Recovering from the flu, I decided to have a look at NetBeans. I have it installed on this new machine, along with MinGW and MSYS, but I haven't gotten around to doing any OS dev work yet.
I looked at NetBeans and poked around with a few test projects, trying to figure out how best to get my structure of OS to work through the IDE. I've come up with the idea that creating a C/C++ Static Library is the best approach, and putting 99% of the OS code into it. That seems to use the ar tool to create a .a file which contains all the .o files. I have then added post-build steps into the project makefile to take this .a file and link it in with my existing start.o to create the binary kernel files as I have before. The makefile also compiles the bootblock. I have set the Project run command to run the Bochs bxrc file (via a batch file) to then fire up Bochs with my OS loaded.
A "quick" install of Apache and Subversion later, and NetBeans is happy to push the code into the source control repository, and I can keep track of changes. All looks good.
Currently, this set of code only contains a few of the previous files, it sets 32-bit protected mode, clears the VGA Mode 3 screen, and displays a title. It's more of a test for the environment. In any case, if this approach works, it will make a very good starting point to re-integrate all of the code and create the modular kernel that should have been working ages ago.
I have sent a copy of the project to Pink to test on his Linux install. He reports that he has been able to get it to build by adding a Debug-Linux configuration into the project and tweaking some settings. We may be able to get a Subversion repository exposed so that it can become a collaborative project, at least from the point of view of being able to get the code and run the progress so far.
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