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Overview: This is a maintenance release. New features include support for resizing NTFS filesystems and arbitrary partitions, IDE block mode I/O, Linux swap detection and clobber, and improvements to the operating system, plus assorted bug fixes.
- Partition Logic can now resize Windows XP (NTFS) partitions, as a result of porting Linux ntfsprogs NTFS resizing code.
- Allows partition-only resizing regardless of the filesystem type (with appropriate warnings).
- Improved IDE/ATA hard disk driver performance by implementing block-mode I/O.
- Added basic 'stub' NTFS filesystem support (detection and clobber).
- Added basic 'stub' Linux swap filesystem support (detection and clobber).
- Added a kernel disk function for rescanning the partitions of a single disk.
- Add a kernel filesystem function for getting statistics about a filesystem (whether it's mounted or not, or indeed, properly supported or not).
- Added a kernel filesystem function for getting resizing constraints.
- Added a kernel filestystem function for requesting specific detection of filesystem type (useful for removable media and such).
- Text mode now shows the operations/commands in two columns.
- The 'move partition' and 'copy disk' functions now use standard progress dialogs and show time estimates.
- Fixed: After formatting FAT32, Linux and older Windows installers would show the filesystem as 100% full.
- Fixed: Errors with IDE/ATA hard disks as secondary masters.
- Fixed: Unformatting (clobbering) a partition in the didn't seem to convince the kernel to un-detect the previous filesystem until reboot.
Overview: This release introduces new functionality including tools for browsing the computer, file systems, and administrative tasks, FAT defragmenting, a built in chain-boot loader and simple MBR formatting, file browsing widgets and dialogs, ELF dynamic linking, Windows .ico icon file support, and Italian keyboard support. It represents a major upgrade of the underlying Visopsys operating system, and also includes a number of important bugfixes.
- Added a 'Computer browser' toolbar item, equivalent to 'My Computer' in Windows. It shows the different disks, auto-mounts them (if applicable) when clicked, and launches a file browser.
- Added a 'File browser' toolbar item.
- Added an 'Administration' toolbar item which brings up a window with icons for various other programs.
- Added defragmenting capability to the FAT filesystem driver.
- Implemented a simple, chain-loading MBR boot menu for loading from different partitions and operating systems. It lets the user edit the menu strings and set parameters. ** Note that this will NOT load any Linux installation that uses an initrd.
- Implemented simple MBR code, which can for example be used to rescue a system from a deleted or corrupt GRUB installation.
- Implemented shared libraries and dynamically linked executables. All included libraries and programs are now dynamic.
- Added .ico icon file format support and converted many existing icons to that format.
- Created file browsing widgets/dialogs.
- Added Davide Airaghi's Italian keyboard mapping.
- Some preliminary networking support has been added, but for the moment it is disabled by default.
- The text-mode formatting now shows a progress bar in text mode.
- Refuse outright, or warn/confirm before moving, formatting, or deleting mounted partitions.
- The 'disks' command now shows mount points.
- Implemented a 'progress' data structure that can be passed to (for example) long filesystem operations such as format, check, resize. Based on that, a 'progress dialog' window library feature that utilizes the 'progress' structure and shows a progress bar and status messages.
- Fixed: Canceling a new partition creation at the label type stage caused 2 changes to show as pending.
- Fixed: The partition reordering menu didn't display changes properly in text mode. It worked but the changes weren't reflected in the menu.
- Fixed: The lost+found directory created by the EXT2 formatting code was not readable when we mounted the filesystem. Also, the permissions are now set to the same values as Linux mke2fs.
- Fixed: Selecting partition/list types could crash the program.
- Fixed: The Program Manager was associating some child threads with the wrong parents in the process list.
Overview: This is a maintenance and bugfix release. Some new features include support for EXT2 filesystem formatting, German keyboard layouts, GUID (Globally-Unique Identifier) generation, and filesystem clobber. Also includes a number of important bugfixes.
- Implemented EXT2 formatting.
- Added Jonas Zaddach's German keyboard layout
- Added GUID-generating capability.
- Filesystem drivers that support 'format' functionality now also support 'clobber' functions, so that for example when a format is done, the filesystem doesn't still get detected as the previous type.
- The filesystems code now has a proper array of all the different filesystem drivers, that can be iterated through (for example, when doing filesystem detection).
- Implemented a "multi choice dialog" that shows buttons with user-specified text strings and returns the index of the specified choice.
- Fixed: When creating partitions, it wasn't possible to create logical partitions. When choosing primary, no primary/logical attribute was shown.
- Fixed: The EXT filesystem code would fail to mount small filesystems with only a single block group, where the number of blocks was less than the maximum blocks per group.
- Fixed: In graphics mode, after specifying start and end values for a new partition, pressing 'Cancel' in the tag type dialog didn't stop the partition from being created.
- Fixed: The 'move partition' function check for empty space on either side of a partition could produce a false error
- Fixed: The partition table was being reread too frivolously (especially in between writing main and extended partition tables).
Overview: This is a maintenance and bugfix release. There are various GUI touch-ups, and disk geometry information is updated in FAT partitions after disk copy operations. Important fixes include the elimination of boot hangs due to faulty mouse initialization and full kernel variable lists, a fix to the detection of secondary hard disks, and a fix to faulty mounting of EXT2/3 filesystems.
- Now ensures that the disk geometries stored in any FAT partitions are correct.
- Window lists components now have multi-column mode implemented, are now capable of showing various combinations of icons, text, or both, and they are now able to resize successfully, so that more rows can become visible and multi-column lists get extra columns.
- Back-ported the 0.6 branch multitasker changes (to do with processImage structures and argument passing).
