luke8086
Joined 7 years ago
Karma
254
Submissions
34
Member since
Sep 18
web: https://luke8086.dev
mail: [email protected]
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Comment · 2 days ago
OP here, I just paraphrased the announcement:
> To ease the transition for new users, #NetBSD -current now includes an alternative editor to vi(1) and xedit(1) in its base system, atto(1). https://man.netbsd.org/atto.1
> It is a modeless screen-based editor similar to nano, pico, xedit, or emacs. It is only 48 kilobytes, making it suitable for inclusion in the rescue system.
I think it's fair to call it beginner-friendly, in context of BSD and vi, but maybe indeed it shouldn't be a part of the title.
Comment · 4 months ago
Yep, possibly.
In case you have DOS installed on the hard drive, you can also use GRUB4DOS [1] - just put gentleos.elf on C:\, run grub.exe, then `kernel /gentleos.elf`. You may first need to comment out any upper memory managers from config.sys. A bit of an academic exercise since the kernel still won't fit into memory.
Btw. feel free to reach out to me on my profile email. I'll be busy with work for the rest of the week, but later I may look for some workarounds to get it running on 2 megs.
Comment · 4 months ago
Thanks, so glad people like the code! I keep looking for ways to make it simpler and more obvious.
> - noticed krn_main() ends with `while (1);` [1]. I would've expected a "schedule" call or something. I assume there's no real busy loop burning CPU, maybe it's never meant to reach this code?
Yeah, `gui_main()` takes over and is not supposed to return, so the code is unreachable. The loop is just an old idiom used in such places (e.g. [1]), though I've now replaced it with a comment and a call to `halt()` to better convey the intention.
> - I'm reminded of the "bare metal OS" when I see one of the apps call `krn_*` functions directly [2].
Yeah... but at least the kernel doesn't call the apps... which it could ;^)
[1] https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/sys/x86/x86...
Comment · 4 months ago
The only AI-generated artifact is the cyberpunk wallpaper from the last photo, I'll admit that :)
Btw. the QEMU screenshots are still in the repo in https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32/tree/main/doc/appimg
Comment · 4 months ago
All the photos are real, though it took me *lots* of time to get them somewhat right. The display on T1800 is indeed "challenging". What helped was:
- Letting it warm for a while
- Putting windows in the right places, because each one generates its own artifacts
- Setting background to dark with the white pattern
- Fiddling with the contrast knob and matching it with the right viewing angle
- Using 2x zoom
To be fair, the default photo app of iPhone 16 automatically reduced some of the artifacts. The only post-processing done myself in GIMP was very basic stuff like adjusting white balance, exposure and contrast.
Here you can see a few very quick-n-dirty photos I just took for comparison - https://imgur.com/a/6Xz6vc8
Comment · 4 months ago
Oh sorry, a quick google check told me PS/1 had 286. 386SX itself should be supported, the monochrome Toshiba on the photo has 386SX/20 with 10MB RAM.
Comment · 4 months ago
Even on 2MB, you should be able to at least see GRUB, which would tell you that it can't load the kernel. Does it go blank before that? This could mean an issue with either GRUB or the floppy.
Comment · 4 months ago
Thank you so much! Somehow I haven't heard about Uxn before, but it seems very cool and I'll definitely look into it.
Comment · 4 months ago
In this context, 32-bit means the minimal requirement. You can absolutely run even the 16-bit version on a 64-bit PC, provided it has BIOS/legacy-boot mode.
It only won't work on modern pure-UEFI systems because that would require writing full stack of USB drivers for keyboard and mouse, and that would be a huge task.
Comment · 4 months ago
Good catch, the yellow and blue colors are totally inspired by BeOS :D I'm even adjusting the default VGA palette to get the right tints in 16-color mode.
Comment · 4 months ago
For PS/1 you'll need the 16-bit version from https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos. A floppy image is provided in releases. Note you only need to copy the first 64KB, the rest is just padding for emulators.
Comment · 1 year ago
Bootloader developers used to be particularly fond of Forth.
For example, for many years the FreeBSD's 3rd-stage loader used FICL (Forth Inspired Command Language) for scripting [1]. It's still supported, although in the recent years it was deprecated in favor of Lua [2].
[1] https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/tree/main/stand/forth
[2] https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/tree/main/stand/lua
Comment · 1 year ago
This was also my first thought, but looks like it's already designed to be toolkit-agnostic, like NetSurf. So it should be easy to port to fltk or anything else.
$ ls -1 fixgui_\*.c
fixgui_cocoa.c
fixgui_gtk.c
fixgui_haiku.c
fixgui_win32.c