This is a fork of MenuetOS [0]. The author of MenuetOS (Ville M. Turjanmaa) does not appear thrilled about the fork and has put the 64bit version under a proprietary license [1].
> Well, they took the code and in a couple of weeks also added their own copyrights to the beginning of all kernel files, booting, multitasking, GUI, networking, drivers, all. I'm not planning to find out if it would happen again.
> Currently Menuet is the only OS written 100% in assembly with modern feature-set and it took us some time to realize this goal. This is also an easily identifiable place in the computing world.
> And like always, if somebody wants to be part of Menuet development, then just send me a message.
According to KolibriOS' site the fork happened in 2004 so it isn't like some recent move where they got the source, added the copyright and then presented everything as own work. This is mentioned in the first page of the site too.
KolibriOS is an open-source Operating System for x86 (32-bit, 586-class and above). It is entirely written in assembly (assembled with FASM). It requires only 8MB of RAM to boot. It has a TCP/IP stack and USB support. It has a graphical user interface which is actually on par with most of the "lightweight" Linux window managers, such as LXDE (but I think LXDE is probably larger than this entire OS lol). It fits on a single floppy.
I remember when I could (and did) run Linux on a 486 with 8MB of RAM and 200MB of HD. Ran X11, fvwm, emacs, Netscape. It used to be possible. These things were done in the 90s :-)
This looks really cool. The screenshot is awesome. Though I'm a bit put off by the giant Facebook logo on the homepage. I find it odd for an OS like this to organize their community on Facebook.
Sadly it's becoming more the norm to rely on other services for social interaction. The last company I worked for completely ditched forums in favor of Facebook groups for community support.
This happens a lot, but I've recently worked with a couple of clients who are trying to own the communities they built after migrating to Facebook because "that's where everybody is".
Turns out FB is capricious and has no problem pulling the rug out from under those companies and the communities they foster on Facebook without notice or recourse. Pages and groups with hundreds of thousands of followers can be wiped off FB and there's nothing your business can do about it.
If I were in their shoes, I'd just use FB as a funnel to an online property that I own and control.
But they do have forum which seems fairly active I don't see why they need to have Facebook. I am guessing it will have pretty niche crowd which probably don't frequents to fb.
The giant Facebook logo is probably from a time when Facebook was regarded with less suspicion than it is today. But if you want to avoid Facebook, you can use their good ol' phpBB forum. If you look at it more closely, the site is really a time capsule: forum powered by phpBB, documentation on MediaWiki, source code hosted on WebSVN, bug tracking powered by Mantis...
People are downvoting this, maybe because of the fact-of-the-matter'ness, but I think this is probably true, coming from someone who despises Facebook. Especially for certain age-groups, Facebook is one of the few social networks you can assume people have logins on, and (maybe especially) niche communities need to lessen friction to get people involved.
I don't know, I've never tried to create a public forum for this kind of thing, but I'd bet you'd get more activity out of facebook than some bespoke web forum or IRC/Matrix/what have you.
I see a lot of people moving away from Facebook here in Europe though. Maybe not in the US.. But about half of my friends were either never on FB or left it recently. The other half are still there. Mainly the older people in fact. The younger ones are on other stuff (like Instagram which is of course also facebook I guess)
But I don't see it as viable as a sole outreach platform for that reason.
off topic: this anti facebook stance by some people here on HN is getting ridiculous.. sad this is a comment here that apparently gets upvotes. I would say that if you do not care about Kolibri os just don't comment..
It's just not a great fit for an open source project IMO. They go to all this trouble to build something noncommercial without tracking, and then start requiring a commercial tracking platform to collaborate?
In fact one of the reasons I use HN so much is because it's not doing any of that. And because I can choose what I read (rather than Facebook's algorithms deciding what appears on my timeline). I'm sure many people come here for that reason. This'll be a reason for the many anti-facebook sentiments. Because those sentiments are one of the reasons to come here :)
I wish the authors started a crowfunding campaign to port it to ARM.
It would be a huge effort for sure (it's asm, ie rewrite just about everything from scratch) but it would pay a lot in the long run. I mean, it can be already spectacular on a mini PC, now imagine it running at these speeds on a 5x5cm $15 256MB RAM Allwinner H3, or any other similar specced, board where a Linux desktop would struggle to be useable after eating all resources. It would become an instant hit for providing ultra small systems with a fast and tight environment in which write network tools, dash boards for electronics projects with scriptable GUI primitives, etc.
