Free operating systems for computers 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.

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.

KIWI Image System provides a complete operating system image solution for Linux supported hardware platforms as well as for virtualisation systems like Xen Qemu or VMware. The KIWI architecture was designed as a two level system. The first stage, based on a valid software package source, creates a so called physical extend according to the provided image description. The second stage creates from a required physical extend an operating system image. The result of the second stage is called a logical extend or short an image.
A normal installation process is starting from a given installation source and installs single pieces of software until the system is complete. During this process there may be manual user intervention required. However an operating system image represents an already completed installation encapsulated as a file and optionally includes the configuration for a specific task. Such an operating system starts working as soon as the image has been brought to a system storage device no matter if this is a volatile or non volatile storage. The process of creating an image takes place without user interaction.
This means all requirements of the encapsulated system has to be fulfilled before the image is created. According to this the so called image description tree stores all the information needed to create an image.
Main features:
- Distribution independent
- Support for virtualisation systems like Xen
- Support for deploying images over the network
- Support for VMware / Qemu images
- Support for USB-Stick systems
- Support for LiveCD/DVD systems
- Centralized image description based on XML
- Prebuild boot images for SUSE systems
- Prebuild PXE configuration usable with kiwi netboot images
- SUSE Linux on a 128MB flash card.. yes thats possible

System Information Data Collector is a tool for collecting information from a HP-UX operating system and some HP hardware and software. System Information Data Collector is a free software and provided by the author AS IS under terms of the GNU General Public License.

Support engineers and system administrators can use System Information Data Collector to obtain a system configuration and troubleshoot problems. To get system information System Information Data Collector script calls specified modules. The modules of System Information Data Collector are located in the modules directory.

The following modules is available in this version:

- disks
Collects disk information (default).

- lvm
Collects LVM information (default).

- etc
Collects /etc configuration files (default).

- init
Collects /sbin/init.d and /sbin/rc? scripts (default).

- logs
Collects /var/adm/syslog file and dmesg output (default).

- net
Collects network information and network device information (default).

- sw
Collects software depot information (default).

- sysconf
Collects system configuration information (default).

- mcsg
Collects HP MC/Service Guard information. This module does not run by default.

- npar
Collects npar configuration information. This module does not run by default.

- dp
Collects HP Data Protector software information. This module does not run by default.

- default
Run all default modules.

The System Information Data Collector has been tested on several HP-UX 11.11 and 11.23 hosts. There was no problems detected with software or hardware during the time the script has been running. But it is not good idea to run script on production michines, because it has not been tested in all possible HP-UX environments.

System Integrity Checker can make sure that no unauthorized changes have been made to your computer systems.
Installation:
$ tar zxvf sic-x.y.z.tar.gz
$ cd sic-x.y.z
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install
Enhancements:
- Threading support was improved.
- Support for internationalization and localization (i18n) was added.
- An XML Schema was created for the configuration file.
- Code cleanups were made.

Kaboot Linux Operating system aims to provide an operating system which you can take anywhere and has all your favourite programs on.

Kaboot operating system is avaliable as a Live CD or Live USB you can take with you anywhere.

A number of different versions are avaliable, two optimised for size or speed, one for functionality, and one science based.

All containing a host of useful programs able to boot virtually any computer (meeting the minimum requirements) from CD and USB.

Kaboot is still in active development and if you find a bug or fix, you can let me know in the forums.

Kaboot Komplete has everything an average user needs, the familiar KDE for the desktop, Open Office 2.0, Thunderbird and Firefox along with many other useful applications and a host of desktop games.

To log in username: root passwd: toor

Yet another Linux FAQ is a comprehensive FAQ about the Linux Operating System. Yet another Linux FAQ is a great document for Linux beginners to read.
This FAQ tries to help those new to Linux help themselves. It covers topics such as kernel recompilation and X Window System configuration.
Enhancements:
- The FAQ was completely redesigned, and dead links were cleaned up.