To Life?

May 31, 2023 by Lewin Day 33 Comments

Irix was the operating system developed by Silicon Graphics from 1988 to 1998. The OS supported the company’s high-end workstations and served in many serious roles. The company cut off support for the UNIX-based OS in 2006, but now a diehard community is looking to bring the ancient codebase back to life.

SGI workstations used to cost big money before the company collapsed. It failed to make the leap to a new era when x86 architecture began to dominate the wider computing industry. Credit: Bruno Cordioli, CC-BY-2.0

While SGI’s workstations once sold for five or six figures, surviving examples can now often be had for just a few hundred dollars on eBay. The MIPS-based hardware was potent for its time, often used for 3D rendering work for video games, films, or for scientific purposes. IRIX was SGI’s own OS built specifically to support these use cases.

The IRIX Network is a hobbyist community that loves these old machines and their software. The group hopes to raise $6,500 through crowdfunding to reverse-engineer IRIX. The hope is to use those learnings to create an open-source derivative version named IRIX-32, based on IRIX 5.3, the last 32-bit version of the OS.

It’s a monumental task, but admirable nonetheless. Whether we one day see IRIX reborn, akin to what happened to AmigaOS, remains to be seen.

An Entire RISC-V Operating System In 2000 Lines

May 18, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 34 Comments

While Microsoft and Apple don’t release the source code for their operating systems, a good estimate is that it takes around 50 million lines of code to run these software behemoths. The Linux kernel alone holds around 30 million lines, with systemd containing over one million lines on its own, which doesn’t include estimates for the desktop environment or other parts of a standard installation. But millions of lines of code, or even hundreds of thousands, aren’t necessary for building a fully functioning operating system. This one sets up a complete OS in exactly 2000 lines of code.

Called egos-2000, short for Earth and Grass Operating System, the diminutive operating system is written for RISC-V computers and while it does contain most of the tools we would recognize in an OS, it was built specifically for computer science students by PhD candidate Yunhao Zhang. The slimmed-down operating system makes it possible for students to easily read and understand every feature of an operating system without it becoming too overwhelming, and can be easily used and modified to experiment with. The name itself comes from its design principles, where parts of the operating system that interact with hardware directly are part of the “Earth” layer and parts that don’t depend on hardware being placed in the “Grass” layer, with applications taking up a third layer.

The OS is available on this GitHub page under an MIT license and works on real RISC-V hardware as well as within various emulators. Building a complete operating system in so few lines of code is an impressive feat, and making it comprehensive enough to teach students with goes well beyond that accomplishment as well. Often when concepts in computer science are reduced to their bare minimum components, we end up with completely illegible (but interesting) experiments like this programming language instead.

Build Your Own Bootable Emacs Environment

April 22, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 18 Comments

An old joke is that Emacs is a text editor with an operating system included, given that its extensibility and customization often goes far beyond traditional text editors. Part of its well-earned reputation comes from being built in Lisp which allows it to be expanded to do almost anything. Despite this in-joke in the community, though, you will still need an actual operating system to run it, but not much more than that.

This project uses User-Mode Linux (UML) as a foundation to load almost nothing other than an Emacs editor. UML is a virtualization technology that allows running multiple Linux kernel instances as separate virtual machines, so once the Linux environment is started and Emacs is compiled, the virtual machine can essentially boot straight into an Emacs environment. Some tools are needed outside of the Linux kernel like mount which allows the virtual file system to access the files needed to build Emacs, but as far as lightweight or minimalist Linux distributions go this one definitely gets at least an honorable mention.

While UML is virtualization software rather than a full-fledged Linux distribution, we would expect a similarly minimalist build could easily be done with something more hardware-based like Linux From Scratch. Emacs has been around for so long and had such a wide reach that it’s difficult to imagine a world without it. Even in more modern technology like browsers, knowing a little bit about Emacs can be an extremely powerful tool.

Computers For Fun

March 11, 2023 by Elliot Williams 9 Comments

The last couple years have seen an incredible flourishing of the cyberdeck scene, and probably for about as many reasons as there are individual ’deck designs. Some people get really into the prop-making, some into scrapping old tech or reusing a particularly appealing case, and others simply into the customization possibilities. That’s awesome, and they’re all different motivations for making a computer that’s truly your own.

But I really like the motivation and sentiment behind [Andreas Eriksen]’s PotatoP. (Assuming that his real motivation isn’t all the bad potato puns.) This is a small microcomputer that’s built on a commonly available microcontroller, so it’s not a particularly powerful beast – hence the “potato”. But what makes up for that in my mind is that it’s running a rudimentary bare-metal OS of his own writing. It’s like he’s taken the cyberdeck’s DIY aesthetic into the software as well.

What I like most about the spirit of the project is the idea of a long-term project that’s also a constant companion. Once you get past a terminal and an interpreter – [Andreas] is using LISP for both – everything else consists of small projects that you can check off one by one, that maybe don’t take forever, and that are limited in complexity by the hardware you’re working on. A simple text editor, some graphics primitives, maybe a sound subsystem. A way to read and write files in flash. I don’t love LISP personally, but I love that it brings interactivity and independence from an external compiler, making the it possible to develop the system on the system, pulling itself up by its own bootstraps.

Pretty soon, you could have something capable, and completely DIY. But it doesn’t need to be done all at once either. With a light enough computer, and a good basic foundation, you could keep it in your backpack and play “OS development” whenever you’ve got the free time. A DIY play OS for a sandbox computing platform: what more could a nerd want?