

Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel - mlLK
http://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html

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andybak
"Emace: A pretty good operating system, but it could use a better text
editor."

I can't trace the source of this quip but I'm glad someone has set out to
prove the first part of it...

~~~
philjackson
You can't trace it because everyone on the internet has said it at least once.

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viraptor
Isn't it possible to do that with any program with no external dependencies?

~~~
vidarh
Yes, it is. I've had embedded systems boot straight into busybox like shells
for example. Even more fun, the system didn't have a BIOS at all (it was hard
wired to just jump into a location in flash, were we placed the Linux second
stage boot loader to uncompress the kernel image to RAM, which then executed
the shell immediately. Even the shell was really mostly there to aid debugging
- in production use it'd immediately spawn the main app for the system.

As long as the kernel has whatever drivers you need compiled in instead of as
modules, and as long as your app either doesn't directly or indirectly spawn
lots of child processes or if it does it takes care of wait()'ing for them,
and as long as you don't need any getty's (without spawning them yourself)
there's no problems tearing out everything and replacing it with a self
contained static app.

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dryicerx
There is actually a easier way to do this. Pass this parameter while in your
boot loader

    
    
        init=/usr/bin/emacs-nox
    

This will fire up emacs instead of init once the kernel is done booting up.
You also need mount, but you can run that within emacs.

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ramchip
Who would have known... it really is an OS.

~~~
stcredzero
Lots of Lispers and Smalltalkers would roll their eyes at this. (Some CS
research history: Both those languages _were_ OS.)

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capablanca
Single threaded OS?

~~~
mahmud
M-x shell or M-!

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spudlyo
You could use vim as init as well, it just wouldn't be as much fun, since you
couldn't do any programming.

~~~
gnosis
Actually, vim has a programming language built in to it: vimscript. So you
could certainly program from it.

And that's not to mention the various other programming language interfaces
vim has. If you've compiled vim with the right options, you could use Perl,
Python, Ruby, or Lua from within vim.

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lallysingh
Sounds about perfect for netbookin'.

~~~
krakensden
except you'd have a devil of a time dealing with wireless networks

