Dear sir,
I am a graduate student of InformationTechnology from India.
After facing a lot of struggle in my life i decided to research on computers,so that I can win an ACM's Turing Award.
I think this is the best way possible.
I decided to work on OperatingSystems.For this I want to develop an operatingsystem.But i know very less about operatingsystems.
Please answer these questions:
*The main problem is I am working Individually.Is it a drawback?
*I am using a personalcomputer with Intelcore2Duo processor,1GBRAM,160GBHDD,2GHZ and RHEL5 installed on it . Are they enough
or are there any other requirements?
* How can I modify the sourcecode of existing operatingsystems,And where can I Actually get the sourcecode?
*What are the programming languages I need to be thorough with and what are the concepts I need in them?
*How to compile the source code and convert it to an os?
please send me reply as early as possible and remember that your action can change my life.

i am no one to comment on your ideas and dont have much knowledge on os..but let me say what i am thinking.. i think you must have basic knowledge of how an os works, its basic functions and so on.. if you had an idea about it, you might not have thought of building an os individually.. it is so vast that it is beyond an individuals reach.and these days the hardwares are so complex that it is no more easy to program on them as it was on 8085 or 8086.

and about source code it is freely available from www.kernel.org (linux) and www.minix3.org (minix)

me too from india and completed my bachelors degree in computer science this year and i was given a vague idea about the os that i neither know it the theoretically or practically.

expecting others to comment..

regards
mobin

Have a look at this site:

http://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page