Symmetry

Well, along with the new name, I have just finished the first version of the new Symmetry web site. It is still slightly based on the Kubrick Wordpress theme, but now pretty much the only thing that remains from that is the sidebar.

I really like the site now - it is a lot cleaner than the old site, and I wanted to achieve a really clean look for the front page. I’ve hidden the sidebar on that page, and also made the main focus a big picture. It should be one of the first things you look at, so it contains a very short description of what Symmetry is. There is also more information below in three columns.

Symmetry now can shutdown using ACPI! The code is not entirely finished, but there is still enough to shut the computer down. Thanks a lot to kaworu from OSdev.org for the great ACPI code.

Next, maybe I’ll look at standby… But in the meantime, I still have to finish paging and heap management.

It’s all in the latest Git if you want to check it out.

Well, I fixed the little build error that I was getting… Pretty much the only thing I had to do was to remove the prototype for the main() function, then rename it to _main(). This was because for some reason, the new version of GCC doesn’t let you have a function called main() that doesn’t have either zero or two arguments, and the first one has to be an integer.

Anyway, I suppose it’s back to work then!

I haven’t really worked on my operating system lately, but I have done a little in the way of getting paging and some basic ACPI (!) support done.

I have been using Git to manage the project’s source code since I rewrote the C++ version, and today I found a pretty nice Git hosting site for open source development called Gitorious. The main repository will be hosted there now, instead of at the Google Code site as before.

Also, SoS now has a new name - Symmetry. I changed it for a few reasons. First, Stephen’s Operating System is kinda a lame name… Because of that I had been using SoS, but that still isn’t a really good name, because it has weird capitalisation, and names with OS in it are sort of unoriginal. Anyway, the abbreviation will continue to be sos, but the name of the project is now Symmetry.

Lastly, I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10, which has a new GCC version. Just like last time, the operating system fails to build. Then, it was because it got too many warnings about char*s which should have been const char*s, and now it is that it doesn’t like me having one argument in the main function, and it wants the first argument to be an int. I don’t see why though, since I’m not using any standard libs or builtins or anything… It shouldn’t matter…

Anyway, I’ll try to find a solution for that eventually. But it’s annoying because I can’t really do much until I can build and test it…