GentleOS/32

A hobby operating system for vintage 32-bit PCs, built for tinkering with old hardware on the bare metal.

You can find more information on its website.

It has a spin-off called GentleOS/16, which targets even older, 16-bit PCs.

Building

The only prerequisite is Docker & Docker Compose, supporting linux/amd64 platform.

To compile GentleOS/32, run:

docker compose run --rm dev make -j4

You will find the resulting binaries in build/.

To clean up docker artifacts, run:

docker compose down --rmi all

Setting wallpaper

A wallpaper can be provided using an initial RAM disk (initrd). To create it, you need Python 3 with Pillow, and mtools. On macOS:

brew install pillow mtools

To create the initrd and install it in the disk image, run:

./tools/mkinitrd.py --wallpaper /path/to/image.png --disk-image gentleos32-disk.img

Note: the wallpaper will only be shown in 256-color video modes. In GIMP you can import the provided VGA palette and use indexed mode for best results.

Attributions

• Assets in vendor/icons8 have been sourced from Icons8 using the free license and modified

• Assets in vendor/mona have been extracted from the Mona Font and modified (LICENSE)

• Assets in vendor/int10h have been extracted from the The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack and modified (LICENSE)

License

Except where otherwise noted, GentleOS/32 is licensed under GPLv2.