Or rewrite most of it into small, quick C (or similar) - so it could be ported to other architectures easily. Overall size would be the major factor in speed and memory efficiency - rather than coding language.
Fun fact, the earliest versions of UNIX were, in fact, written in assembler, and rewritten piecewise into the bootstrapped "C" language, partially for portability (and sanity's) sake.
> a free open-source operating system written entirely in Assembly. The operating system weighs only about 3MB and will boot in less than 3 seconds even inside a virtual machine.
And it really is less than 3 seconds straight to desktop UI and ready to use immediately, incredible.
I have a laptop with NVMe on which if I setup Win10 to boot without password prompt and no BIOS test, I can have a working desktop from cold start under 2 seconds. I actually hate that kind of speed since if I want to change something in BIOS / have different startup (like OS recovery prompt for example) my F2 / Del / F8 pressing has a lot of misses.
Nowadays startup under 10 seconds is more of a hinder than a gain. My 2 cents
It is not a cold start. Actually, the fast start feature of Windows 10 allowed this feat. But in essential, it is just restoring a working session to the RAM.
IIRC, you can use a PowerShell incantation to reboot to UEFI setup. So it's not ideal, but nevertheless manageable. Most Linux bootloaders also have this feature.
People used to program big projects in assembly with no fancy IDE all the time. It's largely a matter of structure and organizational practices. A good macro assembler can go a long way.
Will always upvote this whenever it pops up on HN. Bless this OS project and sincerely hope it gets the recognition it deserves. Have it installed on an Acer Aspire netbook and it just feels right! super snappy and everything mostly works.
Cool stuff. I Love the tiny OS paradigm since i first tried puppy Linux back in 06 (?). It is super fun what you can achieve with a trimmed to the basics desktop OS. I will give it a shot sometime soon.
GEOS etc. was amazing to me when I first used it as a child — it seemed like what computing should be. I don't remember what it was like in detail, but I remember the way I felt about it then.
It seems like it would be really hard to be productive developing large projects in Assembly. Adding features/bug and security fixes seems like they would be very time consuming. What are the advantages of going this low level vs C or similar?
Of which only the mental challenge is a given. Higher language compilers are steadily (still, after all those years) improving with no end in sight. Are your assembly programming skills? Are you rewriting old code with recently learned tricks? And once a superoptimizer is used, it's game over for hand assembly.
Lots of talk about speed and size, has anyone noticed any cool aspects of the UI or basic OS metaphors? It looks pretty conventional to me, but in a little project sometimes fun ideas get put in places you wouldn't notice...
(Really I'd like to see something with the same kind of weird and divergent ideas as TempleOS but in a more accessible package)
seems like a respectable operating system. while using 7zip for distrib...
I was sure it was too much perfect to be true... 7z... I use Gnu/linux (everyday...) and I don't have 7z install... more like the kind of windows users...
Working on update: 100% complete. Don’t turn off your PC. This will take a while. Your PC will restart several times. All your files are exactly where you left them ;)
Assuming 'less than a few seconds' is actually accurate, that's not quite the case - I dual boot with a NVMe and SATA SSD, and even the NVMe (running Void Linux with runit) still takes about 30 seconds to power on. Absolutely 'fast enough' and not really something I think is worth the effort to lessen, but still not less than a few seconds.
That seems very extreme. My Arch install on an M.2 SSD boots to terminal in about 3 seconds, and X starts in about a second. The BIOS delay is roughly 5 seconds or so. Granted it's a fairly minimal install, but that shouldn't cause an order of magnitude difference.
I don't think runit has an equivalent for `systemd-analyze blame`, but something is probably slowing things down by a lot.
My firewall is an AMD 5130 (pre Zen) with 4 GB RAM and a SATA SSD, running Debian stable with sysvinit. It reboots in less than 30 seconds, which means that most of the time TCP sessions passing through it stay up.
So the OS doesn't have a login username/password? Seems like a non-starter for most. I'm using full-disk encryption on Linux using systemd-boot and my OS boots pretty much as fast as this too.
