ToaruOS started as a side project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. For several months in late 2011 and early 2012, the University's [SIGOps](http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/sigops/) chapter managed development efforts focused on building the original compositing GUI. Since then, the project has mostly been a one-man effort with a handful of third party contributions.
The Toaru kernel provides a basic Unix-like environment. The kernel uses a hybrid modular architecture, with loadable modules providing most device driver support. The core kernel includes support for Unix pipes and TTYs, a virtual file system, multitasking, ELF binary support, and various core platform features on x86 systems.
Modules provide support for disk drives, ext2 filesystems, serial, keyboards and mice, a `/proc` filesystem similar to the one found in Linux, as well as an expanding collection of other device drivers.
ToaruOS's userspace is focused on a rich graphical environment, backed by an in-house compositing window manager. ToaruOS's terminal emulator supports xterm-compatible 256-color modes, as well as Konsole 24-bit color modes and anti-aliased text with basic Unicode support. Several graphical demos are provided, alongside a number of command-line applications. A port of SDL targetting the native graphical environment is also available.
The userspace depends on a number of third-party libraries which are outside of the development scope of the project. Additionally, several third-party applications and libraries have been integrated into ToaruOS's core userspace, or otherwise ported to ToaruOS.
Package | | Description
------- | ---- | -----------
cpudet| *(included)* | `cpuid` parser
DejaVu Sans | *(included)* | Popular, free TrueType font series
VL Gothic | *(included)* | Free Japanese TrueType font
