• Mereo@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    The story behind Senerenity OS is quite amazing:

    It was October 2018 and I had just completed a 3-month rehab program at a state addiction clinic in Sweden. I was unemployed, staying with family, and had basically nothing going on.

    With no drugs or other vices to pass the time, the days seemed impossibly long. I struggled to find activities to fill them. I enrolled in school for a while, but it wasn’t for me this time either. Eventually I turned to programming, since it’s always been my big interest in life.

    Until that point, my career had been focused on web browsers (WebKit at Apple & Nokia). However, I had always been interested in low-level things so I began tinkering with some of that. I wrote a little ELF executable parser… And an Ext2 filesystem browser… And a little GUI framework with an event loop…

    Out of this tinkering, an operating system began to take shape. I chose the name SerenityOS because I wanted to always remember the Serenity Prayer. I was quite worried about my future at the time, and I figured that this name would help me stay on the good path.

    My general idea was to build my own dream system for daily use. It would be a combination of my two favorite computing paradigms: the 1990s GUI and the no-nonsense command-line of late-2000s Unix.

    Source: https://awesomekling.substack.com/p/i-quit-my-job-to-focus-on-serenityos-full-time

    • mnmalst@lemmy.zip
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      8 months ago

      Yes and they implement EVERYTHING in house. In case you haven’t heard they also started implementing a browser engine from scratch https://ladybird.dev/ just for fun. It kinda took off and they even got some nice donations, just to keep it going and see where it leads.

      The “founders” youtube channel is quit interesting. Especially the monthly update videos if you want to keep up to date with the latest developments. https://inv.tux.pizza/channel/UC3ts8coMP645hZw9JSD3pqQ

  • kuneho@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Amazing project.

    I was just trying to boot it up on bare metal yesterday, on an AMD Phenom II machine but Kernel Panic’d on not finding a device to boot from, which was a bit puzzling. Unfortunately had no time to investigate, but I won’t give up, I make it boot somehow on that PC.

    Or try to run it on a Raspberry Pi 400.

      • kuneho@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        There’s nothing like that is enabled AFAIK, I"m not even sure this board has UEFI (only Legacy BIOS). It’s an Acer Veriton M421G brand PC, with a Phenom II X4 945 CPU.

        Not even sure it’s compatible with the OS, but this boot device issue was strange, tho. (had the same problem booting up a partition manager software from floppy that is based on Visopsys)

        But will double check everything. Thanks for the tip!

          • kuneho@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            I dd-ed the image straight to the HDD. grub started and booted off from it. lots of messages of PCI devices, I guess some kind of scan. after a while the screen went white, and a bit later the logs of the kernel panic appeared at the top, with the message it could’t find a device to boot from.

            so, it seems that the kernel itself didn’t see the hdd it just booted from - standard IDE PATA disk, 120GB. Used dd from a gparted live disc.

            First, I resized the partition on the disk to the full, at the next try I left it, as-is.

            Both times the same result; the BIOS boots into Serenity, white screen, then kernel panic, couldn’t find a device to boot from.

            Thing is, there are 2 DVD drives (IDE and SATA) and a floppy drive attached to the PC, dunno if they can cause any problem. And 1GB memory.

            this was yesterday, and since then I haven’t got tieme to fiddle with it, but will. :)

  • guillermohs9@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    His coding videos are really nice to see. I don’t even understand that much, as it’s mostly C++, but the coding, the explanation, and the final feature and commit is somehow relaxing.