Saturday, June 24, 2006

An attempt to create a MusicalOS

"Let there be music." - I wished and there was music.

Here we go:

  • 650 MB of code for GUI Applications.
  • 100 MB of code for supporting drivers/libraries.
  • 220 MB of code for Fonts Servers/Network drivers.
  • 300 MB of code for E-Mail clients/SBIN apps.
  • 1 GB of code with other XYZ apps.
Do one require all the above for just playing a list of songs that (s)he wishes to listen?? There's a lot that could be stripped down! This is how it goes the fantasy of making a MusicalOS from scratch.

MuscialOS :: What is it all about?
Its just a distribution, that has minimal features required to play a list of songs that is stored in a secondary storage. GUI support is not provided. The generic we extend our requirements, the bigger the kernel and the loadable module gets. Hence, to be more specific, the requirement goes like this, we just need a keyboard support and a console support in whose command prompt, commands could be invoked to play a list of songs and nothing else. No USB/Floppy/any XYZ devices please. Spare Harddiscs/CD-ROMs.

Minimum requirements
Though, building from the scratch requires a list of files to be build and other stuff to be decided at length, we just make a jot of what are the necessary modules without which our life would be under serious trouble! :)
  1. Sound support - Very Trivial, its where we depend on, isnt?
  2. Filesystems - Trivial, otherwise, no access to data!
  3. Terminals, Console drivers - Trivial, else would be a blindman's box!
  4. Device supports - Keyboard, Mouse, Monitor, CD-Rom drivers - Required.
  5. Anything else??? (Still thinking!)
First Step
As a first step, Kernel v2.6.17-1 is compiled with network support removed and a CRAMfs initrd image is made with modules. And Eureka, the box boots. We've just started :)

By: XaoS at 12:29 PM 0 comments

From "Sliding Snow Leopard" to "Crazed Snow-Weasel"

This is not some kind of a story or a movie, rather a technical news. Though old, needs to be blogged. The name "Crazed Snow-Weasel" is the codename for the new release of Linux Kernel v2.6.17. The older codename was this "Sliding Snow Leopard". Hmm, interesting!

One of the busiest free software development thread, one can ever find another example, is this kernel development. Three weeks back downloaded a recent kernel v2.6.16-9 (recent then!) and now when i come back, to my surprise, it just rose to v2.6.17-1.

Thanks to all kernel developers, for providing the patches to ascend the throne of the recent version. Finally patched up the kernel downloaded with all the patches (somewhere around 13). Not much changes between v2.6.16-9 and 2.6.17-1. Moreover, this is not a right place to discuss the changes for they are already there in the celebrated www.kernel.org.

By: XaoS at 12:13 PM 0 comments

Saturday, June 3, 2006

A Little BLOGGER Hack!

The NavBAR at the top of the blog was not the one i liked to have. So, did
a little hack into the stylesheet of the blogger page and now, its gone!
Atleast as far i've checked that its not showing its presence in
Epiphany/Mozilla. Didnt checked this out in other browsers though.

The Blogger inserts the NavBAR Code exactly after the "<body>" tag. Hence
if we can someway comment the code out, it should work, isnt. Its not very
obvious at first sight.

  • Commenting before <body> tag and after that doesnot help. Because the
    code inserted has a comment breaker "<!-- -->" which breaks unterminated
    comments if any.

  • Moreover, there is yet another way, it is to wrap up the <body>
    within the JavaScript comment using "<script>" block. But this also will
    not help much since the embedded code has good amount of "</script>" as
    well as "<script>" hence, browser would terminate the comment halfway and
    we are into some other problem.

  • Finally efficient way is to use the "CSS" property. Enclose "<body>"
    in a "<div>" with its _visibility_ being "hidden". This finally has worked
    out. Stop, but not precisely, i wouldnt want more space before by Blogger
    Header. Here comes the help from "Negative Margins", finally, things
    worked out.

    • Eureka!!! Its done. Need another hack to include HTML tags in the blog that we mail!


    By: XaoS at 7:06 AM 0 comments

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