Submitted by Version 0.67 of Visopsys was released today, with all the usual bug fixes and tweaks plus two focus areas of improvement: the IDE/ATA disk driver has been ‘modernized’ with PCI, DMA, and 48-bit addressing support, resulting in a raw I/O performance increase of up to 700%; additionally the Disk Manager (Partition Logic) has been re-engineered and modularized to support the later addition of new disk label types, as well as improved support for MS-DOS logical partitions (moving, creating out-of-order, etc.). Downloads are here, and the change log is here.
Now if it only had 3D video support for ATI and Nvidia cards! The only thing left would be a good office suite and a browser. It’s nice to see a one-man development team making so much progress.
The only thing left would be a good office suite and a browser.
And the only thing keeping me from being a millionaire is approximately $999,999
I tried this out earlier in the month and I have to say it’s a fantastic piece of kit given that it’s a one man development team
I also recommend the disk manager as an alternative to Partition Magic (plus it’s free – can’t say fairer than that!)
Good stuff!
Edited 2007-04-03 18:09
This time round, the system works fine in VMWare. It’s very light and responsive, plus it’s got snake!
Don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but if you think this is any sort of alternative to PartitionMagic, then you are very much mistaken….
Partition logic has the following limitations:
* No hardware support for SCSI hard disks
* Does not work with some SATA hard disks
* Supports only DOS/Windows-style MBR partition tables (used on nearly all IBM PC-compatibles). No support for Sun or BSD disk labels, or EFI/GPT tables used on Itanium and Intel Mac platforms.
* Cannot format partitions as NTFS or EXT3. Currently supports FAT (12/16/32), EXT2, and Linux swap.
* Cannot resize FAT or EXT filesystems. Currently supports NTFS (Windows XP) and Linux swap.
* No hardware support for serial mice
* No hardware support for USB keyboards and mice. Currently supports only PS/2 keyboards and mice
* No hardware support for PCMCIA
These limitations are intended to be fixed in future releases.
Big shout to the author – I am sure it will get there, given time.
nick
http://visopsys.org/img/screenshots/screenshot5.jpg
I’m hardly a UI elitist or an eye-candy aficionado, but that has got to be the ugliest interface I’ve ever seen. It’s so ugly I’d be too distracted by it to actually use the OS.
Hey, haven’t you ever heard the old slogan “go ugly early”? Oops, that’s only useful when I’m at the pub! But it might also apply to GUIs as well. Give it a chance! Even ugly girls, errr I mean GUIs need lovin’
Short comings it may have, but I’d kill to have accomplished what he has.
Besides – I think it’s a little unfair to be as critical with an OS of this production size compared to the larger commercial outfits of SkyOS or Zeta
Yeah, this is just a personal project type thing.
Its pretty good for a one man show, but he should be careful not to attract a large community; he would quickly be consumed with requests and problem reports otherwise.
Edited 2007-04-03 22:45
Hi all, thanks very much for your comments. I normally try not to get involved in the discussions (though I always read all the comments, natch!) but:
Partition Logic (just Visopsys with a few modified config files) gets downloaded on the order of 20K times per week. Trust me, when there’s a bug, I sure know about it
Networking would be great.