MenuetOS

by LorenDB • 3 years ago

209 54 3 years ago

whalesalad• 3 years ago

This was epic! I used to bring this to school on a floppy and was absolutely shocked at the quality of the experience after booting. It's a pretty full featured desktop environment.

xyproto2• 3 years ago

It's such a pity that the 32bit version is open source and the 64-bit version proprietary.

The open source alternative is KolibriOS.

cylinder7142• 3 years ago

My understanding is that Kolibri is a hostile fork of Menuet, and that Menuet's author closed it in retaliation.

Pet_Ant• 3 years ago

KolibriOS has forked off from MenuetOS in 2004, and is run under independent development since then. All our code is open-source, with the majority of the code released under GPLv2 license.

https://kolibrios.org/en/

tredre3• 3 years ago

You are correct.

http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=22194

(MenuetOS is Ville's project)

The code was GPL, but kolibri did replace copyright headers and that was Ville's main gripe. Whether or not that breaks the GPL, I cannot say (they kept his name in the license file).

xyproto2• 3 years ago

Open source software can be forked, that's how open source works.

To me, as an outsider to these projects, making the 32-bit version open source and the 64-bit version proprietary feels hostile.

How many years should pass until it doesn't matter if a fork was "hostile" or not and only open source software remains?

CodeWriter23• 3 years ago

IJS before all those “extra layers” in operating systems we used to do stuff like escalate privilege to admin using POKE in BASIC. (OS: Oasis, later ‘c/os’ a Z80 multiuser os from the mid-80s)

mixmastamyk• 3 years ago

This was so small back in the day (one floppy I believe), that I proposed it for firmware or boot manager before EFI became ubiquitous or coreboot came along.

Wonder how that would have played out.

sitzkrieg• 3 years ago

i had similar thoughts, and in modern times "just enough for containers" would be the business i guess.

baremetal os might be it the one tho

https://github.com/ownmac/BareMetal-OS

hedora• 3 years ago

This is probably a better link:

https://github.com/ReturnInfinity/BareMetal

The one you linked to is a fork that is 83 commits behind a repo that is no longer maintained.

atan2• 3 years ago

The first time I read about Menuet OS was on Dr.Dobbs a long time ago.

velcrovan2• 3 years ago

What are boot times like?

I see a lot of text-editing environments geared towards "distraction-free, focused editing" but not a lot of innovation on an OS focused on the same experience. I would like to see such a "writing OS" that boots to a text editor in less than a second. Maybe this OS is a candidate?

mike_hock• 3 years ago

Faster than you can say "what are boot times like" from what I remember.

But it's not a practically usable OS, it's more like a study in how far you can get with pure assembly. Though if a text editor is really all you want, it might be good enough.

ianai• 3 years ago

Might be pretty close to enough with a good ssh client and terminal. It’s probably actually real time which is neat for FOSS.

pjerem• 3 years ago

It was also how far you can go running an entire OS from a diskette. And it was really impressive.

mdp20212• 3 years ago

It was said to boot in 5s twenty years ago...

The hardware compatibility list shows a promising number of machines ( http://www.menuetos.net/hwc.txt ). If you have a spare one, you could try and report. There is a chance that you will achieve a very fast boot time.

AROS (Amiga) could reboot in ~7s, ~15yrs ago. And you can do more than you can with MenuetOS. Again, today you will probably break that record.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yNIuNnBrWg

Edit:

You can see here a recent AROS booting in 3s (it is not clear if it is bare metal though):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s_TfmF-_iE

haolez• 3 years ago

It was even faster than that. I remember it being almost instantaneous. And you could even play Doom!

hotnfresh2• 3 years ago

Last time I ran it, Lakka (a Linux disto for Retroach emulation appliances) booted in 5s or less on an RPi2, to a usable graphical menu, complete with particle effects or whatever if you have that stuff enabled.

brirec• 3 years ago

I’m pretty sure that 5s time 20 years ago was on a 1.44MB floppy, too. A real floppy! Not something emulated.

