Hello Vivek Prakash,
thanks for your interest in HelenOS and thanks for your questions.
Let me start with a generic observation that HelenOS and MINIX (3) are
indeed quite different systems. I am not talking just about the design
and implementation, but also about the roots and current state.
In some sense MINIX 3 can be seen as a more mature system, since you can
easily install it on your hard drive and run many familiar BSD utilities
in it. HelenOS is not yet so streamlined with respect to end-user
installation and ready-to-use applications, but, on the other hand,
HelenOS runs on a larger number of different hardware architectures, has
(IMHO) more progressive design and easier-to-understand source code.
If you are looking for a microkernel multiserver OS which is almost fit
as a practical replacement for GNU/Linux, MINIX 3 is a better choice. If
you are looking for a microkernel multiserver OS which you can use to
experiment with bleeding-edge ideas and which you can indeed understand
from top to bottom in a short period of time, pick HelenOS.
There are more answers to many common "Why ..?" questions on our wiki:
http://trac.helenos.org/wiki/FAQ
1. How to shutdown the running OS ?
I couldn't find shutdown/halt or any command similar to it!
So far there is no facility to initiate a clean shutdown from user
space. It is one of the suggested topics for GSoC 2012:
http://trac.helenos.org/ticket/414
You can at least press F12 to switch to the kernel debugging console and
run the "reboot" command from there.
2. How to install the OS ?
There is an ongoing effort to implement a full-fledged installer for
HelenOS, but it is not yet integrated into our mainline branch. You can
find some of the work-in-progress results in this branch:
https://launchpad.net/grub4helenos
installed OS on HelenOS.img somehow. How to do that ? Or, am i
completely on the wrong track ?
You can do it manually, by installing GRUB to the disk image and then
copying the HelenOS boot files and GRUB configuration from boot/distroot
after compilation. It is not an elegant automated process, but it is doable.
3. How do you write code in HelenOS ? Which tools/IDE you use ? Is
'edit' the only available editor ?
Well, HelenOS is not yet fully self-hosted -- meaning you cannot
completely build and deploy HelenOS from HelenOS. You can use "edit" to
edit small C or Sysel sources within HelenOS, but there is little reason
to follow such a complicated path now.
We develop and cross-compile HelenOS mostly from Linux (*BSD, Mac OS X
and even Windows/Cygwin will also do). If you would like to add a new
user space application to the source tree, just have a look into the
uspace/ directory and browse the makefiles, it is not a rocket science.
Different people use different tools to work on the sources of HelenOS.
Plain source code editors like Vim, jEdit or CoolEdit will do just fine,
but you can even configure Eclipse or NetBeans to do their job. Just
remember that the source tree of HelenOS is not a single source project,
but a set of several independent projects (the kernel, individual user
space libraries and applications, the boot infrastructure) -- opening
the whole source tree in Eclipse as is will likely just confuse the IDE.
4. Does ssh server/client run in HelenOS ? If it does, then i can easily
mount the whole filesystem somewhere else using sshfs and do a whole lot
of work very easily.
No, SSH and SFTP has not been implemented yet. That might be actually a
good topic for GSoC 2012, too :-)
I have tried to keep my answers brief and not go into too much technical
details. I hope you have at least a slightly a better understanding of
what HelenOS can and cannot currently do and where it can be extended.
But please do not hesitate to ask more specific questions.
Best regards
Martin Decky
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