____ ___ ____ ____ | _ \ / _ \ ___ | _ \/ ___| | | | | | | |/ _ \| |_) \___ \ (c) copyright by Toxygen productions. | |_| | |_| | (_) | _ < ___) | Written by Michael Althaus. |____/ \___/ \___/|_| \_\____/ All rights reserved. __ / | /_/ | Introduction |_| ______________________________________________________________________ This document is a short introduction into DOoRS, a modern operating system developed from the scratch. At the current state of developement, it's more like a proof of concept and not for daily use. The main features of DOoRS are · Strong platform independency · Multi processor support (up to 16 cores) · Complete hierarchic driver model · Real time characteristics However, only a limited set of hardware is supported yet. ___ (_ ) / / Hardware Requirements (___) ______________________________________________________________________ Platform independency does not automatically mean that a software can run on any system. This is in particular true for an operating system and platform independence in this context means, that an operating system is *designed* to be run on different platforms. However, an operating system has to deal with platform dependent issues. Good examples for this are the very specific processor initialization or the operating system boot loader. The only platform supported at the moment is a i386 compatible system, ie. any IBM compatible personal computer, commonly simply refered as PC. To communicate with hardware, operating systems use the help of hardware drivers which translate system requests to specific hardware requests. Below a list of some hardware, which is supported by the i386 port of DOoRS. · i386 (or compatible) single/multi processor · APM power manager · PCI bus · Legacy VGA text mode · VESA video mode · Legacy PS/2 mouse and keyboard · ATA/ATAPI mass storage interface · PD765 compatible floppy disk interface Note that storage devices attached via SATA, SCSI or USB are not supported yet. Human interface devices, (HIDs) such as keyboard and mouse, are only supported via the legacy PS/2 interface. There is no support for HIDs attached via USB yet. DOoRS includes drivers for the FAT12/16/32 and ISO9660 (CD-ROM) file systems. Windows NT NTFS, Unix Ext or the UDF file systems are not supported. Due security reasons, write support to any media is deactivated. ___ (__ | _( | Basic Usage (___| _____________________________________________________________________ The startup procedure of a computer system invokes many steps until finally a shell (desktop) can be presented to the user. Before DOoRS is executed, it needs to be loaded into memory. This is the job of the bootloader. Once the bootloader has finished its task, execution is transferred to the DOoRS operating system kernel which initializes the system and loads hardware drivers, before execution is transferred to the main shell. The shell of DOoRS is a simple terminal, representing a prompt and expecting commands to be typed in by the user. To get a list of all commands, use the HELP command. Note that the DOoRS default keyboard layout is the standard US keyboard. You can choose another keyboard translation map with the KEYMAP command. The system fonts use a modified ISO/IEC 8859-1 (Latin-1) mapping. The character set is fully UTF compatible, but there is no complete support for all characters defined by UTF though. For example chinese, hindu or cyrillic characters can not be printed and a default character, a square '', is shown instead. _ _ | || | |__ | How to start DOoRS (i386 Boot Process) |_| ______________________________________________________________________ The DOoRS operating system loader (DOSL) for i386 platforms supports a wide variety how DOoRS is actually loaded on the system. The loader supports booting from · CD-ROM drive · Hard disk drive · Floppy disk drive · A DOS command prompt However, DOoRS is usually distributed in the form of an ISO CD-ROM disc image, thus booting from a CD-ROM drive is the most common way to start DOoRS. First the image has to be burned on a CD-ROM media. Secondly a system restart is required with a forced CD-ROM boot. Please refer to the manual of your system, how to enforce a CD-ROM boot. Note that some systems are configured by default to boot from a CD-ROM drive without user interaction, when a bootable media is found. The DOoRS operating system kernel accepts additional user supplied arguments. Press the SPACE key once the DOoRS operating system loader (DOSL) loads the system image. At the prompt multiple arguments can be entered, each has to be separated by a space. The following kernel arguments are supported: textmode Forces non graphic text mode nogui Graphic mode wo. a graphic user interface (GUI) logdbg Dumps all log messages to the screen ____ | ___) |__ | Disclaimer (____| ______________________________________________________________________ DOoRS (c) copyright by Toxygen Productions. Written by Michael Althaus. All rights reserved. · This software was developed and tested to the best of knowledge. However, the software is provided 'AS IS' and the use is at your own risk. · Toxygen Production disclaims any expressed or implied warranties - including, but not limited to, the warranties for merchantability or fitness of this software. · In no event shall Toxygen Productions be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary or consequent damages - including, but not limited to, loss of use, data or profits, or business interruption - however caused and on any theory of liability. · Any commercial or revenue-generating use, reproduction or redistribution of this software requires an explicit license obtained from Toxgen Productions. · You may use this software for private or educational purpose for free. · Any form of reproduction or redistribution is only allowed for private purpose and only if the software is provided free of charge and in the original form, without any modifications, additions nor parts omitted. For more information, comments or suggestions visit Toxygen Productions on the web: www.toxygen.ch. All trademarks are owned by their respective owners. EOF