Phlux

Phlux is an Assembly based Operating system designed for use on home computers, laptops and servers, it is powered by a single kernel file, kernel-0.11.bin which interfaces with both the hardware and the software installed on the system. Later versions of phlux have had Ascii support built in and even colour support enabled, later versions are said to have a TUI or a simple primitive asm based GUI. A typical phlux system has no file system and this file system has to be installed seperately, early versions of phlux were lacking in support as they were updated so quickly and frequently.

Development

Phlux is a 16 bit operating system allowing the buffer in the ram to store 16 interger values at a time, this is why the names of the commands were shortened, for example, animation becomes anim and so on. Phlux is not based on any particular os although it shares similaritys with DOS, Version 11 also came with a inbuilt mouse application although this is primitive and has no real use, other than to point and show things on the screen, however this was unaccessible until version 12 due to a bug in the source causing the kernel to panic. Phlux started as a CMS developed for windows xp, under the microsoft .net framework called CoSMoS, after minimal success they developed cobra a linux based gui os which is now widely used.

Future plans

Phlux is set for a file system aimed under the microsoft fat file system and also a gui written in asm such as menuet os. Phlux will also feature an application called quickstart which enables the user to run any .com based application developed from the system. The whole kernel including gui and simple apps are set to fit on a single floppy disk.

Advantages

Phlux has several advantages, it is a very small kernel featuring just over 1000 lines of source code, this makes the file size very small at just over 3.0kb, the bootloader designed for phlux will only work with kernels under 5kb meaning that the bootloader cannot be copied as many other kernels are at least 1mb, much over the sector loading capabilities of loader2.bin. Phlux also features very lightweight and powerful machine code powered assembly language, this allows the source to be simply and easily modifed for specific tasks.

Disadvantages

Without a main file system of its own the main kernel involved in the phlux operating system requires a simple file manager which although can be accessed through the main phlux terminal will not be added until later on in the development of the operating system. Panics: The kernel also has many panic errors, including, panicking when an incorrect command is input into the kernel, however this was rectified when the kernel debugger was added in version 11, the kernel still panics although only to severe hardware or code errors, the kernel debugger can fix most of these errors apart from a bug in the colour command which requires a reboot to recover.

TUI

Phlux of versions 0.18 and later, feature a TUI also coded in asm, this utilized the "print" function and a refresher to print the TUI image to the screen. The TUI can handle 16 bit colours from a typical display. In version 0.18 the TUI colour had several disadvantages, the first was that the screen was only printed for a few seconds and if no input was inserted into the shells command line interface then the kernel would crash and jump to the shutdown command. The TUI also didnt support the .com based binary applications installed on phlux, this proved a problem as the users had to restart the kernel and reload the TUI for the applications to be loaded as normal. The latest BETA version of the TUI contains all the features of the traditional GUI in the TUI format, this includes a desktop and normal windows, which can be closed by typing in close, this will close the window and return the user to the traditional cosmos desktop environment.

Future TUI plans

The alpha version of the cosmos desktop environment is designed to feature paging, allowing the user and kernel to have multiple .com based binary applications running at the same time. The phlux kernel has also been impleneted into the open source linux kernel allowing users to have a full preemptive multitasking operating system, along with a GUI for those people who cannot wait for the phlux asm kernel to be written one.

Linux

The phlux kernel has also been combined with the open source linux kernel into an operating system called cobra, this features a GUI for those who require one, there is also a server based version set for release in 2008