[smithbits]

<> Find out which operating system the OS class at your university uses, waaaay back in the day it was AT&T Unix, then there was Minix, these days it's usually a flavor of Linux or BSD. Find the web page for the class that has the build instructions for it and follow those. Get all the source code together and compile and run it. Now make some simple change like altering a boot string to say "Yay I did this." Don't use on of the pre-built VMWare images that just require you to type "make". Download the source code, download GCC and figure out all the configuration stuff needed to build the whole OS. Learn a little bit about each of the tools involved but stay focused on building and running whatever OS it is. Once you get that far pick one of the easy early exercises like modifying the memory manager or playing with the process scheduling algorithms. Doing all that should give you a pretty good idea if you want to really specialize in OS's and you will do very well when you do take that class.