JNode Bootable CD Image Hard Drive Effect

[Sammidysam]

So I found out about JNode awhile back and messed around with it a bit.  In the end I found this repository on GitHub which looks to be the main place where the little development left for it is happening.  My project FakeJavaOS is inspired from JNode, and I would love to compile JNode and run it.  I would prefer to use a bootable CD/DVD rather than VMWare Player.  I have already successfully compiled a 64-bit bootable CD.  My question now is, would my system be affected if I boot from it?  Would it take over my hard drive?  There is little FAQ for JNode so I am clueless as to what could happen.

[Riven]

No matter what the docs/spec says, don't believe it will leave your valuable data alone.

Unplug your drives prior to booting an obscure OS.

[Sammidysam]

I looked into running it with VirtualBox, but it's really rather buggy and doesn't seem to work, so I'll just give up on it for a bit again and I'll probably get the urge to try to run it again in a few months.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[sproingie]

JNode probably only has drivers for the devices VMware virtualizes your real devices as, probably not even all of them, and maybe a scant few other real devices.  In other words, I wouldn't expect it to work on your bare hardware unless you happen to have the same hardware VMWare's devices pretend to be.

Of course nothing stops you from creating a CD that boots a VMWare host and then runs JNode.  Frankly, I just don't see what JNode offers though.  Singularity at least had proof-carrying code in order to be able to run everything without needing memory protection.  I doubt JNode gets even close to that.

[Sammidysam]

I was mainly interested in it because it looked, to me, like the closest anything had gotten to being an OS written in Java.  I thought of that as extremely cool, and that is where my motivation to run it came from.

[sproingie]

JavaOS predates JNode at least in terms of a "usable" released OS, though they started development at roughly the same time.  When I worked for Sun, I actually found a JavaStation to play around with.  It was literally being used as a doorstop at the time.

[Danny02]

One bigger german university is using JavaOS till today for all computer terminals in their libraries. I used them once and it was horrible, you could actually see the text you just typed rendering on the screen one by one character.