I agree, that's kind of what I was pointing out. I kind of wish someone would draw this to the attention of Dark or something.

Hi.
@Severestormsteve, yeah you have changed a lot. I'll just come right out and admit it when I first started seeing your posts I didn't like you at all but over time you've become a really cool dude.
@Ethin, there is not much left to say but you know all you can do is post your advice. Whether people follow your advice or camlorn's shouldn't matter to you so much because either way you got your opinion out there.
You know different people are experts in all kinds of things. I myself know very little about computers other than how to use them. I do know a lot about police investigations because I love things like that so much. I don't mean to brag but I'm an expert in criminal investagations and procedures. All I'm trying to say is that even if you know a lot about something you can be wrong sometimes and there's nothing wrong with that.
@Camlorn, please do not leave this forum we would all be sorry to lose you. Btw, I just wanted to mention I'm a huge fan of your blog I read it all the time.

Heh. I need to update the blog with stuff.  Unfortunately, college basically sucks all my energy and motivation, though ironically this doesn't include time.  The ironic bit is that the post I've had on the back burner for about 2 months now is SSE, which is a low-level but significant tool for mathematical optimization in DSP (read: 3d audio) applications.  I try not to blog about audiogames anymore because that's incredibly blind-specific and can hurt you in the wider sighted world, but I do want to do a quite lengthy series on how Libaudioverse works and I'm considering some game math tutorials aimed at the visually impaired (it's easy. Really. Just no one explains it with those apocryphal thousand words in place of the picture).
I'm not leaving.  I just got to the point where I didn't care if what I had to say meant that I needed to leave after saying it, for the simple reason that this keeps happening.  Over and over.  I try not to throw fuel on the fire; these situations are really unpredictable and coming out and saying "I really do have a problem with this" as I did in post 39 can often make a bad situation worse, not better.

Hello Everyone.
I'm curious what is a kernel? I looked it up and it says it's an operating system that handles input/output. So I'm guessing a kernel of an operating system would be it's core programming is that correct? A while back I was reading about android and it said that android is made from a modifyed linux kernel. So the way I understand it if I had a linux kernel and added some features this would be messing with the core programming of linux?
I only ask because somebody was talking about kernel earlier and it got me wonering.

From what I've learned, messing with the Linux kernel is going to be one of the most difficult things you will ever do. Writing an OS kernel is about 2,000 times harder. The Linux kernel is about 100-200 MB, and its completely ridiculus. They seriously need to re-write the Linux kernel and make it way smaller.

Which is why none of us do it, or at least get far.  Mostly you're stopped at "I need a speech synthesizer" as a blind person, anyway.  You can do stuff that gets it off the ground, but if you ever want to boot on a real machine you have to solve the audio problem first.  And it is huge.
I've never seriously tried, simply because getting to the point of even being able to write a file to disk is a hugely big project.  It's a waste of time to actually write it for any reason other than learning, but learning about it is interesting.  Getting to the point of something actually useful is probably on the order of 40k lines of code.  Getting to the point of actually competing with Windows or any of the other big OSes is probably on the order of 200k or 300k lines of code plus bunches and bunches of device drivers that you'd have to hack together from basically zero information because people like Nvidia don't care about your project.
So yeah, go write the next Swamp instead.

@guitarman, I do not know if I'll ever rewrite the kernel. It took sooooooo much time to set up GCC and then write the code that I might forget the project altogether. I might do it again, if I get enough encouragement from everyone on this forum, and people are willing to support me, no matter my reputation. I'll need all of you on this forum who know how to code in C to help me, as I have never done this before and succeeded.

Hi Ethin.
Well if your looking for a pat on the back I wouldn't expect to much. If you really want to build an operating system you should do it for yourself. The reason I say this is because all the support from this forum won't help you get the job done faster or better. I would love to see what you come up with but like I said build it for yourself.
I know when I start developing games I will do it for everybody but I will make games that will entertain me first.

Um, in the coding world when someone is attempting a project like this, one does not make it solo. In fact, if it wasn't for collaboration linux wouldn't be here, and any mainstream project really. So that seemed kind of insensitive. Sorry, maybe it just seems to me to be that way.

Yeah, so am I.  No one is saying that he has to do it solo, if he does it.  All I've said is that the expertise is not to be found here.  If you don't believe me, go download the commentary for Xv6 on that page I linked; a particularly good place to start is appendix b, a description of the bootloader.  Xv6 is for educational purposes and weighs in near 10k lines.  I don't think it even has shared library support.  Not sure what its filesystem is, but probably simple made-up for our class version 1.

Well, it's got a makefile already.  Assuming you have a fully functional Gcc toolchain, you should be able to just run make.  Any other dependencies will be in the readme or the commentary.  I'm not sure what tools you're trying to compile by hand, as the repository I clonedd doesn't have any.  The output of the makefile should be an image of some sort, and there should be directions for running it in a VM or enough info to make your own directions either in the source's readme or the commentary.
beyond that, I have no idea, but actually building it looked fairly simple: get Gcc toolchain and make sure it's not on a Mac, run Gcc toolchain.

When I read the directions, it said you only need the cross-compiler on a mac, though MinGW probably doesn't work quite right because it's trying to do windows executables.  Just install VMWare player and build a Linux virtual machine and go from there.
I'm not going to try to do this myself, therefore I'm not going to be able to provide you detailed instructions.  If you haven't seen here, set up a Linux VM and follow their directions.  This is the easiest part of the process, at least if you're actually going to try to modify the Xv6 source code.