I am considering to try Genode on a desktop PC, but before I do I would like to know about the availability of the following items. These are items that I use on a daily basis. I checked the Genode website, and although there is a lot of info I was not able to find a list basic properties. If there is such a list, please let me know. If this is FAQ, please excuse my ignorance and tell me where to look for more info.
Is there support for Japanese language (input and output) ? yes/no
Text editor available (like gedit, Notepad++, Emacs, vim, …) ? yes/no
Python available ? yes/no
Perl available ? yes/no
C-compiler available ? yes/no
FORTRAN compiler available ? yes/no
LaTeX available ? yes/no
PDF viewer available ? yes/no
Web browser available ? yes/no
Sound available ? yes/no
Video available (webcam) ? yes/no
USB support ? yes/no
BlueTooth support ? yes/no
Wireless LAN ? yes/no
Ethernet LAN ? yes/no
Shell available (bash/csh/ksh/tcsh/zsh/…) ? yes/no
In general, is it possible to build GNU software, i.e. can one use “make”, “autom4te”, to build simple applications such as grep / gawk / sed / …, and from there to things like GNU octave / evince / …) ? yes/no
You can build GNU software for Genode via the Goa tool on another system or a Linux VM on Sculpt but not natively on Sculpt OS
For any tools that you need (LaTeX, Perl, Python), that aren’t available natively on Genode, you can create a Linux VM to carry out your work and even use your exisiting Ubuntu install in a VM (see Starting an existing Linux installation from Sculpt). To get an idea on how to set up and use the system, I would recommend taking a look at A casual Sculpt OS walkthrough and reading the Foundations book to get a grasp of Genode architecture and concepts.
You commented that it not possible to compile software “natively” on SculptOS. Would it be possible to cross-compile a C-compiler (perhaps GCC or clang) for SculptOS?
I will read the sources you suggested.
Again, thank you for your kind reply. It answers all my questions, and gives good sources of further information.
What about TCC (tiny C compiler) ? If only C (not C++) is needed, that one might have less dependancies and runtime performance issues than a behemoth like GCC. I don’t know whether it is able to compile sizeable projects like LaTeX and Perl though.
As a bonus, TCC is used as a back-end by other high-level programming languages, which would then theoritically become available for self-hosted Sculpt OS as well. I wonder how feasible that is.
I use C-compiler and FORTRAN-compiler on a regular basis at work, and “in our industry” GCC (g++ and gfortran) and the Intel compilers (ifx and icx) are considered as standards. So I just thought of GCC by default. I will check clang and tcc.
But first I want to study a bit more about Genode. If Genode does not do Japanese, then I cannot use it.
That makes sense… On a personal basis, I kinda hope Genode and Sculpt OS will improve support for “input methods” (possibly done by a third party, rather than the Genode team ?), based on the fond memories I have of the early days of BeOS : I remember them making inroads into world markets, including Japan (Hitachi) because they had such good input-method supports, which was not common at the time. Shame what happened to Be. Anyway, it could be interesting for Genode Labs to ‘extend their reach’.
Modern linux distributions use “ibus”, but reading on the wikipedia page it appears that ibus is really quite specific to linux and probably not easily portable to non-linux OS.
Ibus is kind of a two-stage rocket, there is ibus itself (I guess this kind of intercepts the keyboard input), and then there are plugins for each language (like ibus-anthy and ibus-mozc for Japanese). I have never looked into the specific details.
A native Goa SDK is part of the 2026 roadmap and I got an initial version which can build the “hello_make” and “hello_posix” Goa examples on Sculpt OS working a few weeks ago. This initial version should be available for Sculpt 26.04 and the plan is to enhance it over the course of the year.
