visopsys-0.7-src(1)

-------------- Version 0.7 16/02/2011 -------------- Overview: This new release offers an updated look and a number of new features, including JPEG image support, image resizing, 64-bit disk support, UDF (DVD) filesystem support, and GPT partition table support, as well as lots of new icons, wallpaper images, and file browsing functionality. New administrative applications and functionality have been added, and the ATA/IDE driver has been enhanced, including the ability to better support backwards-compatible SATA controllers. FPU context saving has been improved, and a number of tweaks and bug fixes are also included. - Updated the appearance of windows and several types of widgets. - Added JPEG image format support. - Added image resizing code. - Added 64-bit disk support. - Added UDF (DVD-ROM) filesystem support. - Added GPT disk label support to the kernel and to the Disk Manager program. - Included a quantity of new icons based on contributions provided by Leency <leency@mail.ru>, including the folder icon, and all of the file browser icons for different file types. - Implemented keyboard navigation of the GUI menus using 'Alt' to activate them, and the cursor and 'Enter' keys to navigate and select. - Alt-Tab now raises the root window's 'window' menu for keyboard navigation between open windows, in a way somewhat analogous to the way Windows and other GUIs do it. - Created new icons for the 'cal' (Calendar), 'mines', and 'snake' programs, as well as for the 'lsdev' (Devices), 'install', and 'users' (User Manager) administration programs. - Added loader file class support for the ability to recognise GIF and PNG images, Zip, Gzip, and Ar archives, and PDF and HTML documents. Also added file browser icons for PDF, HTML and archive files. - Designed and implemented a new proprietary font file format that enables sparsely-mapped, bitmapped fonts. Added a 'fontutil' utility program for editing and managing the new format. - New splash image for the 0.7x series. - New default background pattern wallpaper image, and three additional, full-sized ones. - Redesigned the 'bangicon', 'infoicon', and 'questicon' images. - Changed the visual effect which clicking on, or dragging icons. Instead of reverse-video (xor), the icons now tint yellow. Additionally, when dragging icons, the icon image now appears instead of a box outline. - Changed the way icon text is drawn, so that it no longer has a solid box behind it, but instead has a little drop shadow. - Icon components are now optionally focus-able, enabling keyboard navigation of (for example) the desktop icons, or the icons in the shutdown program - Implemented image alpha channels and blending, with support for resizing. - Added support for reading monochrome windows bitmap (.bmp) images. - Added support for some new (non-4:3 aspect) graphics modes. - Implemented horizontal window scroll bars. - Added a 'divider' window component, for placing simple little lines in a window. Useful for separating sections of components. - Window components can now be created with a flag to suppress the use of scroll bars. - Improved the IDE driver so that it can detect and operate multiple controllers, correctly use PCI I/O port remappings, and PCI interrupts, as well as adding improved support for things like backwards-compatible SATA disks/controllers. - Added initial, very basic detection of AHCI SATA controllers (operating in native AHCI mode) and their disks. - Reimplemented the kernel API interface. It now supports variable-sized arguments and return values, and does checking on argument types and values (for example user vs. kernel pointers, NULL values, etc). - Reimplemented the kernel's file stream subsystem for character-based file I/O as a simple buffered mechanism with a file pointer, instead of using the kernel's streams. - Added an 'I/O ready' state to the multitasker, so that processes waiting for (for example) disk I/O can go into a 'waiting' state and be awoken as soon as possible when the I/O arrives, rather than polling for interrupts as they had been doing previously. The 'idle thread' now loops through the process list, looking for any I/O-ready processes and yields its timeslice when it finds one. The scheduler gives such processes high priority. - Added more efficient power management, idling the processor during spare cycles. - Moved common keyboard functionality out of the drivers and into the abstraction layer, with an interface for handling of specific keyboard 'special' events such as PrtScn or Ctrl-Alt-Del. - Added basic internationalization library support (libintl), modeled on the GNU gettext system. - Added 32-bit CRC calculation to the kernel. - Added RAM disk support, courtesy of contributions from Davide Airaghi <davide.airaghi@gmail.com>. - Implemented 'lazy' FPU context saving; the context is only saved or restored if a different process tries to use it. - Added new keyboard mappings: French, Belgian, and Spanish. - Keyboard mappings are now stored in files, rather than hardcoded in the kernel. The 'keymap' (Keyboard Mapping) program has been enhanced to facilitate the editing and saving of new keymaps. In addition, the file browser will now use it to open keymap files when they're clicked. - Added a new configuration file /system/config/mount.conf containing variables for specifying mount points of filesystems (like Unix fstab) and whether or not to auto-mount them. The 'mount' and 'computer' programs use the file (as well as the kernel's automounting), and there is also a new 'filesys' program in the Administration window for editing it. - Added some extra error checking in the filesystem detection code. - The FAT boot sector now copies the partition table entry pointed to by the SI register, so that it is in a known/safe location for passing off in turn to the OS loader. - Added right-click context menus to the disk icons in the computer browser. The menu currently contains 'Browse', 'Mount as...', 'Unmount', and 'Properties' choices. - The computer browser now shows the filesystem label, if applicable, in its icon text. - When a wallpaper image is chosen, it is now automatically resized to fit the the client area of the window. - When displaying an image, the 'view' program now scales large images down by default so that they use no more than 2/3 of the screen. - The 'view' program now has a right-click context menu to zoom in and out on images, or show them actual size. - The 'disprops' (Display Settings) program has been reorganized, and now shows a thumbnail preview of the selected background wallpaper image. - Added an option to the windowFileDialog to show image file thumbnail previews. - The 'imgboot' program now has 'run' as the default selection, instead of 'install' - Added locking to the kernel's stream functions. - Added kernel logging of the OS loader's hardware info structure. - Added a 'model' string field to the kernel and user disk structures. - Window components now receive mouse enter/exit events. - Window components can now have custom mouse pointers, as windows do. - Added mouse pointers that indicate window resizing, and they are now switched to automatically when passing over window borders. - New default desktop color that goes better with the splash image - The window shell now uses the foreground color for the root window menu, instead of the desktop color (this way there's a contrast). - The foreground, background, and desktop colors are no longer specified exclusively in the kernel's configuration file. They are still there as default values for boot time, but additional color settings are specified in the window configuration file, and those override the kernel ones when they're available. - Added windowNewThumbImage() and windowThumbImageUpdate() functions to the window library. These can be used to create a thumbnail-sized window image object from an image file name. - Added a kernelFileGetFullPath() functio