tuetuopay2• 3 years ago

You can see here a recent AROS booting in 3s (it is not clear if it is bare metal though):

The virtualbox window is pretty clear to me :D

vidarh• 3 years ago

I used to have a setup where I'd boot the Linux-hosted version of AROS (so not nearly the same as booting from scratch certainly) straight into FrexxEd, and it started AROS + FrexxEd faster than my Emacs install started on the same box...

thomaslord• 3 years ago

I don't know if much innovation is really required, honestly. You probably won't find what you're looking for with Mac/Windows, but if you run a tiling window manager like i3 on Linux you'll pretty much just see a clock, some system stats, and whatever applications you have open on the screen. You can pretty easily configure the bottom bar to remove the superfluous system stats, or even the clock if you want.

Is that the kind of experience you'd look for in a distraction-free OS? If not I'd be interested to hear your ideas - I use i3 for work but manage to distract myself anyway because I always have a web browser open.

eru3• 3 years ago

I'm running XMonad on Linux, and I don't see any clock or system stats, because I don't run that. No bottom (nor top etc) bar for me.

(You can add such bars in XMonad, just like you can remove them from i3.)

prmoustache2• 3 years ago

If you truly want focused you don't even need a window manager, you aren't even forced to run x11 or wayland but if so just put your favorite text editor desktop file in /usr/share/xsessions is enough.

aidenn0• 3 years ago

On any recent PC, I find that more than half the time booting Linux to a GUI is in POST.

[edit]

And 5 seconds for DHCP if you are using dhcp

drewzero1• 3 years ago

When I used it (and Kolibri, Floppix, and QNXdemo) in the mid-2000s it was mostly down to the speed of the floppy drive. So about the same as loading Windows 10 from a conventional (spinning rust) hard drive.

eru3• 3 years ago

You don't need a new OS for that. You can do that as a Linux distribution just fine.

velcrovan2• 3 years ago

Maybe with heavy hacking, but not ready-made, at least that I’ve found. Certainly don’t seem to be any distros (in the casual searching I do periodically) that focus on 1-second boot times out of the box.

rurban• 3 years ago

Faster than the BIOS. Under a second

marttt• 3 years ago

Haven't tested recently, but FreeDOS (or SvarDOS) boots in a couple of seconds. The kernel is ridiculously minimal. From there, you could launch a text editor via autoexec.bat and voila. It is a fun system, too.

Years ago, I found a bootable USB project on Github with a tiny custom Linux kernel that only launched vi. IIRC, my computer's fan was always running full speed with it, though.

squarefoot• 3 years ago

I gave it a try many years ago and its speed was jawdropping. Too bad that a port to ARM would require a complete rewrite; those cheaper lower end *Pi-like embedded boards seem just the perfect platforms to take advantage of such a small and fast OS.

anta402• 3 years ago

If I'm not mistaken, both are written in FASM (Flat Assembler). And unfortunately FASM won't run in recent MacOSes because it's a 32-bit app. No problem with Windows/Linux, though.

astrange• 3 years ago

You can run 32-bit Windows tools in macOS with Wine.

netdoll• 3 years ago

For ARM32, RISC OS is probably the closest to the value proposition offered by Menuet, albeit with a decent amount of high level code and a lot more support from developers for applications, languages, and games.

ruined• 3 years ago

woah, what a throwback. haven't thought about this in a couple decades

jetcopter• 3 years ago

Used this 20 years ago when working on my CS degree in our assembly class and wrote a file copy utility for it as a homework assignment.

jmclnx• 3 years ago

I forgot about this OS, nice to see it still being developed. I will have to keep it in mind for use somewhere.

stephen_g• 3 years ago

Amazing this is still around! I remember playing with this back when I was playing with toy kernel development as a teenager back in the mid 2000s! It was pretty amazing to see even back then given how out of my depth I was with the little bits of assembler you needed to get to set things up (protected mode etc.) before jumping to the C entry point!

MenuetOS

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