Menuet
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- This is an article about the operating system. Menuet is also an alternative spelling for the minuet, a dance.
Menuet (also called MenuetOS or MeOS) is a hobby OS for IBM PC compatible computers originally conceived by Ville Mikael Turjanmaa and released under the GPL. Now the project lies in the hands of Jarek Pelczar. It is notable for fitting on a single floppy disk due to it being written in FASM assembly language, although some simple higher level languages are available for development. The current release includes a GUI, a WAV player, a tiny editor, an assembler, a simple TCP/IP stack, and some games. The source code for several programs is included on the diskette, and the kernel source as well as source for almost every application can be downloaded from the Menuet website (http://www.menuetos.org/).
MenuetOS is a useful tool to learn how a simple OS is constructed and to do various experiments. The applications can be programmed in assembly language, which is fairly easy because of the IA-32 environment which allows parameters to be passed to the kernel functions in the registers. The kernel is a monolithic pre-emptive, real-time kernel and already includes video drivers.
High-level language support
Even though the main focus of Menuet has been on making an environment for easy assembler programming, it is still possible to run software programmed in high-level languages on the assembler core. The biggest single effort towards high-level language support has been Jarek's work in bringing C libraries to Menuet.
Distributions
Several distributions of Menuet exist, including translations in Russian, Chinese, Czech, and Serbian.
Perhaps the most active alternate distribution is the Russian distro, available from the Russian website (http://menuet.narod.ru/). The Russian distribution includes an alternate file browser (X-Tree), which is also in the English distribution, as well as other programs not available in English.
External links
- MenuetOS.org (http://www.menuetos.org/)
- Russian Menuet website (http://menuet.narod.ru/)
- MenuetOS C Library (http://menuetlibc.sourceforge.net/)
- The MenuetWiki (http://menuet.homelinux.net/)
- GridWorks "EZ" Distro (http://menuet.homelinux.net/EZ:Distro)
- Another assembly OS by Mr. Turjanmaa (http://www.co.jyu.fi/~villemt/64/) for 64-bit processor architectures. (Unofficially referred to as the 64-bit MenuetOS, Menuet64 and other names alike)de:MenuetOS