This is a fork of MenuetOS [0]. The author of MenuetOS (Ville M. Turjanmaa) does not appear thrilled about the fork and has put the 64bit version under a proprietary license [1].
This is not criticism, just a statement.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS [1] http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?p=216272#216272
> Well, they took the code and in a couple of weeks also added their own copyrights to the beginning of all kernel files, booting, multitasking, GUI, networking, drivers, all. I'm not planning to find out if it would happen again.
> Currently Menuet is the only OS written 100% in assembly with modern feature-set and it took us some time to realize this goal. This is also an easily identifiable place in the computing world.
> And like always, if somebody wants to be part of Menuet development, then just send me a message.
According to KolibriOS' site the fork happened in 2004 so it isn't like some recent move where they got the source, added the copyright and then presented everything as own work. This is mentioned in the first page of the site too.
So they released the code open source and then were mad about someone using the source?
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KolibriOS is an open-source Operating System for x86 (32-bit, 586-class and above). It is entirely written in assembly (assembled with FASM). It requires only 8MB of RAM to boot. It has a TCP/IP stack and USB support. It has a graphical user interface which is actually on par with most of the "lightweight" Linux window managers, such as LXDE (but I think LXDE is probably larger than this entire OS lol). It fits on a single floppy.
I remember when I could (and did) run Linux on a 486 with 8MB of RAM and 200MB of HD. Ran X11, fvwm, emacs, Netscape. It used to be possible. These things were done in the 90s :-)
fvwm is still updated, and it still consumes very few resources. Apart from Netscape, nothing is stopping you from recreating that experience, heh.
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8 MB (and constantly swapping)
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Indeed, my first desktop with GNU/Linux (Slackware 2.0) run on a similar configuration, just with one of the first Pentiums.
That exact setup, except s/emacs/vim, was my setup starting in 1996. Wow, 25 years ago.
I think even 4MB was possible back then
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I often wished they would put a little os like this as firmware and boot menu.
Does it have any games ?
http://www.kolibrios.org/en/screen
http://websvn.kolibrios.org/listing.php?repname=Kolibri+OS&p...
This looks really cool. The screenshot is awesome. Though I'm a bit put off by the giant Facebook logo on the homepage. I find it odd for an OS like this to organize their community on Facebook.
Sadly it's becoming more the norm to rely on other services for social interaction. The last company I worked for completely ditched forums in favor of Facebook groups for community support.
This happens a lot, but I've recently worked with a couple of clients who are trying to own the communities they built after migrating to Facebook because "that's where everybody is".
Turns out FB is capricious and has no problem pulling the rug out from under those companies and the communities they foster on Facebook without notice or recourse. Pages and groups with hundreds of thousands of followers can be wiped off FB and there's nothing your business can do about it.
If I were in their shoes, I'd just use FB as a funnel to an online property that I own and control.
Yeah even open-source projects, like HomeAssistant moved to discord :(
Matrix would be a much better choice IMO.
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But they do have forum which seems fairly active I don't see why they need to have Facebook. I am guessing it will have pretty niche crowd which probably don't frequents to fb.
http://board.kolibrios.org/
The giant Facebook logo is probably from a time when Facebook was regarded with less suspicion than it is today. But if you want to avoid Facebook, you can use their good ol' phpBB forum. If you look at it more closely, the site is really a time capsule: forum powered by phpBB, documentation on MediaWiki, source code hosted on WebSVN, bug tracking powered by Mantis...
I can understand. The maintainers might want to focus on maintaining their project, not the social network infrastructure for their community.
Matrix.org
It seems from the past somehow.
The code is in svn. I think it's all relative.
No it's in assembler.
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They could be using github or gitlab for their source code repository and then use gitter.im for the community perhaps.
Gitter.im is a poor substitute for IRC, imo.
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There is no better way to get engagement than Facebook these days. People don’t sign into forums on websites like they once did,
People are downvoting this, maybe because of the fact-of-the-matter'ness, but I think this is probably true, coming from someone who despises Facebook. Especially for certain age-groups, Facebook is one of the few social networks you can assume people have logins on, and (maybe especially) niche communities need to lessen friction to get people involved.
