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Format drive and install one of the following operating systems:

• BeOS
• Syllable
• AROS
• Plan 9
• Minix
• FreeDOS
• DR-DOS
• OpenVMS x86 port is coming!
• Visopsys
• SqueakNOS
• Haiku
• Kolibri
• ReactOS
• Tizen
• SkyOS
• MorphOS
• MenuetOS
• CP/M 86
• Multics, also see Multicians
• Erlang as an Operating System

There have been a large number of more or less obscure operating systems and not all have been ported to x86. Unfortunately the architecture has become a de facto standard even though it's not the best architecture or the most efficient but instead a patchwork of solutions to retain backwards compatibility. We have lost many interesting architectures over the years that would have deserved a better fate to the Intel bandwagon.

A lot of the drivers are direct ports from Linux. There's some rather comprehensive documentation on porting drivers, in fact.

not based on Linux nor one of the BSDs

At least the server edition is based on the Linux kernel according to the about page.
Furthermore:

It uses the GCC compiler and many other tools from the GNU project.

So it is also, at least for a significant part, GNU based.
(Note that people often talk about GNU/Linux if they say Linux, so to be certain I show that it is also GNU based.)

Thanks for the explanation. I went to their "about" page( http://web.syllable.org/pages/about.html ) and after about 3 paragraphs of mythology and squishy backstory they still said nothing about what the project is, what problem it solves or what it does differently than other OSes. It probably says so further on but skimming didn't yield anything and it sounded too much like an infomercial to continue.

If it wasn't so late at night maybe i'd have more focus, but that page really needs a punchier intro.

It's almost like websites need a default entry point so that if someone types syllable.org into their browser it will just magically direct to the right page.

Oh wait that works already.

Also in what way do you think www is dying? I'd wager that it's the default prefix for >99.9% of the internet.

Nope. The "desktop" distribution is AtheOS, not Linux.

An important thing to know about Syllable is that Syllable Server is based on the well-known Linux kernel, but Syllable Desktop is not. Thus, Syllable Server is a Linux distribution, but Syllable Desktop is not.

Every now and then I'll download and play with one of the "alternative" OSs. The box I'm typing this on (a Mac running Lion) has VMware installs of Haiku, Syllable (what AtheOS evolved in to), Minix, and several flavours of Linux. What next? MVS under Hercules, perhaps?

Technically, Minix is the most interesting. Haiku is the prettiest.

...laura

And here we have the twin psychotic face of Linux thing. On the one hand time and time again (hell sites like /. are practically bursting with articles written by the community) we here you Linux advocates say "Linux is ready for the desktop!" yet when anyone points out the serious problems that give way to that lie you basically say "Oh its not an OS, its a community! Go back to Windows if you won't do things OUR way". So which is it? Can't eat your cake and have it too you know.

Well there is two things.

The first is that your only experience is with Windows desktop environments. There are millions of people all over the country using non Windows OSes right now on desktops. Companies like Burlington Coat Factory, Autozone, Pep Boys were able to switch easily, because they had a Unix not a Windows culture in their workforce. Education of HS or less so its not computer geeks. Millions of people still use mainframe OSes, and curses style interfaces. You simply lack experience as to what is else is possible. Your feeling is that if it is not done "the windows way" then its just wrong. The purpose of the GNU project was never to replace the NT kernel it was to change the computing culture. Having Linux do things the windows way, would subvert the broader goal. Having people use Windows while running ever increasing amounts of free software and become more concerned about open protocols (see the debate about net neutrality) advances the agenda.

Now as for the rest. It is ready for the desktop, and has been for a decade. Which is different then saying it is ready to overthrow Microsoft Windows. If Linux were the dominant desktop today, Windows would not be able to overthrow it either. The cost of switching between them is high in terms of the entire community of expectations. But for those people who have some reason to want to switch it is a fully viable desktop and has been for years. So I'm rejecting the equivalence you are making between an absolute worst case scenario for Linux and "the norm".

Assume for a moment Microsoft raised the OEM price of Windows to $1000, you don't think you would see computers shipping with high quality well maintained Linux distributions quickly? That's what ready means. That if Linux had to step in, it could step in. Now you made very specific claims about Dell which were easily refuted by looking at the history of the Power Edge for example. The point about the Power Edge is that with a motivated vendor long term driver updates were possible. Which I think should tell you that maybe you need to re-examine your assumptions about the way the Linux community works and the fact that it is able to support hardware when there is a genuine motivation. Which is different than your case where there isn't.

