Download Visopsys 0.66

Andy McLaughlin has been working on the Visopsys operating system since 1997 and recently released version 0.66. The operating system has a full implementation for multitasking, 100% protected mode and virtual-memory and, according to the developer, has a massively monolithic style kernel. There is a small selection of applications available for this platform, of which the extensive Disk Manager stands out with which partitions can be created and modified without any problems. For a complete overview of the how and what, we refer you to this page. The announcement and list of changes of version 0.66 are as follows:

Version 0.66:

Overview: This is a maintenance release, featuring the ability to resize Windows Vista partitions, more reliable loading on various systems, better exception handling, color text in graphics mode, improvements to the C library, and a number of bug fixes.

• Ported ntfsprogs 1.13.1 (including ntfsresize 1.13.1.1) so that the Disk Manager can successfully resize Windows Vista NTFS partitions.
• Modified the vloader OS loader so that it only uses int 15 to move data into high memory. Improves reliability of loading on more systems.
• The exception handler is now a separate task, for proper debugging and better reliability (in case of stack corruption, etc)
• Implemented proper color text output in both text and graphics modes.
• The boot sector code was further groomed and streamlined, though the work highlighted a bug in the GRUB bootloader that will always prevent chain-loading Visopsys from the second hard disk.
• The MBR boot menu code no longer has the number of sectors to load hardcoded into it. It now reads a tracks’ worth. Also changed some of the memory locations used, since there might have been conflicts there.
• Improved the Disk Manager’s confirmation/warning message before resizing a partition.
• When the progress dialog’s ‘Cancel’ button is disabled, the mouse cursor shows ‘busy’.
• In the Disk Manager, progress indicator more accurately represents the actual times of the different stages of an NTFS resize.
• In the Disk Manager, the “Resetting $Logfile” portion of an NTFS resize shows progress indication.
• The kernel now accepts relative pathnames to file-related API functions. Removed all the absolute path hand-waving from programs, libs, etc.
• Implemented the family of scanf() C library functions, including fscanf(), sscanf(), vfscanf(), vscanf(), and vsscanf().
• Added the C library functions_num2str(), _numdgts(), and _str2num(). Removed the custom atoi(), itoa(), itob(), itox(), lltoa(), lltob(), lltox(), ulltoa(), utoa(), and xtoi() functions and made them all macros in using the 3 new functions, above.
• Added realpath() and strnlen() C library functions.
• Added the C library functions basename() and dirname(), and removed the kernel API function fileSeparateLast().
• Removed the custom C library functions _div64(), _divdi3(),_moddi3(), _udivdi3(), and_umoddi3(). We now use the libgcc versions.
• The GUI “menu bar” component is no longer a container. It now *has* a container, so that it can also have state information about which menu is visible. Previously, raising a right-click menu in the Disk Manager could cause the corresponding menu bar title to draw itself raised when it shouldn’t.
• It is now possible to ‘focus’ the root window (without it going over top of the other windows, obviously).
• Fixed: FAT32 bug in which the vloader OS loader was looking for the wrong terminating cluster number.
• Fixed: When a window was bigger than the screen dimensions, moving the left side of it off the screen, then moving the mouse around the right side of the window caused mouse tracers (and perhaps a GUI crash).
• Fixed: Dragging the ‘imgboot’ window off the left side of the screen caused a system crash.
• Fixed: When a list component is disabled, the list items no longer appear greyed-out.
• Fixed: If the ‘iconwin’ program can’t find the icon, it will try to use the standard ‘executable’ one instead of the generic visopsys one.
• Fixed: The ‘iconwin’ program could still show an icon for a program that wasn’t available. Also changed the config file format so that a list of icon names is not required to be specified before the individual specs
• Fixed: In text mode, the ‘more’ command could leave its reverse characters on the last line if you’re scrolling with any other key than [space].
• Fixed: Printing a legitimately-escaped format sequence such as %%d in user space using printf() and friends didn’t work, as the kernel’s print routines would try to format their input again.
• Fixed: The C library memcmp function was comparing one too many bytes.
• Fixed: When the text was a different color (such as an error) and the screen scrolled, the cursor could remain the color of the previous line.
• Fixed: When booting from a CD there was an error message:
  Error:kernel process:kernelFile.c:fileCreate(614): Filesystem is read-only.
• Fixed: Broken CD-ROM emulation was not recognized on some systems.