Jawed’s Blog

This week was full of learning, atleast for me in the office. My company switched to Linux Operating System. Details about why switched? isn’t important here. But the whole experience of switching to Linux was very exciting. By the way we have installed Ubuntu Linux in the office.

Configuring Linux was tedious but interesting because I wanted to learn how it works. I have been installing and uninstalling Linux on my home PC but that was just for fun, never thought of setting up development environment though I tried to do many times but I lost my interest all the time :).

Few things I would like to mentioned that took a lot of time to configure. First configuring the Graphics card; it was pain to configure VGA card, we crashed GDM many times but we figured how to recover the xorg.conf and configure the display driver with few exceptions.

Secondly the most important task is to importing mails from Microsoft Outlook to Thunderbird. If you don’t know just try Google how to import mails from Outlook to Thunderbird.

This could have been more days work if few of our colleagues didn’t have past experience. All is well that ends well, so far ;).

Cheers! Linux

Jnode is an open source Java operating system. It was started when JDK 1.0.2 released, Ewout Prangsma (the founder of JNode) dreamed of building a Java Virtual Machine in Java. It should be a system that was not only a VM, but a complete runtime environment that does not need any other form of operating system.

Ewout made various attempts to develop this OS. He first developed a JBS; the Java Bootable System. It became a somewhat functional system, but had far too much native code, in C and assembler, in it. So he started working on a new JBS system, called JBS2 and finally JNode. which doesn’t have C code, but has only a little bit of assembly code. In may on 2003 Ewout came public with JNode and development proceeded ever faster from that point on.

Hardware Requirements:

To be able to run JNode, you’re hardware should be at least equal to or better then:

• Pentium class CPU with Page Size Extensions (PSE) feature
• 256Mb RAM

more on hardware requirements

Performance:

Performance of an OS is critical. That’s why many have suggested that an OS cannot be written in Java. JNode will not be the fastest OS around for quite some time, but it is and will be a proof that it can be done in Java. To make JNode as fast as possible, we’ll concentrate on doing things as smart as possible, but still to do it in Java.

more on performance