Richard Stallman, 1983
To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including on-line and hardcopy documentation.

The goal was to provide a Unix system. First and foremost Linux has to be a Unix and do things the Unix way. The goal was not to build a free Amiga. There is another project that aims to do that, Syllable and maybe what you should do is work with them.

And the reason your arguments much credit is I remember very much the same arguments being made in the late 1990s and early 2000s by big box Unixes. "Linux is fine for hobbyists but its never going to replace Solaris"...

A Linux/BeOS hybrid would be very interesting, but that doesn't look like what's happening with Syllable.

Instead, Syllable is a Linux distribution in their Server edition, and something built on AtheOS for their desktop edition. Their AtheOS page clarifies:

Unlike many people seems to believe AtheOS is *not* a BeOS clone. The two OS's are not compatible at binary level nor source-code level. Making a BeOS clone has never been a goal (I started working on AtheOS before the first BeBox was shipped), it is not a goal now, and it will not be a goal in the future.

Even if it was, though, it's hardly a "hybrid".

Well, that would depend upon what role this OS is going to play. Server? He did mention he liked OpenSolaris enterprise tools. Desktop? The Ports Collection opens up a lot of compatible linux software. Do you need a semi-truck or a motorcycle? But you also left out Syllable, a linux/BeOS hybrid, in server and desktop edition, FreeDOS for those nostalgic moments, or MenuetOS for when you really want to get your freak on.

You know, as much as I agree with you, I wish it were not so.

More and more things are getting tied to a computer. Back in the early 1990s, a computer was generally used for number crunching and document managing. People (generally) did not use a computer to listen to music, watch a movie, meet people, or to stay in touch with one's friends.

Now people are using computers for all of these functions. It's important that things we need for daily living in the 21st century are not controlled by a single corporation with a known pattern of abusive behavior. Microsoft's latest abusive behavior--suing TomTom for having FAT32 support on their device--shows that the only thing stopping Microsoft from abusing their monopoly are antitrust laws and community activism.

This is why Linux needs to fix the issues that make Linux not a suitable desktop for end users, or why one of the other possible open-source desktop OSes (Haiku, Syllable, etc.) needs to become a suitable end-user desktop.

I use Windows right now instead of Linux because I don't feel Linux is ready for the desktop, but most of my partitions for "extra data" are formatted using the second extended filesystem (Linux's "base" stand file system) and read in Windows using ext2fsd because I don't want my data to be held hostage by Microsoft patents.

So, yes, I really want Linux to succeed.

- Sam

Try Syllabe : http://web.syllable.org/pages/index.html

It boots almost instantaneously.

From the top of my head:

- (X)Ubuntu with a default XFCE enviroment. Designed for very old computers and people who hate the Gnome/KDE slowpoking.

- Haiku OS. OSS BeOS variant. Lightning fast, designed with the GUI in mind. Sub-10-seconds booting is rumored.

- The Syllable OS. An OSS OS inspired by the proof-of-concept project Athena OS and some concepts implemented in BeOS. This one is actually quite interesting, as they've come quite far for a project that started from scratch without being a simple Unix rippoff. The site has demo videos showing Syllable coldboot into the Desktop under 10 seconds on older hardware and they've got quite a few apps ported to it allready, including a native browser using a pimped-out webkit renderer. Shutdown is sub 5 seconds (also important). They're working on a completely seperate server variant too. I consider this one a truely interesting alternate OS. You should check it out.

- Current Debian with a 2.2 kernel, Fluxbox or Windowmaker VM and a little tweaking should get you a very lightweight OS enviroment aswell.

Take any of the above and flash them onto a modern bios that you plug into your Mobo and your set for super-fast booting.

VLC Media Player to play said ISO on Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS-X, BeOS, Windows, QNX (WTF is this?), or Syllable (WTF is this one as well?): Free

QNX is a widely used embedded system that happens to also have a very nice desktop/development environment, so it can also run VLC. Syllable is a fork of the now long-dead AtheOS, and is mostly GPL/LGPL so you can give it a try if you like. We even have a pre-installed virtual machine image (VMDK) you can try, if you like.

