OUR EXPERT
Michael Reed was already serene enough, even before he tried SerenityOS, thanks to his experience with alternative OSes.
S erenityOS is an alternative, free and open source operating system that combines a S modern technical approach with a healthy nod to classic operating systems of the past. The kernel has features such as pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection and multithreading, and overall, the system is quite Unix-like, with many familiar tools available from the command line. It takes its visual style directly from ’90s classic desktops from the likes of Microsoft and Apple – awelcome sight to anyone who’s fatigued by the bland, flat look of modern GUIs.
In some ways, it’s fairly early in its development, but it already has a full desktop with associated tools and some runnable applications. One of the most admirable aspects of project is its highly active community, many of whom contribute to the code. This community has also funded the project, meaning that the main developer, Andreas Kling, is able to work on it full-time.
This all adds up to an alternative operating system that is developing at a mile a minute, and it’s already good fun to play around with. To get the behind-thescenes picture of what’s going on with the project, we managed to shoot a few questions at Andreas himself.
Serenity from the source
As always, we’ll start our exploration of the system by obtaining it and installing) and running two scripts. The second script compiles the code of the OS and runs it within the virtualiser. If you’re not familiar with Git, this might sound complicated, but it’s actually easy to get up and running. The only downside is that compiling the system can easily take an hour on slower hardware.
