Bootes

Bootes is a 16 bit operating system written in x86 assembler that was intended to become a scriptable boot loader similar to GRUB.

History

The project started out of curiosity and ended up becoming a bachelor degree thesys.

To be presented for the thesys, it gained the more aggressive name "iOS" before some one else used it! Bootes proved to be a successful project for its new purpose of gaining University points.

It has been discontinued since then (2003) and is now open for learning purposes. Bit and pieces of functionalities will be collected and put together in the GitHub repository of this project. The original intentions for Bootes was to boot a C++ operating system (codenamed Chaos) that was never realized.

Running Bootes

The repository contains a pre-build image of a bootable floppy disk that can be used to run Bootes without the need of building it.

Running in BOCHS

Download and install the latest version of BOCHS. OS X users can use Homebrew and follow the instructions of brew install bochs.

Run BOCHS from the bin directory.

At this point BOCHS should load the provided bochsrc.txt configuration file and start Bootes.

Running on a floppy

If for some reason you still have a hardware floppy disk reader, you can create a bootable Bootes floppy disk following this checklist:

• Build Bootes (see later)
• Format the floppy with FAT12
• Copy the file bin/objects/Stage2 to the root of the floppy disk. This must be the first file written to the disk and must not be renamed or modified
• Use the command dd -if=bin/Stage1.FAT12 of=<floppy> count=1 to write the Stage1 to the boot sector (I don't remember how that file got created)
  • <floppy> is something like /dev/fd0 in Unix systems and \\.\a for Windows
  • The dd command for Windows is available here

At this point you should have a bootable floppy disk. If left inserted when rebooting the machine, Bootes should run.

It should also be possible to install Bootes on a FAT32 formatted hard disk but instructions for that should be reconstructed.

What to do in Bootes

Once in Bootes you should be presented with a prompt. Bootes uses name spaced commands and has tab completion! You can also use the tab key to cycle through all sub-namespaces.

Explore available commands with:

• iOS.Script.InfoNamespace() gives a list of available namespaces.
• iOS.Script.InfoNamespace("iOS.IO.Console") will list all functions in the iOS.IO.Console namespace.

There is a special directive to get documentation on a command:

• help iOS.IO.Console.Write will give a description of the iOS.IO.Console.Write command

Hello wordl with shell variable usage:

myvar = "Hello world!\n"
iOS.IO.Console.Write( myvar )

To shutdown the machine:

• iOS.Machine.Shutdown() or iOS.Machine.Reboot()

There may be more secrets in Bootes like a bare-bone graphical interface and the actual ability to boot something. The mysterious startup.ios file was also used for something. More instructions may be added in the future.

Building Bootes

To build Bootes you need FASM. There is also a working OS X FASM version in the FASM message board (by Zab, you'll need to register to the board to download the file).

The building process is described in Makefile.bat for a Windows console, it's reported here:

• fasm Stage1\Stage1.asm bin\objects\Stage1 to build the Stage1
• fasm Stage2\Stage2.asm bin\objects\Stage2 to build the Stage2
• fasm Stage1\Loaders\Stage1.Loader.FAT32.asm bin\objects\Stage1.Loader.FAT32 to build something unknown
• copy bin\objects\Stage1/b + bin\objects\Stage2/b bin\Bootes.img Windows command to concatenate 2 files using binary mode to read them

License

MIT License