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I wrote something on this forum back in 2017. I Think I spent three weeks working on a kernel, then I got too busy with other stuff, and maybe I was also spending so much time per day looking at the code that I forgot to take breaks.

I still have the code, and when I got a new laptop (the one I wrote it on is ten years old or so now, and does work if I don't need to burn CDs), I compiled a GCC cross compiler on the new one and checked that it could compile the kernel. I could keep working on it, but I might start over, since three weeks of work isn't a lot to redo, and I'd probably do some things differently now.

I'm not sure I ever mentioned that I majored in translation between English and Spanish. So not exactly CS (which I'm guessing most of you studied) but at least something that should make me good enough at English to read hardware documentation.

And I just set my name here to match my name on GitHub. It's a name that means something in Spanish, and I no longer live in a Spanish-speaking country, but I guess I'll keep using it. (The name I used here before: FolderCarpet, was a reference to the Spanish word for "folder" being "carpeta".) I might change my profile picture here once I manage to implement either ELF loading or non-English keyboard input (or both) Hopefully I'll figure out keyboard input this time around. At least I know to double-check my structures (turns out I had some elements in the GDT in the wrong order).

While working on the OS a while ago, I had called it Temas, which means "Subjects" (as in book subjects, not school subjects) or "Themes" in Spanish, but I think I won't keep that name. But now that I've moved to Denmark I guess I should give the OS a name that means something in Danish. Some ideas are:

• Ram dog: means "Just Hit" as in "stop missing the target".
• Den Art And: means "That Species of Duck".
• Let Rat: means "Light Steering Wheel".

Yeah, I've seen enough animals irl that I went with three animal-related names. There's quite a few other words I could play with, but I'm guessing I'll probably pick one of those three names. I guess I could also show you my list of Danish words that look like English words, but some of them might have too weird meanings in one of the languages (for example, the Danish word for school subject looks like an English slur, and if you try to write "good speed" in Danish it might raise some English-speaking religious eyebrows).

(And sorry if I use parenthesis/round-brackets a bit too much. I guess when I talk to programmers my English ends up looking a bit lispy, which is odd because I don't program in Lisp. I guess if writing in all-caps is shouting, then I'm whispering because writing an OS seems like the kind of thing an engineer would do, and I'm not even a scientist. But with engineers delving into language stuff like implementing machine translation between languages they don't even speak themselves, I guess I shouldn't avoid doing "engineering things" in my free time.)

[Note: I tried to send this post earlier today and got an error message about some SQL error. As far as I can see the post didn't send, but if there's suddenly several copies of it, then I'm sorry. And if I see them I'll try to delete them. Well, now I'm trying a version without non-ASCII characters in it, hopefully that will do the trick.]

SeaLiteral wrote:I forgot to take breaks

sorry if I use parenthesis/round-brackets a bit too much

Ah, someone else with ADHD. Welcome back!

Octocontrabass wrote:

SeaLiteral wrote:I forgot to take breaks

sorry if I use parenthesis/round-brackets a bit too much

Ah, someone else with ADHD. Welcome back!

I don't think I have ADHD (though I am on the autism spectrum). But I do tend to focus quite a bit on things I get interested in, which NTs* sometimes see as a bad thing because I "should" be interested in a bunch of other things. But in some hobbies such as game development I can make up for it by splitting the hobby into a bunch of sub-hobbies (so if I'm making a game, I'll do some programming, then some art, then some music, then more art, then more programming...). So I guess if I get to a point where my OS gets a GUI, I'll sometimes take "breaks" for programming where I focus on drawing new desktop backgrounds and icons. But dw, I won't be giving each release of the OS a visual revamp just to make it look different fro previous releases. (But at some point when I feel like the OS is ready for it I might try to make my own emoji font. That's the kind of project I could keep working on on and off for a long time because once in a while the Unicode Consortium adds new characters to the list of characters I'd have to implement in the font.)

* NT is short for "neurotypical", so NTs basically means people with "normal" brains.

SeaLiteral wrote:I don't think I have ADHD (though I am on the autism spectrum).

The two frequently coincide.

Octocontrabass wrote:

SeaLiteral wrote:I forgot to take breaks

sorry if I use parenthesis/round-brackets a bit too much

Ah, someone else with ADHD. Welcome back!

It's a bit too much to assume from just those two lines, don't you think? The symptoms of ADHD can be quite varied, and some ADHD people may not show some symptoms, while certain people without ADHD might have some of the symptoms.

Well, I have ADHD for certain, you can talk to me

Hi from someone who uses semicolons too much!

Update: If I skip the day and a half I was ill, I guess I've worked on this project for a month now. My OS is already a bit more advanced than what I had last time I gave up, including that feature where doing int 0x40 changes the value of a volatile variable to 0x40. But I guess at this point I should decide on which license to use. I'm guessing when I port applications I'll keep the ports under whichever license the original was under. And for code I write myself, I think I might want something open source but probably not too restrictive. (I could go with MIT or BSD, which I've seen some other hobby OSes use, or I could go with Apache since I've used that license for a game I wrote some time ago.)

And I know that the wiki recommends against deadlines, but I think I'll take a few more days to think about licenses, but choose one for the kernel before April Fools Day (so on that day I can tell someone I'm making an OS, and I can talk about all the silly features it's going to have, then when they thinks it's a joke I can show them the code ).

eekee wrote:Hi from someone who uses semicolons too much!

Too many semicolons? If that means you write way too long sentences, then perhaps you'd make a good lawyer. Or perhaps you wouldn't. I sometimes use long sentences myself and I don't really think I should try to become a lawyer.

SeaLiteral wrote:But I guess at this point I should decide on which license to use. I'm guessing when I port applications I'll keep the ports under whichever license the original was under. And for code I write myself, I think I might want something open source but probably not too restrictive. (I could go with MIT or BSD, which I've seen some other hobby OSes use, or I could go with Apache since I've used that license for a game I wrote some time ago.)

And I know that the wiki recommends against deadlines, but I think I'll take a few more days to think about licenses, but choose one for the kernel before April Fools Day (so on that day I can tell someone I'm making an OS, and I can talk about all the silly features it's going to have, then when they thinks it's a joke I can show them the code ).

I've been bitting and bobbing on my kernel since 2016, and haven't yet chosen a license, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

A license is necessary when you release something other people are likely to want to use, or at least when you think you're ready for people to use it. But until that time, it is entirely unnecessary, even if the source repository is publicly accessible.

FWIW, I've been torn on my license choice. I don't intend to make my kernel modular, OS extensions will be user space for the most part, so I'm tending towards GPL for the kernel itself.

I intend to extract the kernel runtime utility library, and make it usable as a user space library, so driver code can be written the same in kernel or user mode. That shared kernel/user library I'm likely to make BSD or MIT license.