Visopsys discussion forum

[admin]

After a number of requests from users, we've created this discussion forum for Visopsys.

Gosh, I hope someone actually uses it

[samir]

hello Andy and congratulations for this great project.
I want to know how to port other linux programes to your system. ..thanks

[andymc]

hello Andy and congratulations for this great project.
I want to know how to port other linux programes to your system. ..thanks

Hi samir, thanks very much

If you download the visopsys source, have a look at how the things in the programs/ subdirectories are built.

At this stage, everything in visopsys is still built under Linux. The compiler is given some particular directives to make it build against the visopsys header files, libraries, etc.

If you want to port a program, best thing would be to create a subdirectory under programs/ and try to build with those same compiler args. The visopsys 'C' library is not complete, so it could be that I (or you) would have to add some functions to get it working. C library functions are usually pretty simple to implement, luckily.

[luis]

Has anyone tried to use Visopsys on bochs? If so, what would be a suitable bochsrc text to configure a boot from floppy to support version 0.1?

[andymc]

Has anyone tried to use Visopsys on bochs? If so, what would be a suitable bochsrc text to configure a boot from floppy to support version 0.1?

Hi luis,

It has been tested on bochs occasionally, sometimes with success and others not. Bochs does have some funny hardware behaviour that has caused problems in the past (required a code workaround that wasn't valid for real hardware).

I haven't tried it lately, but may do before I release the full 0.7 version.

As far as I can remember, you just use the unzipped Visopsys floppy (.img) file with Bochs.

[luis]

I have tried formatting my entire hard drive and install the OS. I created a boot menu and every time I try to boot from hd0a the boot process never kicks off. I tried version 0.70 and 0.69. I tried many times but it just hasn't worked. I am just using one partition fat32. The boot menu shows up but reads "booting..." and hangs. Has anyone experience this?

[luis]

I have tried formatting my entire hard drive and install the OS. I created a boot menu and every time I try to boot from hd0a the boot process never kicks off. I tried version 0.70 and 0.69. I tried many times but it just hasn't worked. I am just using one partition fat32. The boot menu shows up but reads "booting..." and hangs. Has anyone experience this?

Hey, everyone I experimented with bochs, on my laptop and an old desktop machine. I tried installing Visopsys to my hard disk as I mentioned above, but the bootsector never installed correctly. What I ended up doing was to format the drive using the FAT 32 file system then I would mount the drive as follows:

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mount hd0a /hd0a

Then I copied the bootsector using copy-boot:

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copy-boot /system/boot/bootsector.fat32 hd0a

Then I copied the loader and operating system from the root folder:

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copy /vloader /hd0a/ 

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copy /visopsys /hd0a/

Then I copied the rest of the directories found on the root folder (docs, programs, system, etc):

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cp -R docs /hd0a/docs 

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cp -R programs /hd0a/programs 

...
etc

This worked like a charm. I was able to boot into Visopsys from the hard disk! No longer do I have to use the demo via CD-ROM. I not sure why it was not installing correctly on bochs, my laptop and desktop using the install program, via Graphics and Text mode using version 0.7-PRE, 0.69 and 0.68. Any way, if you experienced this issue too then the above method works just fine. Hope this helps!

[andymc]

Ah, excellent. I have a bug on my to-do list that the native installer (the one inside the OS) doesn't install the boot sector correctly on a FAT32 filesystem. But, I thought the utils/install.sh script - which automates those steps you showed - worked with FAT32. Did that fail for you also?

[andymc]

Oh, I think I misunderstood; you did these steps on the command line from within Visopsys, right?

That's still very helpful for debugging, thanks.

[luis]

Oh, I think I misunderstood; you did these steps on the command line from within Visopsys, right?

That's still very helpful for debugging, thanks.

Correct, I did these steps on the command line from within Visopsys after booting from CD. I noted the install.sh script after I did all these steps, but I could not use it since I do not have a linux/unix machine.