The whole argument for FOSS 3D video card drivers is just silly in my opinion.

It makes excellent sense if your whole world is not limited to X.org. There are lots of other platforms that can benefit from Open drivers.

As a self proclaimed nerd I would like to see a linux distro that actually did something revolutionary.

id like to see standardization really take off for nix os's. there is not any one single distro that could toppple MS's os. but, if every distro was more integrated and standardized to the everyday person unix and linux would dominate the market.

It'll never happen for Linux because it's already far too fragmented. A different OS like Syllable can provide that sort of standardisation, but it's a long way off any making any significant impact on users.

Could you tell me what a fast OS for a dual core optron or a Core Solo is? I'd really like to know...

Have you tried Syllable?

The Linux kernel isn't the cause of Linux's lack of pep on the desktop. Sure it isn't a particularly good desktop OS kernel as it's mostly made with the server in mind, but it isn't bad. The real reason why Linux hasn't been adopted be Joe Average everywhere is because of the high-level parts of the system: the KDE, the Gnome, the package mess, the difficulty installing software, the hard to use programs, and so on.

If you're not happy with Linux, there are other places to find what you're looking for. The world doesn't need to be Linux.

Have you looked at projects such as Syllable?

There is no need to fork Linux into a "desktop" version. Projects like Syllable already exist, and we re-use a fair amount of code from Linux, GNU and other OSS projects.

Anyhow, for those interested in that concept, there is Haiku, which is the FOSS OS inspired by BeOS.

What does an OS have to do to get a little recognition around here anyway? There is also Syllable, which is a FOSS OS not inspired by BeOS.

http://www.syllable.org/ ... a pleasure to work with.

i cant find any khtml based browsers that are available outside of KDE/QT

Er, Safari? ABrowse? Or did you mean "on a specific platform (that I'm not going to mention)"?

Or AROS, which is an actual Amiga OS clone.

Syllable started out as an Amiga OS clone once.

Aside from KDE ports to other platforms, khtml can be used standalone on Windows, SkyOS, and AmigaOS (amongst others).

You'll find the first non-KDE port of KHTML was to AtheOS, now Syllable.

I recently built my own machine... 2G memory, .5TB (2 SATA drives), 3.06Ghz dual core... all very cool. I spent almost 2 weeks getting Ubuntu installed and working properly (for what reason would an OS not come with generic video drivers?). The sound was a nightmare to get running, don't get me started on my unsupported video capture card. Fortunately (I guess), a lot of the drivers came with the linux kernel (as one might expect), but the installation and configuration was amazingly tedious, and error prone.

I'm convinced one part of the horrible nature is that even today it seems that EVERY driver, EVERY re-configuration demanded intimate knowledge of my hardware though in my wildest imagination, I couldn't think of a rationale -- this continuity interruptus makes for a tedious, drawn out, error-sprinkled, bad-taste-in-the-mouth experience.

I finally shook out all of the bugs (oh, yeah, about 100MB+ of software updates -- the original was from earlier this year, go figure), got a SCREAMING machine, absolutely delighted with the configuration and performance (although my 3d benchmark isn't as high as windows).

Now, to be on-topic, I can't begin to imagine these upgrades will be problem free, I can't even think they'd be problem-sparse. It's non-trivial work installing from scratch, much less considering layering something as big as GLXserver over an existing Xorg installation. I wouldn't want to do it. I've read enough reviews from people with bollixed machines (granted, they were working with CVS releases) -- there will be a LOT of people out there who've committed too much data and personal work (blood, sweat and tears) on their new Linux machines -- and they're going to lose data (ReiserFS anyone?).

It's interesting to note the article doesn't recommends upgrading to a newer version of Ubuntu by doing a clean install. That's not really upgrading Ubuntu, that's installing Ubuntu. How many people will not have had their data backed up properly ahead of this? How many will be left with applications that ran on a previous kernel that won't run on the current kernel?

The article is probably wrong, this is GNU's olive branch to... well... no one really... who had hoped to roll out the new machines with brand spanking new Linux distro already installed. It's a PR debacle and nightmare in the making. Fortunately for Linux, that would be mostly irrelevant.

