MenuetOS

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Few years back when I was in college I had Assembly course which was about how to program in Assembly language. On that time I was excited about do further research about Assembly and its use in today programming. Accidentally I found an OS which was written totally in Assembly and that motivated me to gather more information about it which was called as MenuetOS.

On the time I wrote an article and had presentation about how it could applied as a replacement of BIOS and so on.

Now after years I have decided to write a short introduction for MenuetOS. Basically, MenuetOS is written in Assembly language as I mentioned before. As a result the size of OS is really small. You can put its image in a floppy and run it such as live disk (CD). Additionally, Assembly is a low level language and the speed of running is really fast (100 to 1000 times faster than C programming language). By contrast of the advantages of Assembly language it has many disadvantages as well. For instance writing code is really difficult plus debugging the written code is more difficult and exhaustive task and therefore, it causes that the development process will take long time which is eventually a big down point for enterprise businesses.

Fortunately, MenuetOS developed by the bunch of volunteers and geeks who enjoy in coding, although it has its own community as well. Therefore, there is no worry about business and enterprises profits.

On the other hand the OS is developed very well and active as well. Overall all reasons encouraged me to say that it could have been really good replacement for BIOS. Up to now the idea is partially wrong. Although, Microsoft is made secure boot which is called UEFI and in many laptops this program has taken the place of regular BIOS, my guess was about having totally FREE lightweight OS as substitute of BIOS. It could have facilitated users to do their some lightweight tasks when they are in hurry as well as setting up their device configuration like regular BIOS. So Microsoft secure boot is far from my idea with limiting users more and does not included those facilities that can be found in MenuetOS. It is more likely as a fashionable version of BIOS which jails the user in a nice prison.

I have made a list of the some features of this OS below. You also can get more information from the official website.

  1. MenuetOS does not have any similarity to Unix like OS and POSIX standard
  2. It is released in two 32, 64 bit versions. (32 bit is released under GPL license but 64 is not but it is free to download)
  3. Source code of 32 bit is available and FREE to download but 64 bit not as mentioned
  4. It is entirely written by Assembly language, flat assembler (FASM)
  5. It has GUI with glossy features which captivated the users
  6. It supports multi threading and multi tasking
  7. It supports USB hard disks and pen drives
  8. It includes some built in programming languages like Assembly, C, Basic, and Java
  9. It includes many utilities and software like media player, browser, etc. (Fore playing videos, especial codecs need to be downloaded separately)
  10. The size of entire 32 bit version is 640 KB
  11. It has built in games
  12. It supports many network and internet protocols like TCP/IP, SMTP, FTP, and so on
  13. The kernel of MenuetOS is Real time and Monolithic
  14. Some operating systems are derived from MenuetOS like Kolibri