Hi,
thanks for your question, I'll try to reply from my perspective: "What's required to get the ball rolling? As I see it, applications needed " That depends on what you want to do with the OS. We don't have a single intended purpose for HelenOS, so depending on your use case (desktop, embedded, sever in a VM,...) you will need different things. One missing piece that is common perhaps to many use cases is there is a gap in the installation/boot process where we basically always run from a ROM image or live CD image and there is not a ready-made solution for installation to disk / having persistent storage, meaning e.g. if there were any configuration files, they would not persist across reboots. "" "are 1) SSH client and server 2) http server with TLS support 3) python " > I work for the infosec department of a very large corporation and am > trying to provide an alternative to the CentOS and Ubuntu which currently > make up the vast majority of the VMs we run. So it seems to me you would like to do something like run a simple server (e.g .some web application) in a VM. Then what you're saying makes sense, you would also want the HTTP server to be able to display non-static pages (e.g. python CGI scripts or something like that). Jakub had the idea of hosting microkernel.info from a HelenOS VM. Currently you can telnet into HelenOS (albeit it is somewhat limited). Inside HelenOS you have nterm, but that cannot be used as a full fledged telnet client. Sure, there is no security. The web server is very very primitive, only serving static pages and no TLS. Python is there though not sure how much of it works and how obsolete the version we have is. "Some of these can be ported, but I worry about the limited POSIX compliance getting in the way. I have just today discovered HelenOS, so if I am misinformed about what's available, please politely correct me, with details." HelenOS is not meant to be a UNIX-like OS. That said, we have three compilation environments available for applications: - HelenOS native (code which his part of HelenOS builds in this) - should provide (a subset of) ISO C library + HelenOS specific stuff - XCW - for multiplatform applications that want to support HelenOS natively as one of their platforms - ISO C library + HelenOS specific stuff - Coastline/harbours/libposix - libposix provides an (imperfect) emulation layer that should make it possible to port existing applications running on unixish operating systems with minimum changes (e.g. we don't implement fork ()) So I think we're okay here. It's been my stance that HelenOS is not another kernel to run the GNU stack on top of, but rather different (think Windows or BeOS), aming to give a rather different user experience. Therefore we'd like (and need to) write our own basic applications, rather than porting things like coreutils (since our file system works differently), vim (since our user experience should be different). Even SSH is a poor match for HelenOS since HelenOS console works differently from the UNIX terminal. You'd get much better experience using a remote terminal/protocol that explicitly supported HelenOS. Still we'll probably need to support SSH protocol as a n alternative because it's so widely adopted. Best regards, Jiri
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