Free multiple operating software for linux

J Operating System is primarily intended for programmers.
Target Users:
- Hobbiests--You used to buy computers to do programming. They didnt do much else. Windows doesnt even come with a compiler, which is ironic since Bill Gates wrote BASIC. The "J" operating system is primarily intended for programmers. Ive attempted to lower the bar, so amateurs can contribute. I hope to recreate the dynamic environment that used to exist when the Commodore 64 was around and everyone was creating odd-ball software.
- Researchers--Im sure many lab researchers still use DOS because they have to interact with hardware, which is difficult with Windows.
Main features:
- No security! You can access all ports, memory and disk blocks to your hearts content. When youre working with your own computer, security just gets in the way and makes things slow--I hate anti-virus and anti-spyware because they just slow things down. When you know you dont have a risk, have no secrets and do regular back-ups, who needs security?
- Uniformity
- There is no virtual memory and everyone is on the same address-map. You can easily communicate between tasks, passing addresses. Addresses start at a base of zero and, essentually, segment registers are not used.
- There is basically one language to learn called "C+" which is a little more than "C", but less than "C++". You dont need to learn a scripting langauge because everything uses this syntax.
- There is an extension of ASCII called "J" rich text which allows colors, links, graphics and various widgets in your documents. This format is used in source code, documents, help, menus, etc.
- Support for compressed, encrypted and contiguous files.
- FAT32, FAT12 and ISO9660 filesystems.
- Blazing-fast compiler which can recompile everything in 5 seconds. It doesnt optimize.
- All source code is included and its still around a Meg.
Hardware:
- PS/2 mouse and keyboard
- VGA graphics
- Some hard drives. Must be on the primary or secondary IDE controller and support LBA28. Drives of 120Gig are the limit.
- Some CD-ROM/DVD drives, including burning.
- Some floppies. Just 1.44Meg and not all types.
- No USB support yet
- No network support yet
- ASCII printers on the parallel port are supported.

DEX Extensible Operating System is an operating system specifically designed for educational and research use. DEX Extensible Operating System allows for the dynamic reconfiguration and customization of various system services using concepts found in extensible operating systems.
It aims to create an operating system design thats easy to understand while having features that are common in todays modern operating systems. Unlike other small operating systems, it is powerful enough to support simple applications that require multithreading and file management.
Its architectural design, with the help of Aspect-Oriented programming, enables easy modification and extensibility. It was developed in C and runs on PCs with 80386 processors or higher.
Enhancements:
- This version is released with a floppy image and the kernel source code.
- The release contains peformance enhancements, source code clean-ups, and a makefile for use with GNU make.

