It's been a dream of mine for awhile. I just want to program my own Operating System that will not use a ton of resources on my computer. I just want it to run as smoothly as possible, not like all this new fancy Windows whatever stuff. I mean, fancy looks cool, but I just want to run my computer. I don't know if programming my own OS will let me run my computer faster or not, but even so, I still would like to produce something that I could call my own, even if I end up using Windows, anyway. But the reason I'm posting about it is that I'm wondering what kind of work would go into making an OS? Will I be able to program it in C or C++? Basically I want to know what it takes to build an operating system and what factors I would have to take into account. I know that it would be unbelievable hard to do, but I still want to try it out. I know I'll probably get a couple sarcastic "good luck"s, but oh well.
With c++ you can try to modify a open source Linux distribution and you can make it how you whant and distribuit it on a site IGood Luck you have to work hard
Have u programmed anything before? I'm not trying to be an ass, but you can't just wake up and say I'm going to program a OS today... I have a dream of flying a plane, but I cant wake up tomorrow, drive to my airport and jump in a plane? I have to go through training, licensing, etc. Catch my drift?
I am not trying to discourage you in any ways. Just think about it . how many Os do you know of ? You can count with your fingers. With all the great programming guys out there, if it was that easy, there would have been more no of OS. Besides you should be pretty much geniuess to build one. If you can pull one out you can be the next Bill gates or Setve Jobs. At one point of time you will need C/C++ until and unless you make your own compiler (D/D++ maybe). Before that you will need assembly language and an in and out knowledge of computer architecture. But all this said its true that if you cannot think big you wont make it big. So best of luck.
With opensource software there are a lot of different levels that you can work on an OS. If you want to do everything from scratch, you will probably need to spend a few years learning about device drivers and how the low level system interacts with the operating system. You'll probably also need to spend at least a few years learning C. From a programming standpoint, an OS isn't a good place to start. However, you can probably take an existing operating system and create a particular part of it. For example this is what OS X is. Apple took the lower level parts of an open source project and built their operating system on top of it. Using this type of approach might work well for you since the lower level programming is going to be pretty tedious--especially if you don't have a tremendous amount of experience. Also you'll get a lot further if you can start on a stable platform. If you like the visual side of things, I'd suggest looking at the GNOME or KDE project and seeing what you can do there. It sounds like that might be more along the lines of what you are interested in. You'll find a lot of good community resources and you can start out with something that works instead of spending years working on parts that you can't use until the whole thing is assembled. Another advantage of just working on the GUI aspects of Linux is that you'll have existing programs that work on the OS. If you spend the next 5 years and create a great operating system from scratch, you'll finish and then discover that you can't even browse the web until you write a web browser for you operating system. You also might checkout the opensource version of the company that sold to Palm (I'm drawing a blank right now). They had a very nice operating system and I think there is an open source group that is keeping a version of it alive. Good luck!
I'm still a student, so basically I have all the time in the world to learn. I'd like to see if I can do it from scratch, and yes, I know you can't really do anything with it unless you have programs and that it will take a phenomenal amount of work.
Yes thats the spirit. You can start by looking into the source code of opensource OS. Sites like programmersheaven.com are very good place to learn.