So I found out about JNode awhile back and messed around with it a bit. In the end I found this repository on GitHub which looks to be the main place where the little development left for it is happening. My project FakeJavaOS is inspired from JNode, and I would love to compile JNode and run it. I would prefer to use a bootable CD/DVD rather than VMWare Player. I have already successfully compiled a 64-bit bootable CD. My question now is, would my system be affected if I boot from it? Would it take over my hard drive? There is little FAQ for JNode so I am clueless as to what could happen.
No matter what the docs/spec says, don’t believe it will leave your valuable data alone.
Unplug your drives prior to booting an obscure OS.
I looked into running it with VirtualBox, but it’s really rather buggy and doesn’t seem to work, so I’ll just give up on it for a bit again and I’ll probably get the urge to try to run it again in a few months.
JNode probably only has drivers for the devices VMware virtualizes your real devices as, probably not even all of them, and maybe a scant few other real devices. In other words, I wouldn’t expect it to work on your bare hardware unless you happen to have the same hardware VMWare’s devices pretend to be.
Of course nothing stops you from creating a CD that boots a VMWare host and then runs JNode. Frankly, I just don’t see what JNode offers though. Singularity at least had proof-carrying code in order to be able to run everything without needing memory protection. I doubt JNode gets even close to that.
I was mainly interested in it because it looked, to me, like the closest anything had gotten to being an OS written in Java. I thought of that as extremely cool, and that is where my motivation to run it came from.
JavaOS predates JNode at least in terms of a “usable” released OS, though they started development at roughly the same time. When I worked for Sun, I actually found a JavaStation to play around with. It was literally being used as a doorstop at the time.
One bigger german university is using JavaOS till today for all computer terminals in their libraries. I used them once and it was horrible, you could actually see the text you just typed rendering on the screen one by one character.