Maximum PC

What if I took a linux ditrobution, a lite one such as mandrake or penut, and added a few lines of Bash Shell and customised it?????

Its called remastering - and in some cases its actually encouraged (such as knoppix).

Get Knoppix Hack from O'Reilly by Kyle Rankin (~$30). You can work on Project Revanant with me - kinda like a BartPE - without the PE - more of an FE. And it will work on any x86 system - not just windows.

Manta

BTW - I'm not knockin BARTPE - I could never do what that guy did.

You wouldn't be able to customize too much w/ just bash. If that is the type of thing you're looking to do, I would recommend reading the Linux From Scratch documentation.

Also, Mandrake is not a lite distro.

If you really wanna do a lot with Linux, get the kernel source and change it, then recompile it.

How to you make a pc that when you turn it on, your favorite game just appears, nowinxp, no os. The game is the OS!

You'd have to totally customize the platform the game was designed for. For Windows, good luck.

I agree with Kybo_Ren. I've been working on a small OS project and even seemingly simple things like saving to a file or getting keypresses can take a rather long time to implement, although you can see why when you break it into component parts.

I.E. saving a file:

- implement a 'write to disk function'
- to do this you have to have an fs driver
- even with an fs driver you need to actually know how to transfer the data (so you need another driver for the HD controller)
- to do this without wasting CPU cycles you will likely need DMA.
- write a driver for DMA controller.
- to write controller drivers you will likely need to write to ports. But you don't want just any program to write to ports, so you should implement a GDT...

You get the idea. And this is just for really basic functions. I'm not even talking about implementing things like OpenGL or other (required) graphics libraries. In short it would be waaay too much work for one person to handle in a reasonable amount of time.

Even in dedicated gaming platforms like the big name consoles, you still have an os sitting between the hardware and the game. As others have pointed out, the time and expense of implementing a combination game/OS would be outrageous, and it would like perform worse because most game programmers don't know system level programming as well as the people who created the os.

I think I am going to try and alter the kernal source code to a distro and buy the book manta was talking about. A few questions......

-what distro should i use?

-what language(s) shuld I brush up on?

-How much would I have to alter it to be able to say its "mine"

- Are there any legal issues?

1) Distro to what? If you're using the Linux kernel, then obviously, any distro will do. The fact is, distros differ in what applications they package (and some system tools) as opposed to the kernel they have .

2) C - and lots of it.

3) if you alter a kernel, it's not really yours. If you write your own kernel, then it's yours.

4) yes, if it's closed source. Kernels with GPL or BSD licenses have little to no restrictions on what you can/can't do.

I know any will do, but what distrobution do u reccomend I should pull it from?

Any. Download your favorite distro.

We've already been through this .... several times now?

Anyways, writing operating system code is very difficult - all system level code for that matter (operating systems, drivers, application servers, compilers, etc). You are well advised to stay away.

If you wanted to become a mountain climber, would you start with some easy local mountain or choose to be another fatality of K2?