Hello to all of JNode! First let me introduce myself, my name is Tom. I've been following JNode's progress for a long time now but I've been reluctant to get involved for several personal reasons. I'm currently a part-time software engineer, specializing in Java, ASM and PHP/MySQL (I also know C, C++, Haskell, R, Prolog and MIPS).

Anyway, I've been following JNode and I'd really like to get involved. I'd like to see JNode become more user-friendly and polished. Personally, if a java-based OS existed which provided standard desktop features, it'd be installed so quickly on my computer I wouldn't care about backing up my data!

I believe JNode developers should start a Code Drive 2009 over the space of 4 - 8 weeks which will help push JNode towards a more user-friendly stage. Some goals we could set out (and achieve) would be:
- Visual bootup
- Multi-user system (including login screen)
- Artwork (default background, login screen, bootup)

JNode needs a better, faster native-code compiler. My gut feeling is that JNode runs Java code roughly an order of magnitude slower than the best Java implementations do. This impacts on most areas of JNode performance, with the long startup time for the JNode GUI, and running garbage collection being two of the most obvious examples.

So I want us to start thinking about improving the JNode compiler. Here are some questions to start the discussion:

• Can we improve the existing compiler, or would we do better starting from scratch?
• Is there an existing compiler we could port? (I looked at Jikes RVM, but I think that we would run into licensing problems. This is not to say that we cannot borrow ideas though ...)
• Do we want to continue with the current strategy of compiling to native code before executing, or should we adopt the mixed interpret/compile strategy used by Sun and Jikes?
• Does anyone know a good place to start learning about code generators / optimizers?

I have typed "startawt" in commandline but it appears a dark screen and nothing happened then. Should I use some other virtual machine software instead?

Hello Everyone,

First of all I would like to thank everybody who has worked on JNode for all of the excellent work that has been done; I find the idea of a Java based operating system very exciting.

Now down to business:

I've set up a scheme which I think is similar to the one that Exile in Paradise set up a while back (see http://www.jnode.org/node/1238), but mine has a few differences. Specifically, I only have one hard drive to work with, so it has four partitions: one for Windows, one for Linux, one for Swap, and then one that I just made for JNode.

I copied the files that JNode needs to boot (jnode32.gz & some various .jgz files depending on what I want to do) onto this new partition. I was then able to successfully boot into JNode with the GRUB installation that exists on my harddrive that I use for my other operating systems.

While it starts up, a large red stacktrace is outputted by JNode complaining that it "Cannot start ide0" (actually, it could be ide1, if this is critical information I will look). In the end, however, it reaches the shell that I can play around in.

I have just recently glanced across some of the code and noticed that most if not all exceptions in the Jnode code have been thrown. My thoughts were that you could code a custom bug tracker that will tell what application was run and then when an exception is caught send it to a mysql database possibly on this server? As I can see so far the implementation of this will be fairly easy. It could even be possible to create a randomized hash for each persons machine that could be updated as bugs come across for further fully featured bug tracking.

All feedback is welcome.