FruityOrange

FruityOrange is a freely downloadable, very small (approximately 1 MB in size) and open source computer operating system that has been written entirely in C programming language, as well as in the famous Assembly low-level programming language. It is powered by the Higherhalf kernel, which uses the concept of a monolithic kernel.

Features at a glance

Key features include a dynamic syscall interface, support for multitasking, the Concha shell, initial ramdisk, ELF32-loader, virtual file system, heap (data structure), paging, as well as physical memory management.

In addition, the operating system includes the usual ls, cp and cat command-line utilities. Only a console environment is provided in this tiny operating system, designed for testing purposes only.

Distributed as a bootable Live CD image

FruityOrange is currently distributed as a bootable Live CD ISO image that has only 1 MB in size, supporting only the 32-bit instruction set architecture (it can boot on both 32 and 64-bit computers). To get started, users can download and write the ISO image on either a CD disc or USB flash drive.

The source code is also available for download for those of you who want to build the operating system from scratch and give the development version a try. Check out the project’s official website (see the homepage link below) for more details.

Getting started with FruityOrange

After downloading the ISO image, write it to either a blank/RW CD disc or a USB flash drive. Then, insert the bootable medium on your computer and attempting to boot it from the BIOS. The system will start automatically by loading the kernel and all the necessary modules. In the end, you will be dropped to a shell prompt, where you can run various commands.