Menuet OS power in my hands!!

Five minutes trying Menuet OS 0.98.84 64-bit (released yesterday) in VirtualBox 4.1.12 under Ubuntu 12.04:

- duh, it just works...!

- entire distribution fits in a single diskette image (1.44Mb; you can easily build the CD image... 1.5Mb: yes, 1.5 megabytes)

- pre-emptive multitasking with 1 KHz scheduler, multithreading, SMP up to 8 cpus, hard real-time data fetch support, etc: oops, while in Virtualbox this means it sucks all available CPU power; I guess it is due to 1000Hz scheduling (host machine was set with a 70% cap, resulting in more than 50-60% cpu usage while running a few demos)

- responsive GUI working on VESA standards, using transparencies and skinnable windows and drag'n'drop; mouse did not require particular Virtualbox configuration. It was a bit eerie navigating windows with that two non-aliased fixed-size fixed-width fonts. Has a starting "Menuet" menu in the bottom-left side of the screen; the always visible bottom area contains running program names. A weird thing was the need to click the "Menuet" button to wipe out the opened menus/submenus.

- editor and assembler for applications (yes, you will write apps using assembly language; the operating system itself is written in x86 assembler, both 32 and 64-bit; the assembler of choice is FASM);

- USB support for a few peripherals (including USB 2.0 storage, webcam, printer, TV/radio, and USB 1.1 keyboard and mouse); USB boot supported (I did not yet test it)

- TCP/IP stack with utilities (HTTP browser and server, FTP client and server, etc; sadly, it seems to lack a PING utility); networking addresses can be configured in the first phase of the boot (oops: only fixed IP addresses, no DHCP seen yet)

- system configuration at boot time in a commented text-file full of hex numbers (nerdy style)

More news coming soon...!