While a lot of hype have been generated for Windows 7, the research operating system Singularity  from Microsoft Research released their certain version into Codeplex. The OS is written on C#, unlike most OSes nowadays written in C/ C++. I heard although it is hosted in Codeplex, Singularity is not an open source OS. So don’t mistaken it for the likes of Linux and HaikuOS. There are a lot rumours about a secret OS project in Microsoft called Midori which is based on Singularity, but then again its all rumours.

This time to help users to get a feel of the OS within learning how to build the OS from scracth, they included a .ISO file download which is actually a Live CD of the OS. The ISO file can be mounted to VPC and it will work. Below are my screenshots, unlike Windows 7, this is a lot more boring.

Boot loader starting up

Kernel starting up

Initialising drivers?

Singularity command prompt loaded.

Get a list of available commands using ‘help’

Like the DOS days, ‘dir’ is working, but not ‘cd’. Maybe there is a new command name. Still at pre-release stage, there is not much functions on this OS yet, but if you are a research on OS technologies it is worth a good look on some of the new ideas around building OSes.

You might want to find out more here

http://www.codeplex.com/singularity

http://research.microsoft.com/os/Singularity/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Singularity