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UselOS

By M-374 LX <http://m374lx.users.sourceforge.net/>

About

UselOS, which stands for "useless operating system", is a small operating system for x86 PCs I decided to write just to better understand how an operating system works, how different it is to write an operating system relative to a typical user space Linux or Windows application, and some of the hardware interfaces on a x86 system.

Basic usage

When starting the operating system, you are presented with USH, the useless command shell, where you can enter commands.

USH commands

When starting the operating system, you are presented with USH, the useless command shell, where you can enter commands.

clear
Arguments: none
Clear the screen

echo
Arguments: strings to print
Print a series of space-separated strings on the screen

help
Arguments: none
Show a list of commands that can be entered

reboot
Arguments: none
Reboot (reset) the system

Building

Building the operating system requires GNU C Compiler (GCC), GNU Assembler (AS), and GNU Make. You can build it by entering the "src" directory and running the command "make".

After building, you can generate a bootable ISO image featuring the GRUB bootloader by running "make iso". This requires the "grub-mkrescue" utility.

To delete all files resulting from the build process, run "make clean".

Running

You can run the operating system on a PC without using an emulator by generating an ISO image (as seen in "Building"), burning it on a removable media (such as a CD or a USB stick) and then booting it. You can also run it on an emulator such as QEMU or Bochs.

Licensing

The code is in public domain, which means that you can use it freely.