TonalliOS

What is up my fellow awesomesauce stardancers.

So, I’ve been working on this thing for a while now, and I simply just forgot to post a devlog for it. I got the hang of how to use the curses library in python, so I was able to create this UI, which in its own is based around an old bulletin board systems kinda vibe. Really interesting to research and learn how to use.

Right now the UI doesn’t do anything, just buttons that say “launching x”, so now I’m going to be focusing on implementing some action for each of the buttons.

Furthermore, the fake boot sequence is more refined and uses a print and delete loop to create the effect of the “press Enter to continue”. It’s worth noting that the logo is not centered “in” the center of the screen, so I’m gonna try and fix that for the next devlog.

Oh wow, my first devlog. Cool.

So, I’ve had this idea in my mind for a while of building my own cyberdeck. I wanted something simple. Like, just a Pi connected to a monitor in a basic case, enough to scratch the itch. But then I kept adding ideas on top of ideas, until eventually I thought: what if I just built a Python program that made the terminal look and feel like a fake operating system?

And thats when TonalliOS was created, or, at least, that’s what I want it to be. Right now it’s nothing really, but I plan to keep expanding it with cool stuff like a weather app, a news reader, and even a local AI chatbot if the Pi I end up getting can handle it. We’ll see.

The name comes from wanting to connect this project to my country, México, and to the color of the terminal itself, which is this warm amber that everything is written in.

Tonalli is a word from Nahuatl, which is a language that dates back to around 2000 B.C. and is still spoken today by over a million people in México. Like a lot of Nahuatl words, Tonalli carries more than one meaning depending on context. But, the one that really tied the name together was this one:

“The tonalli was a sort of soul, located in the crown of the head, that regulated body temperature and growth and played a major role in determining a person’s character and fate. Tonalli loss resulted in illness and, if healing ceremonies were not performed, death.”

In simpler terms, Tonalli was the flame inside a person. A solar-driven life force that gave them vitality, and, in a way, I liked that concept. An OS named after something that keeps you alive, running warm, glowing amber. Something that fades and cools off when you shut it down, like, let’s say, i don’t know… a computer?

So, now that the lore behind the name was cleared up, now it’s time to get into what I actually built this week, which it’s basically just a wall of fake system messages that scroll rapidly before the OS loads, ending with a blinking “Press ENTER to continue” prompt. When you do, the screen clears and the TonalliOS logo reveals itself line by line before a progress bar loads the launcher. Really simple. It actually took me more time to figure out what I wanted to name the program than to build it.

Fun fact: Tonalli’s Aztec visual lexicon is a star, which directly ties to it’s more literal meaning, the sun. So for them, in a way, the sun was the thing that gave you power and vitality. So maybe, adding a couple solar panels to the eventual cyberdeck build wouldn’t be so bad of an idea…