Sorry if the title is a little confusing. What I was meaning to say was that I want to make an OS but I dont know what to use because I am reasonably new to programming and I would like to use something reasonably easy to use.
I have looked at VB and COSMOS but I havent used them. Are they good tools to make an OS like program?

Thanks
TheThingThatFlies

Firstly, you can not really use (except for some corner cases) a desktop application language to create a computer operating system. Your best "tool" would be http://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page

Yeah!
Anyway, if you're reasonably new to programming and you want reasonably easy to use tools, you should keep in mind that OS development is not reasonably easy at all.

COSMOS will allow you to write your own OS with a (relatively) easy language like VB, but without any deep knowledge in programming and OS theory you won't go far from developing some toy-OS printing "Hello, world" at boot.

At this point, you'd better learning OS development the hard way, learning first fundamentals of programming, for example writing some nice applications first.
If you're really looking at OS development, it would be useful to learn programming with some lower level language like C, tipically more suitable for this kind of stuff.

If you're a programming beginner you really shouldn't consider writing an own os - its simply to hard(core) ! The first is to choose a (modern) Programming Language like C/C++, Java, C# or VB.NET. Since Operating Systems require a atleast a little amount of assembler you can dig into this language, but please do it if you learned a high-level programming language !

Its really important that you understand the basic programming principles like variables, loops, control-statements, classes, .... Next you need to choose a Operating System and at last a development environment. If you want to program under Windows in C/C++, C# or VB.NET there's Visual Studio. Its a commercial product, but generates good executables. For a free C/C++ compiler you can use GNU GCC within the MinGW Package. For a IDE (Integrated Development Environment) you can use Code::Blocks (I use it and its really good and its platform-independent!). There are other Compiler Vendors like Intel. Java is freely available.

I don't know how old you are but if you consider working in the Computer Section, you really should learn a modern language like C#, VB.NET or Java. C/C++ is not as widely used as the previous ones.

And if you programming you always need a lot of tee !
Hope this helps a little bit,
Martin

and get a hobby with which you can mollify your nerves !

Tools: cat, nasm and dd
Actually, if you are fairly new to programming I'd say first try writing normal software before trying OS dev.
But if you insist then have a look at Mike OS or a similar OS aimed at teaching how an OS works.

There is no such thing as a beginner tool for OS programming, simply because it's one of the most demanding things one can create. If you do not even have a clue what to use, you are most likely not able to implement fundamental stragegies an OS has to fulfill.

What you should really do is programming for embedded systems (not some ARM box running linux, but something a lot smaller, like some ATmega where you get around best in assembler), where you create programs, that run on bare metal without some OS around them. Then you can extend this to provide some abstractions, provide APIs for programs and implement abstractions via callbacks into drivers, etc.

Yeah, making your own OS is not something a beginner can do.

But what about beginner tools for "modifying" an OS (other than OpenSUSE Studio-which is useless).