Birbla

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  • Hacker News
  • What a lovely-looking OS! Also great to hear that the project isn't aiming for infinite changes!

    Will be digging out some old hardware to test it out very soon, this is exciting!

    by vortegne
  • Love the photos of it running on 386/486 laptops. So cute!
    by phendrenad2
  • Made me think of Breadbox Ensemble, which is GEOS, and was really lovely.
    by gt0
  • Oh, we had an "enthusiast" customer back around the turn of the century who swore by this and NetZero.

    Microsoft is still doing fine, sir.

    by itomato
  • FWIW, still around and now FOSS.

    https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos

    by lproven
  • You are the right person to ask as you understand the core of the problem:

    Why all modern(ish) kernels require 4MB of ram as a hardcoded value? Is it because of the ram page size or what?

    by iberator
  • GUI looks a but BeOS inspired, but somehow even cleaner.
    by reconnecting
  • More like a Win 3.1 theme with BeOS colors and a NeXT desktop.
    by MisterTea
  • I think it's that yellow bar what it makes it look like BeOS. And maybe the right hand menu bar. But once you check a B/W version, it doesn't look like BeOS that much.
    by tecleandor
  • Good catch, the yellow and blue colors are totally inspired by BeOS :D I'm even adjusting the default VGA palette to get the right tints in 16-color mode.
    by luke8086
  • Nice! The project also has a 16-bit variant https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos, not clear if it works on 8086 IBM PC, but I'll give it a go. Been looking for a reason to power up my IBM PC again.
    by hansvs
  • Am I crazy or are the "photos" generated? I did have T1800 and it never looked like this. It had a very early very bad grayscale LCD wiht fiddly contrast control, not a perfect crisp vibrant OLED like this page shows.

    example how one looks like irl https://allegrolokalnie.pl/oferta/laptop-toshiba-t1800 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxIc_UVKxvc

    by rasz
  • Perhaps a new panel was retrofitted into it?
    by bor_real
  • All the photos are real, though it took me *lots* of time to get them somewhat right. The display on T1800 is indeed "challenging". What helped was:

    - Letting it warm for a while

    - Putting windows in the right places, because each one generates its own artifacts

    - Setting background to dark with the white pattern

    - Fiddling with the contrast knob and matching it with the right viewing angle

    - Using 2x zoom

    To be fair, the default photo app of iPhone 16 automatically reduced some of the artifacts. The only post-processing done myself in GIMP was very basic stuff like adjusting white balance, exposure and contrast.

    Here you can see a few very quick-n-dirty photos I just took for comparison - https://imgur.com/a/6Xz6vc8

    by luke8086
  • A pre-build floppy disk image would be great, so I could run it on my IBM PS/1 from a floppy.
    by Aldipower
  • For PS/1 you'll need the 16-bit version from https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos. A floppy image is provided in releases. Note you only need to copy the first 64KB, the rest is just padding for emulators.
    by luke8086
  • I'm curious what model of PS/1? My first PC was a PS/1 model 2011, with a 286@10Mhz.

    Also, there's an emulator for PS/1 machines at https://www.ibmulator.org/

    by sillywalk
  • There seems to be an 8 meg image here: https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32/releases/download/202...
    by valleyer
  • Ok, I built the floppy image now. dd'ed it on a floppy and powered my IBM PS/1 up. Despite some nasty sounds of the HDD bearings that went away after 30 seconds, the floppy does not boot on this machine. Just a black screen. 386SX-25 2MB RAM. Maybe 2MB RAM too less, but I thought at least something will happen. :-)
    by Aldipower
  • Kind of an odd statement I think, but I really like the aesthetic of early OS GUIs where you could tell half the tools were pretty much there as developer tools.
    by Waterluvian
  • I think this is fantastic! I love that the code is so clean my dumb ass can understand it despite not using C much.
    by nosioptar
  • The code is cleaner that what I was expecting from a C repo. Also, it's quite a feat to fit this into 4 MB on a 386.
    by sixothree
  • This is great, thanks for releasing your work. Very impressive.

    You may get some interest from others in the retrocomputing/permacomputing sphere if you implement an Uxn emulator; it is extremely simple and can run on very limited hardware. https://100r.co/site/uxn.html

    Vintage hardware would be a great host for Uxn programs, so I suspect this would generate some excitement.

    by iamnothere
  • Heh, the "small virtual machine" was NOT a lie! Is that less than 200 lines? Very nice!

    Now I feel like integrating that into various things....

    by sandos
  • Thank you so much! Somehow I haven't heard about Uxn before, but it seems very cool and I'll definitely look into it.
    by luke8086
  • > The only future plans are bugfixes, optimizations, and adding more apps.

    Perfect. Nice to see a platform target stability instead of constantly reinventing itself and its APIs. Definitely want to give it a go!

    by mysterydip