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Re: Sphere

Here is my 2 cents.

At Oregon Institute of Technology, we are wrapping up an OS course based on
the OSKit libraries. Let me put an emphasis on LIBRARIES. With OSKit, YOU
must build the kernel. OSKit provides a set of utilities to help in the
building of kernels, but in order to do this, you must know what it is you
want to build, then, as I am sure all of my students from this quarter will
attest, be willing to get down and very dirty in code (even assembler) to
understand what is going on.

Getting code to the point of having a bootable entry point is a monumental
task. OSKit has already done this for you. You do not need to spend months
researching the Intel X86 processor to do this. This, in itself, is worth
it's bits in gold. Cheers to the OSKit developers!

Everybody in the course was at least able to get the examples to boot. Many
of these students have little experience developing in a UNIX based
environment. We got projects from virtual terminals, to thread schedulers,
to file system managers, to a working 4GByte virtual memory manager.

A tip for you. Get the Mandrake 8.0 release and install it and the GRUB
bootloader (if you are doing stand-alone development). This will allow you
to compile the OSKit in native mode, then load the kernels directly as
multiboot images.

Good luck.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Grimes" <alangrimes@starpower.net>
To: <oskit-users@fast.cs.utah.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2001 6:57 PM
Subject: Re: Sphere


> Leigh Stoller:
> > So, I went and dug up your first message to the oskit list, from 2
> > years ago. I gather you have not learned much, or made much progress
> > since then.
>
> I've given more thought to this point and have concluded that the
> problem lies in the obscenely outrageous usability deficits of UNIX. I
> can't immagine how anyone could get anything done with it with a reading
> retention rate of anything less than 90%... (Mine is 20% at best; My
> strength is in understanding abstract stuff...)
>
> If I had a set of charts (much better than the one provided on the site)
> depicting the structure and intended use of OSkit, I could probably
> begin to get a handle on it. Lacking that, the texts provided are not
> sufficient for me to get anything useful done with it. =\
>
> Your list ef example kernels lacks any indication as to how they are to
> be compiled and tested... =\
>
> --
> NUKE NIGERIA!!!!  (419)
> http://users.erols.com/alangrimes/  <my website.
> Any usage of this e-mail account is subject to the terms and conditions
> specified on my website.
>
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