HelenOS – the operating system that launched a thousand processes

“The team’s website is of a simple, but elegant design that is
easy to navigate and provides information in a clear point-by-point
manner. There is a lot of technical information here, especially
concerning the design of HelenOS. Visitors to the site will learn
that HelenOS contains approximately 325,000 lines of code (mostly
written in C) and is currently maintained by nine developers. What
is, perhaps, more telling is the lack of documentation on using the
operating system. As Jakub mentioned above, there isn’t a lot an
end-user or administrator is going to do with HelenOS; at the
moment it’s more for programmers and people who want to learn about
kernels. Once I confirmed that HelenOS supports Intel 32-bit
machines (as well as ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and Sparc64) I downloaded
the ISO image for HelenOS and set it up in a VirtualBox virtual
machine.

“Booting from the CD briefly shows a GRUB menu in which starting
HelenOS is the sole option. A few seconds later the user is dropped
at a console that is partly text and partly graphical. Along the
top of the screen is a banner which displays the name of the
operating system, a series of numbered buttons and a button
labelled “kcon”. Below the banner is a command line shell (the
Brain Dead Shell, in this case), which prompts the user to type
“help” for assistance. Being as this was my first experience with a
new operating system, I took the prompt up on the invitation.”

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