Inferno is a compact operating system designed for building distributed and networked systems on a wide variety of devices and platforms.
Inferno was originally developed at Bell Labs (the research division of Lucent Technologies).
Inferno Operating System is a well-designed, economical operating system particularly suitable for use in networked devices such as advanced telephones, hand-held devices, TV set-top boxes, and many other embedded applications.
Inferno can run in native mode on an embedded system or in emulation mode under many different operating systems. Inferno has many features in common with Plan 9.
Cross-Platform Portability
Inferno can run as a user application on top of an existing operating system or as a stand alone operating system. Most of the popular operating systems and processor architectures are supported:
Host Operating Systems:
- Windows NT/2000/XP
- Irix
- Linux
- MacOS X
- FreeBSD
- Solaris
- Plan 9
Supported Architectures:
- Intel x86 (386 & higher)
- Intel XScale
- IBM PowerPC
- ARM StrongARM (ARM & Thumb)
- Sun SPARC
Inferno also runs as a plug-in under Internet Explorer version 4 and higher. Each Inferno system presents an identical environment to the applications, irrespective of the underlying host OS or architecture, allowing the developer to work with a truly homogeneous environment across multiple different platforms.
Portable Applications
Inferno applications are written in Limbo, a modern, safe, modular, concurrent programming language with C-like syntax. It is more powerful than C but considerably easier to understand and debug than C++ or Java. Limbo code is compiled into architecture independent byte code which is then interpreted (or compiled on the fly) on the target processor. This means that any Inferno application will run identically on all Inferno platforms.
Transparent Resources
Inferno offers complete transparency of resources and data using a simple but powerful namespace system. By representing resources as files and having one standard communication protocol, resources such as data stores, services and external devices can easily be shared between Inferno systems. A resource interface may be imported to the local system and used by the applications without them knowing, or needing to know, whether it is local or remote.
Security
High level security is an important part of the Inferno system. By using one standard protocol for all network communication, security can be focused on one point and provided at a system level. Inferno offers full support for authenticated, encrypted connections using a certificate based user identification scheme and variety of algorithms including:
- IDEA, 56 bit DES, 40, 128 and 256 bit RC4 encryption algorithms
- MD4, MD5 and SHA secure hash algorithms
A Complete Solution
Inferno is not only an operating system, it is also a complete development environment, providing all the tools necessary for creating, testing and debugging the applications that run within it.
- Acme IDE: includes editor, shell, advanced pattern matching tools & more
- Fast Compiler: with full syntax and compile time type checking
- Graphical Debugger: with full stack trace for currently executing threads
- Powerful Shell: with sophisticated scripting capabilities
- UNIX like commands: including bind, grep, gzip, mount, ps, tar, yacc...
Enhancements:
- New licence terms (a `dual licence scheme allowing use as Free Software)
- Styx revision based on 9P2000, and consequent changes to Sys
- Authentication changes
- Improved colour graphics support, including compositing
- Scalable fonts using Freetype
- Revamped Tk implementation
- Window management moved out of Tk to a separate window manager in Limbo
- Limbo: exception handling and fixed-point
- Limbo: other possible changes
- Dis VM changes
- More commands and library modules
- Better network service configuration
- /net/dns served by host and native DNS resolver
- Hosted kernels configured from a parts list as for native kernels
- Signed modules
- Internet Explorer plug-in revised and in source form
- Expanded documentation

Amiga Research Operating System (AROS) is a portable and free desktop operating system aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS 3.1, while improving on it in many areas. The source code is available under an open source license, which allows anyone to freely improve upon it.

Goals

The goals of the AROS project is it to create an OS which:

1. Is as compatible as possible with AmigaOS 3.1.
2. Can be ported to different kinds of hardware architectures and processors, such as x86, PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc, HPPA and other.
3. Should be binary compatible on Amiga and source compatible on any other hardware.
4. Can run as a standalone version which boots directly from hard disk and as an emulation which opens a window on an existing OS to develop software and run Amiga and native applications at the same time.
5. Improves upon the functionality of AmigaOS.

To reach this goal, we use a number of techniques. First of all, we make heavy use of the Internet. You can participate in our project even if you can write only one single OS function. The most current version of the source is accessible 24 hours per day and patches can be merged into it at any time. A small database with open tasks makes sure work is not duplicated.

History

Some time back in the year 1993, the situation for the Amiga looked somewhat worse than usual and some Amiga fans got together and discussed what should be done to increase the acceptance of our beloved machine. Immediately the main reason for the missing success of the Amiga became clear: it was propagation, or rather the lack thereof. The Amiga should get a more widespread basis to make it more attractive for everyone to use and to develop for. So plans were made to reach this goal. One of the plans was to fix the bugs of the AmigaOS, another was to make it an modern operating system. The AOS project was born.

But exactly what was a bug? And how should the bugs be fixed? What are the features a so-called modern OS must have? And how should they be implemented into the AmigaOS?

Two years later, people were still arguing about this and not even one line of code had been written (or at least no one had ever seen that code). Discussions were still of the pattern where someone stated that "we must have ..." and someone answered "read the old mails" or "this is impossible to do, because ..." which was shortly followed by "youre wrong because ..." and so on.

In the winter of 1995, Aaron Digulla got fed up with this situation and posted an RFC (request for comments) to the AOS mailing list in which I asked what the minimal common ground might be. Several options were given and the conclusion was that almost everyone would like to see an open OS which is compatible to AmigaOS 3.1 (kickstart 40.68) on which further discussions could be based upon to see what is possible and what is not.

So the work began and AROS was born.

Fedora Linux brings you a powerful Linux operating system which is built from open source software. The Fedora Project is an openly-developed project designed by Red Hat, open for general participation, led by a meritocracy, following a set of project objectives.

The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year, with a public release schedule.

The Red Hat engineering team will continue to participate in building Fedora Core and will invite and encourage more outside participation than in past releases. By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system more in line with the ideals of free software and more appealing to the open source community.

Major Features:

1. Support for the PowerPC (PPC) architecture.
2. GCC 4.0
3. GNOME 2.10
4. KDE 3.4 includes new accessibility features. You can manage these new features in KDS Control CenterRegional & AccessibilityAccessibility.
5. Native Eclipse 3.1M6 (part of a free Java stack)
6. MySQL 4.1
7. PHP 5.0
8. Xen 2 (virtualization to run multiple versions of an OS)
9. GFS 6.1-0.pre22 (cluster file system)
10. Evince 0.2.1 (universal document viewer)
11. GDM 2.6 Includes early login capability
12. SELinux This release includes coverage for 80 new daemons by the targeted policy. There are changes to the handling of Booleans. The targeted policy is enabled by default.

Rubyripper is a secure audio-cd ripper for linux.

Through multiple times ripping the same track and correcting any differences Rubyripper tries to deliver a secure rip.

OpenPKG is a flexible and powerful software packaging facility that eases installation and administration of Unix software across several platforms.
Consolidating different vendor approaches into a unified architecture, it assists in administration of large networks previously complicated by nonconformant systems. It uses RPM to provide an additional system layer on top of the operating system.
It is fully self-contained (no RPM pre-installation is required), installs itself by means of a tricky bootstrapping procedure with minimal operating system intrusion, and supports multiple installation instances.
Main features:
- Portable across major Unix platforms.
- Available for FreeBSD 4.11/5.4/6.0/7.0, NetBSD 2.0, Sun Solaris 8/9/10, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, Fedora Core 4, RedHat Enterprise Linux 4, Novell SUSE Linux 9.3/10, Gentoo Linux 1.12.0, Mandriva Linux 10.2.
- Already known to work for IBM AIX 5.1, HP HPUX 11.11.
- Release 2.5 consists of 579 packages.
- Entirely based on Open Source software technology.
- Operating System interference minimized.
- Streamlined software packaging.
- Easy installation, updating and deinstallation of packages.
- Bundled with useful and secure package preconfigurations.
- Includes an abstracted and powerful run-command facility.
- Virtual hosting through multiple instances on a single system.
- Proxy packages for reusing packages across instances.
- Build-time package variations for maximum flexibility.
- Foundation to build self-contained environments.
Enhancements:
- This release consists of 579 selected packages which include the latest versions of all popular Unix server software.
- All software is carefully packaged for easy deployment on 19 different Unix platforms.
- The major technical efforts for this release were spent on migrating to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) version 4.0 and further improving the Solaris 10 support and adding full support for the new FreeBSD 6.0 and SUSE 10.0 platforms.

The Fedora Project is an openly-developed project designed by Red Hat, open for general participation, led by a meritocracy, following a set of project objectives.
The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software. Development will be done in a public forum.
The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year, with a public release schedule.
The Red Hat engineering team will continue to participate in building Fedora Core and will invite and encourage more outside participation than in past releases.
By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system more in line with the ideals of free software and more appealing to the open source community.
Main features:
- Support for the PowerPC (PPC) architecture.
- GCC 4.0
- GNOME 2.10
- KDE 3.4 includes new accessibility features. You can manage these new features in KDS Control CenterRegional & AccessibilityAccessibility.
- Native Eclipse 3.1M6 (part of a free Java stack)
- MySQL 4.1
- PHP 5.0
- Xen 2 (virtualization to run multiple versions of an OS)
- GFS 6.1-0.pre22 (cluster file system)
- Evince 0.2.1 (universal document viewer)
- GDM 2.6 - Includes early login capability
- SELinux This release includes coverage for 80 new daemons by the targeted policy. There are changes to the handling of Booleans. The targeted policy is enabled by default.