Exclaim 0.2.1 Release Notes

Version: 1.1

The release notes are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales license.

These are the release notes for version 0.2.1 of the Exclaim operating system, a free operating system for modern computers. Version 0.2.1 is a bugfix release of 0.2.0, bringing a few improvements.

These release notes will provide notes and warnings for your use of the Exclaim operating system, as well as provide instructions on how to get started. Please remember that Exclaim is alpha quality software, and may damage your data or your computer. Please back up all data before using this operating system, and the Exclaim Project cannot be held responsible for any damage caused by use of this software.

Exclaim is © 2008 The Exclaim Project, and is released under the terms of the GNU GPL, version 2.0. For more information, please see the LICENSE file. For more information on the Exclaim project, please see the Exclaim website at http://www.exclaim-project.org.

Due to the minimalistic nature of Exclaim, it is hard to provide an accurate set of system requirements. Below are the recommended requirements that Exclaim has successfully run upon:

• Pentium processor or equivalent (any speed)
• 16MB of RAM
• Some form of storage device (to hold the OS, netbooting is possible) i.e. floppy, CD-ROM, Hard Disk
• Monitor capable of displaying colour text
• Some features require an ATA hard disk with an EXT2 partition on it, and/or a graphics card supporting VBE3 and a compatible monitor.

Version 0.2.1 contains the following changes from the previous 0.2.0 release:

• Fix for VBE graphics
• Rewritten memory management code, based on dlmalloc
• Replacement of elibc with Newlib
• Added ettt (tic-tac-toe game) and dungeon (predecessor to Zork)
• VFS Bug fixes
• ATA Read speed improvements

The following bugs are already known, and we request that you do not report them. The Launchpad bug IDs are shown in brackets.

These release notes will be updated from time to time, with the most recent copies being placed on the Exclaim website at http://www.exclaim-project.org. Please refer to the latest versions of these notes, as well as the search function on the bug tracker before reporting a bug.

No known issues

Exclaim is shipped as both CD-ROM and floppy images, as well as source code. You may compile it yourself with these instructions. Building Exclaim is possible on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, and possibly BSD, although it has not been tested. The page linked above describes the process for building on all the supported platforms.

We also provide a hard disk image that, when used with the -hda option to qemu (specify in the build configuration), will give you a partition to test the ext2 driver with, on /Devices/ata0d0p0. Note that the default startup script will attempt to mount ata0d0p0 as ext2 on /Volumes/ata0d0p0, regardless of the machine you are running on. If you do not wish for this to happen, you should edit apps/startup.esh in the source and recompile.

Thank you for taking the time to download Exclaim. Should you encounter a problem, or wish to file a feature request, see our Bugtracker at http://bugs.exclaim-project.org. For more information on Exclaim, see the Exclaim website at http://www.exclaim-project.org.