OSDev.org

Long time lurker with Zero actual experience in OSDev, but this is my first post!

So I recently came into acquaintance with a little beauty - a test computer! Since it's fairly out of date compared to the stuff that I use on a day to day basis, but still has some decent hardware, I figured if anyone wanted any specific testing on that hardware, I could help!

By tester... I don't mean look for bugs all the time, but maybe try out features of the OS as a normal user. If your OS is supposed to be tuned to users, then this would be pretty nice!

I'll be gathering the Specs exactly tomorrow, but if I remember, I think it uses something Intel DualCore. I think 4 gigs of memory, and ... That's it.

G'day friends!

PS: Hey Max, I've been following your OS for a bit, it's looking pretty nice so far!

You know, I started reading this and was about to be a cremudgeonly old b*stard and roll my eyes, but you caught me short when you mentioned usability testing.

I think you did yourself a disfavor with the thread title -- most people here have tons of old and new boxes sitting around to run their builds on. What should be the main focus here is that you're someone who's interested in this but isn't a dev and would be interested in doing QA for people who are interested. And I would bet I'm not the only one. With this hobby, just getting someone to look at your project for more than a couple of minutes can be kind of a struggle.

P5 doesn't have a user interface to speak of at this moment and I don't really expect myself to find time to get it there any time soon, but I know that if/when I did I would love to have an eager person to throw it at and tell me what elements of my interface are really working or confusing for them and get feedback on things they feel could improve the experience. And having someone to stumble on bugs I might not trigger myself would be very nice.

Unrelated side question: You sound young and earnest, do you already have some programming experience but have yet to dabble with bare hardware or is it that you've never programmed at all?

Don't feel bad about lurking, I've been visiting this board and screwing around with P5 since I was 15 or 16 -- I'm 26 now and just created this account like two weeks ago.

Hmm, guess that is true. But I don't really think much outside of the last five seconds,

Yeah, User Side usage is mainly what I'm focusing on. A lot of the people here (actually nearly all) are Devs, and I can see how they might be reluctant to include something solely for a user that may never exist. But I think I could be of some help to people!

As for your side question, yeah! I'm actually only going to High School now, so I guess you could say I'm pretty young. I started programming when I was 10, and now I'm 14, still going strong. I just really don't know where to go for Low Level stuff, and couldn't get a grip on C.

I think interacting directly with the hardware would be super fun, but I'm not at all experienced in that

Ran Dxdiag just now, here's what came up : (Imgur Link) http://imgur.com/a/ZQHJw

What languages do you know? I would dig into C even if you've felt like you're not getting it. I personally started with QBasic, and then this game engine called DarkBASIC, dabbled with Python for about five minutes in there and finally learned C when I was a teenager.

But I had a similar story. I ran into a wall when I was trying to make something happen in DarkBASIC and my dad mentioned in passing (while not really having any idea what he was talking about) that maybe I should try C++ (because late 90s buzzwords) since it would 'be more powerful'. So shortly after, I picked up C++ for dummies, got about 30 pages in, and promptly gave up.

For some reason, though, C popped into my life a bit later. I don't even remember why. But it started making sense quicker because I wasn't trying to learn all of the OO crap at the same time. And eventually it clicked for me, and it's been my favorite language because you can do almost anything you can imagine with it.

So try to follow some tutorials on C or do some small projects -- it will click for you eventually. And on the flipside, if all you've really done so far are batch scripts and BASIC, give something like Python a try first. It may be a good stepping stone.

Honestly, I've been jumping from language to language. I understand the concept and general design, but I'm still having a tough time getting used to C. Even then, maybe what I think I know is utterly useless.

You could test my OS (disk.img in my repository, raw hard disk image). Boot it using MEMDISK or a real IDE hard drive, or SATA under IDE emulation. It does need a PS/2 mouse and keyboard, though.

Hey friend!

Welcome to actively posting in the forum. Very nice offer.
Thanks! I'll get a test image ready for you, but don't expect too much, I rarely run it on real hardware myself

Greets

Hey!

If you've got time, I'd appreciate you testing my OS on your hardware. It's pretty simple, just a printf and interrupt able OS, but I've had some problems with the keyboard driver.

Anyways, here's a link to the release on Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/CaffeinatedGeek/TrailOS/tags/TrailOS_0.0.6

There's notes there on how to run it.

Cheers,
Walt

Hey Kaisogen!

Sorry for letting you wait so long. I made a new demo release that is available for download! I'd appreciate you testing it out.

Notes: It will take a moment to boot, as the image has come a little bigger (because the programs are linked statically) and GRUB is a little slow in loading. And regarding the GUI - don't expect too much yet, I suspect the VESA driver will cause problems on real hardware.

Greets!