Sacred OS

Sacred OS is a simulated operating system that runs in your browser. It is a Windows 9x inspired OS, and every HTML file is executable. Sacred OS is written in vanilla JavaScript. Sacred OS uses a bootloader so you can use the OS with your saved settings, programs, files, etc.

How it works

Sacred OS runs off a JavaScript object which is essentially the "hard disk". The GUI, the kernal, programs, and more are all stored here. The bootloader writes to this object either by uploading a disk backup or by fetching all the necessary files and storing them (what happens when you boot from a fresh install). Sacred OS and the bootloader uses a file table so that they can properly index files (like NTFS or ext4).

In Sacred OS, HTML files are executable. When you execute an HTML file, it is loaded into a window which contains an iframe of the HTML file. These HTML files can communicate with the kernel, such as requesting the system's main style sheet or writing to the disk.

Current State

File creation is limited at the moment in Sacred OS. Right now you can only create txt files and create one new file per directory. You can delete files, but you can't delete folders. Eventually you will be able to edit HTML files. Right now clicking on HTML files in the file explorer just executes them in a window.

Running Locally

In order for Sacred OS to function properly in a local environment, the files need to have an origin to them. Otherwise, you will expirience CORS errors. One solution is to use Node.js to create an http server.

Starting the http Server

After cloning the repo, go into your terminal and change the current directory to public and run

npx http-server --cors.

Developing in Sacred OS

Right now Sacred OS isn't stable and is in it's early phase of development, so things like syntax for messages to the kernel may change.

Sacred OS HTML Program Headers

If you want to assign a specific default window size to a program or disable resizing, you must put a comment at the top of the HTML file that follows this structure: <!--width="160" height="144" noRS-->.

• width and height: window size in CSS pixel units.
• noRS: stands for "no resize". This disables a maximize button from appearing on the program.

Deploying

Easy Deployment

Deploying Sacred OS to any site is really simple. All you have to do is copy all the files inside the public folder.

Automatic Deployment to Neocities

For my personal deployment on Neocities, I use a GitHub action to automatically upload changed files in the public folder after every merge to the main branch. The reason why the public folder exists is because Neocities only allows specific file types, and this repo has some files that aren't uploadable, so they are stored in the root of this repo. To learn more about deploying to Neocities, read this guide: https://liassica.codeberg.page/posts/0002-neocities-github/