Visa version
Before you start
These are the tools that you will need to complete the project.
VMWare Workstation Player
If you already run a Linus distribution you don't need a VMWare Player; ou probably do not need it even if you run Windows. If you run something else besides Linux you might have problems finding and installing the tools needed and it could therefore be easier to run everything in a virtual environment.
To install VMWare Player you down load the approprate executable from the link below and then install the player. You will also need a Linux operating system and why not choose Ubuntu to make things easy.
When you install the VMWare player it will ask for a license key but you can ignore this and enter you email address when you first run the player. The following tools assume that you have Linux environment up and running, either as the host operating system or as a virtual system.
The nasm assembler
We will not do very much in assembler bu the first steps will of course have to be in assembler since we do not have any support from an existing operating system. We us the Netwide Assembler (nasm) which is a portable x86 assembler. Don't worry if you have not done very much assembly programming before, it will work out just fine.
> sudo apt-get install nasm
The xorriso iso tool
We will bundle our kernel in a .iso file i.e. what you would normally find on an installation CD. The .iso image will be used by our emulator to start the operating system but you might equally well patch your own boot-loader or create a bootable USB-stck and boot your own machine with your own operating system.
> sudo apt-get install xorriso
The QEMU emulator
It is very cool to actually boot your own machine with your own operating system but when your developing the system it will take too long to test it. We will therefore use a emulator that will run the operating system. The great thing with an emulator such as QEMU is that you can configure it to behave like another processor i.e. ARM, MIP, SPARC etc We will target the x86 architecture and I assume that you're already running on a x86 machine so we will not use this feature but it is good to know.
>sudo apt-get install qemu
Installing Rust
We will use the Rust tool chain to compile for different architectures so we're installing a bit more than we would actually need. You will not have to learn all features of this process since everything will be hidden in make scripts.
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