NOS, which OS?

[eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU ("Mark W. Eichin")]

Those of you interested in using a Unix for advanced NOS work might
want to look at "Linux", a free (source, should be fully copyleft by
Feb 1) 386 Unix implementation. It's at the 0.12 beta release stage
now, but many people are hacking on it, and are particularly looking
to add networking code. A newsgroup has been formed to discuss it
(alt.os.linux, pending proper voting on comp.os.linux). It's
reasonably SYSV and POSIX compatible, and has had most of the GNU
utils ported to it; it ships with gcc, which is used to build the
kernel as well. See the newsgroup, or anonymous ftp to TSX-11.MIT.EDU
and look in pub/linux for info (README, sources, boot disk images...)
        Once I actually have such a machine (the biggest machine I
have at home is a NEC APC, an 8088 box from about 10 years ago with 8"
drives :-) I'm certainly going to look at porting the Clarkson drivers
and whatever higher level code (NOS, karncode, etc) that makes sense
over to it. (The Clarkson drivers, for example, are written for 16bit
8086 mode, and need some change to use a 386 segment with gates
instead of direct interrupt control...) There are a number of other
people already there who have a bit of a head start.

                                _Mark_ <eichin@athena.mit.edu>
                                MIT Student Information Processing Board