ShawnOS is an Operating System/Kernel meant to help learn the fundamentals of Operating System development, primarily on Intel x86-based architectures.
The project is very much a work-in-progress at this point and many design decisions regarding the OS are yet to be made. Eventually, the project aims to reach a basic level of usability, with a functional console environment and C compiler.
All code is licensed under the GNU GPL v3 unless explicitly stated elsewhere.
In order to build and run ShawnOS, a gcc cross-compiling toolchain must be present for the desired target (currently i686-elf is only supported).
The OSDev Wiki has a tutorial on how to create the required toolchain for Linux, OS X, and Windows here.
In addition to the tools mentioned in the OSDev wiki, you also need the nasm and xorriso packages in order to build ShawnOS. These are available in most Linux distributions' package managers.
# Ubuntu
$ sudo apt-get install nasm xorriso
# Fedora
$ sudo dnf install nasm xorriso
# Arch Linux (note mtools is needed to stop GRUB from automatically trying to generate an EFI image)
$ sudo pacman -S nasm xorriso mtools
Once you have set up the necessary toolchain, you must update the PREFIX and PATH variables in env.sh to reflect its location.
Example:
export PREFIX='$HOME/opt/cross'
export TARGET=i686-elf
export PATH='$PREFIX/bin:$PATH'
Once you have completed this, simply run the following to load the variables:
$ source env.sh
Now you may build an ISO image of the OS:
$ ./iso.sh
If you have qemu installed for the proper architecture, you can also run ShawnOS in a virtual machine:
$ ./qemu.sh
The project eventually aims to provide a basic usable user space with console utilities and a C compiler.
Much of the code from ShawnOS is adapted from or inspired by the following resources: