MENUETOS & KOLIBRIOS
A floppy-drive sized assembly based OS
Stepping out of his comfort zone, Michael Reed explores MenuetOS and its fork KolibriOS, two highly unusual operating systems.
OUR EXPERT
Michael Reed, as a teenager in the 1990s, was raised on the three touchstones of alternative comedy, alternative rock and alternative operating systems.
QUICK TIP
Most virtualisers can still boot floppy images. In VirtualBox, go to the Storage tab within the settings for a virtual machine and add a new controller of type floppy. Then, add a floppy image in the same way that you do an ISO image.
H aving a day when you’re running out of RAM and wish you had a faster processor? This issue, we’re looking at operating systems that can boot almost instantly, run from a floppy disk (a what? Ed) and require as little as 8MB of RAM to boot. You might think we’re delving into systems of the past, but these are currently maintained operating systems.
Specifically, we’re looking at MenuetOS, an operating system coded in pure assembly language for speed and a frugal memory footprint, and a system forked from it called KolibriOS. Obviously, systems like these are stripped down for speed and simplicity, and we don’t expect them to take over from operating systems such as Windows and Linux on the typical desktop. However, they can do quite a lot and they are fascinating to examine and play around with. Like a lot of alternative OSes, they offer a glimpse of the direction that operating systems might have taken if the computer industry had evolved differently.
MenuetOS
MenuetOS is a free download from the official website (www.menuetos.net). It started life as an open source 32-bit operating system. However, it then transitioned to being a 64-bit OS and became closed source, although it’s still free to download and use.
Initially, we started with the smallest 64-bit build on the site, the floppy image, partly because we were curious to see what an operating system on a 1.44MB storage medium could offer, and we booted it using the VirtualBox virtualiser. The first thing that hit us was the boot speed, as it takes only a few seconds before you are presented with a full desktop. Amazingly, the desktop is populated with icons that link to many applications, with more in the application launcher.
Exploring what’s on offer, it’s obvious that this is a highly customised operating system with a unique set of applications. There is a file manager, a text editor, a number of simple games and even a web browser, along with some other internet utilities. This is in addition to other utilities such as a video player and a fairly complete suite of GUI system monitors and setup utilities. Just to assure you that you’ve not misred, we are still talking about the floppy edition of MenuetOS! Although this is astonishing on a technical level, it’s not quite miraculous. The applications themselves tend to be very simple. For example, the GUI text editor has only the basic facilities, with no advanced features such as syntax highlighting.