The OSIS project was at first a project for making it able to run existing TOS/GEM applications in Linux/m68k. The project has been going on for many years, starting from two different directions and is taking off in even more directions.
oTOSis, formerly known as tosemu, was made by Elias Mårtensson and Roman Hodek, and is running many TOS/MiNT applications already.
oAESis, which gave the OSIS project and its parts their names, was originally only a replacement AES for TOS/MiNT, made by Christer Gustavsson.
All parts of the OSIS project are released as GPL, the GNU General Public License and is therefore always released free of charge with sources, or the possiblity to easily obtain the sources.
The official ftp-site for the OSIS project is
ftp://ftp.nocrew.org/pub/osis/
where you can find the different packages.
We sometimes makes distributions of the packages, for people that don't trust
our CVS versions completely. We have tried these distributions on our machines
but this is no guarantee that it will work for you. If you find a bug, or
have problems with the packages, please mail the mailing list below and we'll
try to help you.
If you are able to use CVS, that is what we recommend, since all our development is done on our CVS server.
When building the system, build the packages in this order: ofbis, ovdisis,
libotosis, oaesis, ocpuis and otosis. You have to make install on all packages
for it to work.
If you are running on a m68k machine, you don't need the ocpuis package, since that's
used for emulating the m68k CPU.
Martin Döring has described how to build OSIS from the sources found on the CVS server. You can see the description here.
After everything is compiled, you can use it in two different ways. Either run an existing TOS/MiNT application with the tos program in oTOSis directly from the command line. This will only work for applications which don't use any VDI or AES calls. The other way, is to start the oAESis server, a program named oaesis, which will bring up the oAESis launcher in which you can start other programs. In the oAESis launcher, you can run native compiled programs directly (programs compiled with the OSIS-libraries), or you can run existing TOS applications.
An existing TOS application still needs to be run through oTOSis to run properly. To make Linux start oTOSis automatically for a TOS application, you will need to have support for misc binformats in your kernel. When you have that, run the following command:
echo ':oTOSis:M::\x60\x1a::/usr/local/bin/tos:' > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/registerThis will tell the system to use the program /usr/local/bin/tos to run TOS applications. If you have installed oTOSis in a different place, you need to use that path in the above line. If you don't have misc binformat support in your kernel, you will have to create a script for each TOS application you want to run, which starts oTOSis with the specified program as argument. Once you get the above line to work properly for oTOSis, I suggest you put it in some boot script, to enable the support when you reboot.
To follow the development of OSIS, or if you want to help, we have a mailing list for the project. The address to this is nocrew-osis@nocrew.org. If you want to subscribe to the list, please follow the instructions on the mailing list page. Feel free to ask questions or come with suggestions.
Tomas Berndtsson - tomas@nocrew.org
OSIS logos by Tomas Berndtsson, using GIMP.
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