It's now been just over a month since this iteration of the Renraku
project began. In that time, we've made monumental progress in
effectively every way. We're up to 4 developers and a designer (see
the pretty logo?), we've started to solidify the actual design of the
codebase and how it's going to function in the future, and we're
steadily pushing toward being a usable OS. We have a very long path
ahead of us, but we're iterating quickly.
Today, we're proud to announce the release of Renraku OS version 0.2
alpha, codenamed "The Way Up".
What's new:
- Services – allow the interface to be decoupled from the implementation and provide a model for drivers, filesystems, network servers, etc.
- Contexts – allow applications (Capsules, in Renraku terminology) to access services, and allows nesting such that you can run a Capsule in a sandbox where you provide filtered services, e.g. transparent proxying, nested windows, etc.
- Mouse support – Renraku now supports PS/2 mice via a simple service interface.
- VGA and general video interface – We can now use the latest in video technology (320x200 VGA, of course) in Renraku applications, even features double buffering. Progress is underway by one of our developers to build a basic GUI, but we have a few example apps.
- BCL improvements – We've been gradually implementing various collections (ArrayList, Queue), text helpers (StringBuilder), and other pieces of the BCL, as we make the development process higher and higher level.
- Compiler improvements – Inheritance, enums, interface implementation, method overloading, and many other things now work perfectly. There are now only a few key components (reflection and generics being the two big ones) missing before the compiler is effectively functionally complete.
- Bootable ISO building – You can now build bootable ISOs along with the kernel image.
- New apps to test out our new functionality:
- 'exclaim' – Example nested Context application, turning your '1's into '!'s by hooking the keyboard service. Screenshot
- 'draw' – Simple bouncing box VGA demo. Screenshot
- 'mouse' – Control a box cursor with your mouse, changing the colors with the click of a button. Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2
- 'logo' – Renders our logo in beautifully dithered 256 color VGA. Screenshot
You can get a bootable ISO or check out the tree at Github. We'd love to hear what you think; drop by our IRC
channel, #renraku on irc.freenode.net. If you run into
any bugs, feel free to throw them on our issue tracker.
You can also see the complete screenshot gallery as well as a few shots of Renraku running on real hardware.
We've had fun building it, I hope you have fun playing around with it.
Happy Hacking,
- Cody Brocious (Daeken)