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gatOS

What is gatOS?

Most game terminals are a text box with a short list of party tricks. gatOS does the opposite. It starts a small Alpine Linux guest in QEMU and lets purrTTY open SSH sessions into it. The guest has a real shell, apk, editors, pipes, jobs, and the usual ways to get yourself into trouble.

The special bit is /sim. gatOS mounts the live KSA simulation there as a filesystem. A value is a file. A stream is a file. A control is a writable file. Normal Linux errors still matter, so a bad command can fail with EINVAL, a disabled control surface with EACCES, and a feature gate with EOPNOTSUPP.

Terminal window
watch -n1 cat /sim/vessels/active/altitude/radar
tail -f /sim/vessels/active/stream | jq .vel.surface
echo 1 > /sim/vessels/active/ctl/ignite

You do not need to be a programmer to enjoy this. You only need enough curiosity to type ls /sim. If you are a programmer, gatOS also gives you HTTP, MQTT, serial, and MCP when a shell pipeline is not the right cockpit instrument.

Next: install it or see how it works.