The VSTa Wiki

Welcome to VSTa!

VSTa is a copylefted system, originally written by Andrew Valencia , which uses ideas from several research operating systems in its implementation. It attempts to be POSIXish except where POSIX gets in the way, and runs on a number of different PC configurations. VSTa is also designed to take advantage of SMP right out of the box.

VSTa is no longer actively developed. The FMI/OS project (http://www.fmios.org) was based on VSTa technology, but appears to have also ceased development (and, in fact, their web server is no longer online). Although not entirely open source, the microkernel OS Neutrino from QNX might be of interest: http://www.qnx.com.

As of September of 2006, NNTP has been removed as there really isn't any discussion, thus no need for a forum to support it.

A WikiWikiWeb is a collaborative hypertext environment, with an emphasis on easy access to and modification of information. While the VSTa development world has been historically focused on a mailing list format, two major shortcomings have become apparent:

It is very difficult for knowledge to be collaberatively created, published, and archived
Spammers punish contributors in the E-mail medium by subjecting them to a tremendous load of E-mail "noise"

Because of this, the VSTa mailing list has been discontinued, and the focus of communication about VSTa has moved to this Wiki for access to documents and its companion NNTP server for interactive discussion.

Click VSTa to see the VSTa documentation hierarchy.
Click OtherOS for links to other interesting operating systems.
Click Download for pointers to VSTa downloads.
Go to http://www.vsta.org/news/ to see a read-only view of the contents of the old newsgroups.

For registered users:

Click Chat to see the archive of the old chat contents.
Click Mail for the E-mail archives of the old VSTa mailing list.

This Wiki implements several mechanisms to protect against abuse by malicious and predatory parties. Most of this protection is based on levels, a pair of integers which specify which documents you can read, and which documents you can mnodify. If your read level is numerically equal or greater than the read level of a document, you can read it--similarly for writing.

Documents are grouped into several categories:

Introductory Wiki text

Anybody can read
Very few can edit

Introductory VSTa documents

Anybody can read
Registered users can edit or create new content

E-mail archives

Only registered users can read
Nobody can edit

VSTa discussion areas

Only registered users can read
Registered users can edit and create new content

Sandbox

Any registered user can read or write (we require registration to avoid malicious posting of commercial URL's)
The contents will be wiped on a regular basis

As needed, further categories of documents can be created. Read the RegisteredUser topic for more details.

If you have the ability, you can edit any page by pressing the link at the bottom of the page. The intention of the VSTa Wiki site is to permit users to contribute new content and correct current documents, without funneling all of this through a single "web site maintainer". Capitalized words joined together form a WikiName, which hyperlinks to another page. The highlighted title searches for all pages that link to the current page. Pages which do not yet exist are linked with a question mark: just follow the link and you can add a definition.

To learn more about what a WikiWikiWeb is, read about WhyWikiWorks and the WikiNature. Also, consult the WikiWikiWebFaq.

Interesting starting points:

RecentChanges: see where people are currently working
HelpForBeginners: to get you going
WikiSandBox: feel free to change this page and experiment with editing
FindPage: search or browse the database in various ways
VSTa/FAQ: The VSTa Frequently Asked Questions page

FindPage by browsing, title search , text search or an index
Or try one of these actions: LikePages, LocalSiteMap, SpellCheck