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ULOS 2 Update 1
It's been nearly a year since my original post about Cynosure 2. In that year a lot of progress has been made. The kernel saw a nearly complete rewrite in January (8db6b7) A decent chunk of ULOS 2's userspace is done. There have been two prealpha releases one alpha release, with a second alpha release in development. Development has slowed a bit in the past six months or so as my motivation has dwindled.
ULOS 2 is significantly better than ULOS 1 in several ways:
- Program compatibility: The ULOS 2 liblua provides a decent chunk of the LuaPosix API. This means that with a very simple wrapper script, almost all ULOS 2 programs can be run on an ordinary Linux distribution. (Possibly macOS, too, but I haven't tested that.)
- The shell: VBLS, the Vaguely Bourne-Like Shell, is wildly better than ULOS 1's bsh.
- There is full support for file permissions, even on managed filesystems.
- The OS is even more modularized, so swapping out the init system, the package manager, the shell, or even the liblua is entirely possible. All ULOS 2's configuration files are specific to ULOS 2 - so creating your own Cynosure 2-based distribution is entirely feasible.
Unfortunately, ULOS 2 is not yet ready for production use. This is partially due to the fact that there's a sneaky memory leak somewhere (though that might be OCVM's fault), and partially due to the fact that half the necessary coreutils are not yet implemented.
In its current state ULOS 2 is more or less a neat tech demo. Its pre-emptive multitasking and file permissions set it apart from virtually all other OpenComputers operating systems.
P.S. I have a website now! It's this one.