It's primary design principle is simplicity. This means that if a feature will make the codebase cluttered, it is dropped until it can be implemented in a clean way.
Well, r0.15 hasn't happened yet, how typical of me :)
In the meantime, along with doing quite a few fixes to AxWin3, I've started implementing ACPICA into
Acess. This is the first external project that's been included, and I've tried to do it with minimal
modification of the sourced code, and without having to include the code in the Acess tree.
So far, it's been a success. There's a makefile that automatically extracts the ACPICA code from its
tarball, patches it for Acess and then compiles it into a .a for the kernel to link against.
The kernel shim is almost complete, but there are probably some bugs sitting about that ends up
confusing the ACPICA code and causes it to run out of cache entries.
For the curious (and lazy), the ACPICA shim is in `KernelLand/Kernel/arch/x86/acpica.c` and the
Makefile hackery is in `Externals/ACPICA`
Ok, so in the beginning, back with AcessOS/AcessBasic, there was AxWin. It was my attempt at making
a GUI system, and to an extent, it worked... although I never wrote anything real for it. Then I
started work on AxWin2, which was going to be a very tablet/iOS style interface. There would be no
windows, just full screen tabs. This turned out to be a nightmare to implement, and the lack of
dialogs would have crippled it.
So, I started planning AxWin3. This sat unloved in the git tree for quite a while, until not long
after the 0.13 release, I started really working on it. 0.14 is the first GUI release, however
stability is questionable.
On that note, I plan to finish bugfixing everything sometime soon (at least for this round of
features) and release 0.15
In preparation for the UWA open day next weekend, I have been
giving the Acess2 networking code a real workout using the telnet ASCII Star Wars stream from
towel.blinkenlights.nl (thanks to the guys who made that)
After several days of fixing fiddly bugs (including some dumb ones in non-networking code), I
managed to get the entire show to play through. :)
The next week will be spent cleaning up some little issues and getting the display presentable, so I
can show it off for the UCC's stand.