The first step is to setup a good and viable development environment. Using Vagrant and Virtualbox, you'll be able to compile and test your OS from all the OSs (Linux, Windows or Mac).
Vagrant is free and open-source software for creating and configuring virtual development environments. It can be considered a wrapper around VirtualBox.
Vagrant will help us for creating a clean virtual development environment whatever system you are using. The first step is to download and install Vagrant for your system at http://www.vagrantup.com/.
Oracle VM VirtualBox is a virtualization software package for x86 and AMD64/Intel64-based computers.
Vagrant needs Virtualbox to work, Download and install for your system at https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads.
Once Vagrant and Virtualbox are installed, you need to download the ubuntu lucid32 image for Vagrant:
vagrant box add base http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box
Once the lucid32 image is ready, we need to define our development environment using a Vagrantfile, create a file named Vagrantfile. This file defines that our environment need: nasm, make, build-essential, grub and qemu.
Start your box using:
vagrant up
You can now access your box by ssh the virtual box using:
vagrant ssh
The code will be available in the /vagrant directory:
cd /vagrant
The file Makefile defines some basics rules for building the kernel, the user libc and some userland programs.
Build:
make all
Test our operating system with qemu:
make run