The comic made me lol.

And I was inspired. Very inspired, for the entire weekend. My post on the XKCD forum follows:

It took me all weekend, but I created a Linux program to mimic the functionality of Windows 7 in the comic.
Incidentally, the experience was rather like that in '11th Grade', but with C instead of Perl (I'm a high school student).

Video of it working is embedded below:


To use it, you'll need a workable Linux system and a toolchain; the readme can provide all the details.
Grab it here: http://www.mediafire.com/?mhnmnjztyn3

Update: digg it if you wish

Update2:
I've also built a minimal kernel and initrd for use as a live system. Grab it here, and follow the instructions in the readme.

Haha, well done. Definitely dugg.

I never got the picture, yay!

Maybe it's because I installed it on my MacBook...

Nice!

If nothing else, you're getting my site lots of hits - my friend sitting next to me just StumbleUpon'ed my site randomly to your topic.

Very cool.

Guess I need to put together a mini-distro with the bare essentials to run this so everyone can get in on the fun.

Yeah, I guess you do. This project really seems to appeal to people.

I just got this through stumble upon. Nice work, guys.

Haha, thanks, and thanks Tari. I wonder how it got so popular on StumbleUpon all of a sudden? I should keep Stumble in mind for high-profile projects in the future.

I submitted it to stumble, and it went from there.

Hey tari, mind if I transform this into a standalone OS using Kllrix 2?

Go ahead. I just finished building a minimal kernel and initrd which boots into fb-hitler, which can perform the same task, though.

Update:
Just finished packaging up Hitlin 0.1 for release. It's just a kernel and initrd which you can install to anything of your choice.
I suggest using unetbootin to install it to a USB disc.

Get it here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?yymm2t4dynk (1.5 MB .tar.bz2)
http://www.mediafire.com/?yknwghmg3z2 (1.7 MB .zip)
[The first one I upped was slightly broken. All fixed now.]

I'm gonna tell my mom this is Windows 7 and see if she'll buy it/think it's better than Vista.

If she thinks it's better, I think your signature would have a whole new level of terrible.

I can't even get it to boot up, it just panics and tries to kill itself(much like my experience with Vista). Can you package a zip I can just extract to my root drive and then append boot.ini manually(because I think I installed it wrong)?

Check the readme. You need to append vga=0x312 to the kernel commmand line. Do it either by adding that to the options field in unetbootin, or modifying it in the boot loader's config (syslinux.cfg for unetbootin).

That is, assuming your problem is caused by being unable to open the framebuffer:

Code:

The program can't open a framebuffer and exits gracefully. The kernel notices that init is no longer running and panics.

I have no idea- maybe it has something against ATI cards. If it does, I blame vesafb.

As for the links, they both work for me.

DShiznit has been temporarily banned for repeated anti-Semetic imagery and words and repeated word filter evasion.

now who am I supposed to troll when you're not on SAX?


EDIT: Duh, I'll troll mr. Semetic over there.

Over where?