I don't know, I've never tried to create a public forum for this kind of thing, but I'd bet you'd get more activity out of facebook than some bespoke web forum or IRC/Matrix/what have you.
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I see a lot of people moving away from Facebook here in Europe though. Maybe not in the US.. But about half of my friends were either never on FB or left it recently. The other half are still there. Mainly the older people in fact. The younger ones are on other stuff (like Instagram which is of course also facebook I guess)
But I don't see it as viable as a sole outreach platform for that reason.
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People don't sign into FB just for this.
off topic: this anti facebook stance by some people here on HN is getting ridiculous.. sad this is a comment here that apparently gets upvotes. I would say that if you do not care about Kolibri os just don't comment..
It's just not a great fit for an open source project IMO. They go to all this trouble to build something noncommercial without tracking, and then start requiring a commercial tracking platform to collaborate?
In fact one of the reasons I use HN so much is because it's not doing any of that. And because I can choose what I read (rather than Facebook's algorithms deciding what appears on my timeline). I'm sure many people come here for that reason. This'll be a reason for the many anti-facebook sentiments. Because those sentiments are one of the reasons to come here :)
You would be better suited on Reddit with your bashing
I wish the authors started a crowfunding campaign to port it to ARM. It would be a huge effort for sure (it's asm, ie rewrite just about everything from scratch) but it would pay a lot in the long run. I mean, it can be already spectacular on a mini PC, now imagine it running at these speeds on a 5x5cm $15 256MB RAM Allwinner H3, or any other similar specced, board where a Linux desktop would struggle to be useable after eating all resources. It would become an instant hit for providing ultra small systems with a fast and tight environment in which write network tools, dash boards for electronics projects with scriptable GUI primitives, etc.
Or rewrite most of it into small, quick C (or similar) - so it could be ported to other architectures easily. Overall size would be the major factor in speed and memory efficiency - rather than coding language.
Fun fact, the earliest versions of UNIX were, in fact, written in assembler, and rewritten piecewise into the bootstrapped "C" language, partially for portability (and sanity's) sake.
And then port it to RiscV too ;)
> a free open-source operating system written entirely in Assembly. The operating system weighs only about 3MB and will boot in less than 3 seconds even inside a virtual machine.
And it really is less than 3 seconds straight to desktop UI and ready to use immediately, incredible.
I have a laptop with NVMe on which if I setup Win10 to boot without password prompt and no BIOS test, I can have a working desktop from cold start under 2 seconds. I actually hate that kind of speed since if I want to change something in BIOS / have different startup (like OS recovery prompt for example) my F2 / Del / F8 pressing has a lot of misses.
Nowadays startup under 10 seconds is more of a hinder than a gain. My 2 cents
It is not a cold start. Actually, the fast start feature of Windows 10 allowed this feat. But in essential, it is just restoring a working session to the RAM.
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IIRC, you can use a PowerShell incantation to reboot to UEFI setup. So it's not ideal, but nevertheless manageable. Most Linux bootloaders also have this feature.
How fast is it if you disable fast startup (which is essentially hybernation)?
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Kolibrios does this from a floppy or usb drive, not a NVMe.
How does one program something like this directly in assembly?
Do you use an IDE that makes things easier?
I remember doing very simple programs in asm during college, but it wasn't anywhere near this complex.
Any resources or articles that touch on this topic would be appreciated!
Check out FASM (https://flatassembler.net)
Start with this https://gpfault.net/posts/asm-tut-0.txt.html
Thanks!
I'll check it out
Try learnasm.net, or the chibiakumas youtube channel.
They also released an (affordable!) book recently, covering several architectures.
People used to program big projects in assembly with no fancy IDE all the time. It's largely a matter of structure and organizational practices. A good macro assembler can go a long way.
That fancy IDE was called Turbo Assembler and DevPac.
Assembly is a skill learned through practice, much like any other language.
Check the project’s wiki. There are several examples there.
Love it, even has a web browser!
https://board.kolibrios.org/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=2315
Finally, some simple, lightweight, non-patronizing software. Definitively going to try it out soon.
Looks like it is using Netsurf Browser (http://www.netsurf-browser.org).
Nice! This might make this viable for thin client applications.
Has anyone tried this?
