Hello Ben,
* Nobody III <hungryninja101@...9...> [2014-12-22 17:54:48 +0000]:
I myself have been trying to do my own work on making Genode a general-purpose OS, and am willing to contribute a fair amount, however I have always been running into block device issues. The AHCI and ATAPI drivers don't work, and the USB driver isn't working for USB storage. All 3 drivers fail to announce the service "Block". Once these drivers are fixed, I will be able (and more than willing) to provide help in making Genode into a general-purpose OS.
I do not want to be rude but there is this saying “if you want something you will find ways and if you do not you will find reasons”. Even if these issues are resolved I will guarantee you there will be others. At one point or another you have to get your hands dirty. I certainly get your point — the problems you are having are showstoppers when using Genode as your daily OS but they should not stop you from exploring Genode or even starting to port some software at this time.
After the block device drivers, my second suggestion would be to either create a Nitpicker X server or else to port the main X libraries to Nitpicker.
Do yourself a favour and do not waste your time by porting X11 to Genode. It is not worth the effort. Everyone is better off w/o it.
After that, for Genode's first desktop environment, we could port LXQt. It's very lightweight and it's compatible with Qt5. I would be happy to take part in this task.
To be honest I would rather not use a “common” desktop enviroment on Genode. I think the DE is vital piece of software and by simply porting an existing one you would probably lose much of the features that make Genode unique. But do not let me stop you — if you want to use LXQt on Genode go for it.
Cheers Josef