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I've never ran across a project that screamed at me so loudly to be put into an OSGi framework.

There's multiple stages to an application that's OSGi based. The lowest level of design is just updating your jar files so that the implement the necessary bundle information. This is pretty straightforward and there are ant tasks that will do this for you, using the bndtools.jar and this would provide a plugin framework OOTB

The second level, and where it gets interesting is the conversion of the application into a services framework. Being able to implement a level of separation of concern is where OSGi shines.

My general thought process is that if I see something that I think I can be improved, just don't complain about it, but offer a suggestion.

So my thoughts turned to the documentation that's available for JNode. What could we do to improve the documentation, and what do I mean when I say improve it. Documentation is difficult, and can be boring if you don't have the mindset for it. It's also extremely important for new and old users to have a robust level of documentation to support the project.

One of the obvious solutions is a wiki, however wiki's require monitoring and administration and servers. Another solution, which JNode is currently doing, is centralizing the documentation on a CMS but limiting the rights of the people who can modify it. This can work pretty well but can suffer for the same reason that wiki's do which is the lack of man power in a slow moving, large project.

My recommendation is to push the core documentation into the source code, as a project in it's own right.
Which provides the following benefits

• Documentation is now available offline
• There is a history of the documentation
  

JNode is running great in Hyper-V.

If you're using Windows 8, Hyper-V is a natural choice since it comes with the OS.
To run JNode on it, just create a simple virtual machine and use one of the JNode iso files to boot from.

You can also safely play with harddisks. I created a virtual harddisk (VHD format) and mapped it under IDE 0.
When you are not running this virtual machine, you can use the Windows Disk Management to attach the VHD in Windows. This enables you to create/view partitions, format and even read/write data on it.

For now JNode is not aware that it is running in Hyper-V. I hope to add that in the future. Then JNode can also signal to Hyper-V that it is still alive and all kinds of other goodies.

Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS7x_ejyoD4&feature=youtu.be

SHOTS:
http://imageshack.us/a/img405/6972/33266144.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img832/598/45954065.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img41/242/69543282.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img222/949/99613155.png

I plan to engender this ui layer to a ful-fledged ish OS, via jNode.
Any tips are welcome.

I'd like to know if JNode is still in active development at this time (02/28/12). I haven't seen any current posts. I'm going to contribute to the project, and hope for the best. This seems to be the cause of many projects drying up. The project's community isn't helping out enough, or at all, and obviously the developers can't handle all of the project's weight on their shoulders. So maybe we can revive the project if we get enough of the community to start helping out, by contributing as much time as possible. The community can write the documentation that needs done, so that developers can spend their time "developing". Also we can do any testing and bug reporting that needs to be done.