I believe there's a VNC client as well.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22873298
Will always upvote this whenever it pops up on HN. Bless this OS project and sincerely hope it gets the recognition it deserves. Have it installed on an Acer Aspire netbook and it just feels right! super snappy and everything mostly works.
Its my new BeOS5 :)
Have you tried Haiku?
for sure!
Cool stuff. I Love the tiny OS paradigm since i first tried puppy Linux back in 06 (?). It is super fun what you can achieve with a trimmed to the basics desktop OS. I will give it a shot sometime soon.
For those who don't want to try it, here's the boot time. - https://youtu.be/j2KKkyBIXfA
Or you can try it online: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=kolibrios
Reminds me a bit of PC GEOS / GeoWorks Ensemble / Breadbox Ensemble from the 90s.
GEOS etc. was amazing to me when I first used it as a child — it seemed like what computing should be. I don't remember what it was like in detail, but I remember the way I felt about it then.
Interesting to see how developers are making old hardware very useful.
This will make huge impact on people who can’t afford high end devices
They should implement a WASM container.
Need to know more about the web browser.
It seems like it would be really hard to be productive developing large projects in Assembly. Adding features/bug and security fixes seems like they would be very time consuming. What are the advantages of going this low level vs C or similar?
Speed
Mental challenge
Of which only the mental challenge is a given. Higher language compilers are steadily (still, after all those years) improving with no end in sight. Are your assembly programming skills? Are you rewriting old code with recently learned tricks? And once a superoptimizer is used, it's game over for hand assembly.
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Unfortunately modern computing requires Chrome, which runs comfortably in 32GB.
Lots of talk about speed and size, has anyone noticed any cool aspects of the UI or basic OS metaphors? It looks pretty conventional to me, but in a little project sometimes fun ideas get put in places you wouldn't notice...
(Really I'd like to see something with the same kind of weird and divergent ideas as TempleOS but in a more accessible package)
seems like a respectable operating system. while using 7zip for distrib...
I was sure it was too much perfect to be true... 7z... I use Gnu/linux (everyday...) and I don't have 7z install... more like the kind of windows users...
WHY THE HELL did you use 7z... :Ð
> Have you ever dreamed of a system that boots in less than few seconds from power-on to working GUI?
You mean every OS these days with a SSD?
Working on update: 100% complete. Don’t turn off your PC. This will take a while. Your PC will restart several times. All your files are exactly where you left them ;)
Windows drives me mad with this stuff any time I have to use it.
I'm baffled by people still claiming "desktop Linux hasn't arrived" when they put up with this shit.
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Windows boots pretty fast. MacOS and iOS are dog slow and take well over a minute (dunno about M1).
iOS: booting iOS is pretty much moot since this is in fact for devices that remain on most of the time for weeks until the next upgrade.
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At least if said OS is Solus or maybe Arch Linux, Clear Linux. These in particular can be crazy fast and literally boots in maybe three secs or so.
Assuming 'less than a few seconds' is actually accurate, that's not quite the case - I dual boot with a NVMe and SATA SSD, and even the NVMe (running Void Linux with runit) still takes about 30 seconds to power on. Absolutely 'fast enough' and not really something I think is worth the effort to lessen, but still not less than a few seconds.
That seems very extreme. My Arch install on an M.2 SSD boots to terminal in about 3 seconds, and X starts in about a second. The BIOS delay is roughly 5 seconds or so. Granted it's a fairly minimal install, but that shouldn't cause an order of magnitude difference.
I don't think runit has an equivalent for `systemd-analyze blame`, but something is probably slowing things down by a lot.
I would not put up with anything more than 10-15 seconds on my stock (but not bloated) Arch with Systemd and a cheap SSD.
I wonder what's going on.
My firewall is an AMD 5130 (pre Zen) with 4 GB RAM and a SATA SSD, running Debian stable with sysvinit. It reboots in less than 30 seconds, which means that most of the time TCP sessions passing through it stay up.
How much RAM do you have installed? That can significantly affect your boot time.
Maybe try systemd, the boot times are legitimately quicker.
So the OS doesn't have a login username/password? Seems like a non-starter for most. I'm using full-disk encryption on Linux using systemd-boot and my OS boots pretty much as fast as this too.
Well my dad could beat up your dad.
(Enjoy this for what it is)