Happy New Year! FlingOS had a fantastic year in 2015 and 2016 promises to be another exciting year of big progress. Already in the first 24-hours of 2016 we’ve had over 12,000 views of our website (and that’s before we count the blog, community forums, codebase and YouTube videos!) Here’s some of the highlights from 2015 and our plans for 2016.
Our first summer intern, Roland Baranyi, joined us to add MIPS support to our compiler and created our FlingOops testing kernel. Sponsored by Imagination Technologies, Roland helped reform the Drivers Compiler into a cross-platform compiler and added the MIPS target architecture library. We also created a basic test kernel for the Creator CI20. More on where this is headed in 2016 further down!
On September 17th we launched a new FlingOS – a total new look for our website and a lot of content and progress to back it up. We added over 30 new articles and published our 10-video Getting Started tutorial series on YouTube. Since launch we’ve had thousands of views per month of the articles and just over a thousand per month of our videos.
On top of all that, I’ve been presenting about FlingOS and the educational problems the project is solving, in and around Bristol. I’ll be giving another talk in Hereford in February 2016. I also ran a series of lectures and workshops in the University of Bristol which were a resounding success.
In 2016 we’re aiming to build on our progress but also to better align what we’re producing with what industry wants and education needs. To achieve this, we’ll be creating an OS dev starter kit, aimed at A-Level and first-year university students.
The kit will be based on a embedded device to align with what new OS dev industry is aimed at (and which we hope Imagination will support us with using the Creator CI20 or their latest CI40 board). We will be creating a complete self-teach course and lecture course (with slides, notes, examples and exercises) and selling the complete kit at low cost. But as always, our main codebase a core articles will remain free and open-source.
To succeed in producing all this, FlingOS needs sponsorship (or investment) to hire 3 to 5 interns next summer (myself included!) and to cover our basic costs. We’re still looking for sponsors, investors or people to donate! Please head to our Sponsor page to find out more if you think you can help.
2016 promises to be a year of big progress, with lots of new articles, a solid codebase and more great tutorial videos. We hope you’ll join us on our journey and support us by sharing, liking and Tweeting (@Fling_OS).
Many thanks to everyone who helped make 2015 a solid milestone in the project’s development!