- The exception handler process now displays a dialog box when a program crashes, so that they don't simply disappear (requiring the user to look at the console output for the reason)
- Changed the FAT, EXT, and ISO filesystem drivers to take more advantage of packed structures for better efficiency.
- Fixed: The system could fail to boot in graphics mode due to faulty mouse initialization
- Fixed: The kernel's symbol variable list was becoming full and causing various boot initializations to fail. The kernel's variableList code has been changed so that it automatically manages list memory.
- Fixed: "ID or target sector not found" messages during boot when a second (slave, for example) hard disk was present.
- Fixed: EXT2 mounting had become generally broken
- Fixed: The 'format' function was inadvertently ignoring the '-t' filesystem type option.
- Fixed: When a mount attempt failed, it was possible to end up with a rogue '/' entry added to the root directory, which could render the whole directory tree useless until reboot.
- Fixed: Depending on screen contents, the icon layout in the kernel window shell could allow the text of the bottom-most icon to wrap off the screen.
- Fixed: The console window's scroll bar was not being added to windows when the rest of the text area was added; thus the scroll bar did not appear.
- Fixed: The 'wallpaper' function failed to set the wallpaper if the file name supplied in the file dialog was an absolute path.
Overview: This is a maintenance release, with some additional capabilities including installation support for all FAT filesystems, primitive PCI driver support, parallel I/O for disk copy operations, and better multitasking and interrupt handling performance. In addition, GUI window layout and resizing has been reimplemented and generally fixed.
- The system can now install to and boot from any kind of FAT filesystem (FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32/VFAT).
- Updated the IDE disk controller locking, so that each now have their own locks; thus I/O can be done in parallel between disks on different controllers.
- Back-ported large numbers small changes and improvements from the 0.6 development branch, including improvements to the operating system's disk layer.
- The bootable floppy image for the ISO distribution now contains only the OS loader and the kernel, because only these are used. This shrinks the (zipped) ISO image size.
- Fixed window relayout when windows are sized.
- Added a basic PCI bus driver, the initial implementation of which was provided by Jonas Zaddach. Only logs a bus device scan, for the moment.
- Fixed: Copying a big file such as an .iso image could fail because the copy code tried to allocate enough memory for the whole file. Now it allocates as much as possible and does multiple reads/writes
- Fixed: Typing and using the mouse at the same time was causing funny things to go on. The interrupt handlers for the two devices needed to be better synchronized.
- Fixed: Interrupts are now disabled during the pause before reboot, so that for example the operating system is not still processing I/O interrupts and such.
- Fixed: In the install program, installing on a freshly-inserted floppy. could produce the error message "can't install a boot sector for filesystem type 'unknown'".
- Fixed: When installing from a 'basic' install, there was a spurious error message resulting from attempting to look for the 'full' install file.
- Fixed: When dragging an icon, one pixel-width of the icon title wasn't being erased properly.
Overview: This is a maintenance release, with numerous small improvements and bug fixes and some additional features, such as improved disk-to-disk copies, filesystem display, and partition table reordering. A number of unnecessary files and programs have been removed.
- Implemented threaded, double-buffered disk IO for the 'copy disk' operation.
- The slice list now indicates the disk name and file system type (if available), and it is now possible to change the partition table ordering - i.e., changing drive names/letters.
- Re-engineered the file handling code
- The format operation causes a re-scan of the partitions, so that the new filesystem type is shown in the menu
- The Program Manager now shows overall memory usage totals.
- The shutdown program now attempts to eject the CD-ROM a second time if required, since it seems that some drives will fail on the first attempt but succeed on the second.
- The FAT boot sectors no longer rely on the disk geometry they get from the DOS BPB block. They get it from the BIOS instead.
- Removed the 'move' command (there's already a 'mv' command)
- The 'disks' command now reports the filesystem type, if known, and not just the partition label.
- Fixed: Showing 1MB total size for all disks
- Fixed: The 'copy disk' failure was leaving the dialog box on the screen.
- Fixed: Formatting operation could hang when doing a large FAT32 filesystem.
- Fixed: In the 'create partition' function, if you supplied bad start/end values, the logical/primary choice would be disabled when the dialog box came back.
- Fixed: In the 'create partition' function, specifying a megabyte size value overflowed at 4096m.
- Fixed: When copying a file, if the destination was a directory (rather than a fully-specified file name), it would fail and there was a spurious error message
- Fixed: when the text mode menu scrolled the screen, it looked funny.
- Fixed: 'ls' an unknown file, hang!
- Fixed: The 'rmdir' functionality was broken, because the '.' and '..' entries were not being removed correctly.
- Fixed: The 'umount' command failed when a following / was after the mount point name.
Overview: This is primarily a maintenance/bugfix release for the base operating system. New features include the ability to fix small partition table inconsistencies and the ability to take screenshots. It is now easier to toggle between text and graphics modes.
- Enhanced the bootstrap code so that it is possible to boot on some trickier hardware platforms, such as Toshiba laptops.
- Now offers to fix errors turned up by the partition table check.
- When the shutdown program is attempting to eject the disk, it now shows a banner dialog since sometimes it takes a couple of seconds.
- Fixed: The Program Manager wasn't really putting threads under their correct process parents; it merely put them in order as received from the kernel.
- Fixed: Broken CD-ROM floppy disk emulations no longer trick the loader into detecting nonexistent floppies.
- Fixed: On some hardware, the kernel's hardware detection could be tricked into detecting nonexistent fixed disks with NULL geometry.
- Fixed: The 'megabytes' value being printed for hard disks by the loader was severely wrong.