(To contrast, on same machine described above, I took the new Vista release candidate, booted up, installed and got completely running, all sound and video working perfectly -- in less than 2 hours!

Funny, for my life I could not find a satisfactory solution (or even find a google solution) to get Grub configured properly to reference Vista... Finally gave up, and let the new Vista boot loader handle it, the configuration was painless and flawless. Go figure.)

Feel free to replace with with Mac OS X, FreeBSD, BeOS, any other Linux distro, etc. Just because you fail at life (i mean really, who has issues with a windows installation on stable hardware....) doesn't mean you need to act like a hobbyist OS is the holy grail. Oh yea, Syllable 4 Life!!!</sarcasm>

Fair enough :) You might want to check out Syllable, though, if you're truly in the mood for Something Completely Different(tm).

If we're doing that, let's add Syllable to the list, too. 128MB of memory and 512MB disk? Easy.

If he, or someone else, manages to fit a full desktop environment within this U$100 Notebook specs, Ill be using it on my desktop too!

Perhaps you'd like to take a look at Syllable? It'll fit comfortably in those specs and it will work with a lot of current consumer hardware.

The Amiga and Mac pre-OS X had no swap or virtual memory capability at all. The Mac Plus and Amiga A500 shipped with no more than 512k of chip RAM, which was plenty for running the OS and one or two applications. As a fair comparision, the equivilent versions of Windows at the time (2.0 & 3.x) also had no swap or virtual memory and most IBM compatible machines shipped with no more than 1MB of memory. Again, this was plenty for running the OS and one or two applications.

It was and still is perfectly possible to run a complete OS & applications in 128MB. Syllable will run with 64MB of system memory and 8MB of video ram. I've just checked my running Syllable machine, which is using 49MB of system memory right now, plus an additional 75MB for disk cache. With Whisper (email client), ABrowse (Web browser, which uses khtml) and a couple of other applications and Terminal windows open, that rises to 59MB of system memory and 80MB for the disk cache. No swap is enabled or needed.

you should not expect any GUI OS to run like a modern system with only 128M of RAM

I'd have to disagree. Unless "modern" is now a euphimisim for "Warped glass effect 3D backed alpha-blended" which, lets be honest, is going to be used by about 5% of the user base and isn't exactly important to a $100 laptop.

Try something like Syllable for extra geekitude.

Out of interest, have you ever seen Syllable? Not because it has a good user interface or anything (It doesn't, yet) but because they're not doing "Designed by geeks, for geeks".

A VM sounds nice, but I can't see how it would be any easier to make a VM for OSX than it is for x86-Linux, and the existing x86-Linux emulators (or translation layers or whatever) are far from perfect. I don't want WINE for Mac, I want Windows!

Now WINE isn't virtualization...
VMWare, on the other hand, is. It has existed for Linux (on x86) since the beginning, and there is even a VMWare player for Syllable.

I expect some version of VMWare for Mac OSX, I only hope it comes soon.

s/AtheOS/Syllable/

I fail to see what the big deal is anyways. What purpose would be gained from looking at the driver source code?

I don't know about just looking, but it's very useful to have working source code available if you want to port it to other systems. Syllable would still be using VESA only if it wern't for the availability of video driver source from XFree86/Xorg and in the future we'll rely on source for any and all OpenGL hardware acceleration. If anything, we need far more source for drivers that support 3D acceleration.

Why wait for Linux to do it? It's not the only game in town.

A GNU userland already does boot on two BSD kernels and one GNU kernel

And one non-GNU, non-BSD kernel.

What linux needs for the desktop market is an easy to use, and simple desktop. The problem with this on current installs is the lack of communication between desktop and kernel etc.

Perhaps Linux isn't the answer, but something like Syllable might be able to deliver what you and many others are looking for. It's a complete Operating System, which means that implementing features that span from the GUI all the way down to the kernel is very easy.

Zeta also faces free competition in various forms:

Haiku (BeOS clone)
Syllable (BeOS-alike, fairly mature)
ReactOS (clean Windows clone)

The BeOS user community is largely behind Haiku. Syllable and ReactOS are fairly advanced in their state of development.

Such a scheme is being used by various operating systems. Syllable is one, and Gobo Linux is another. There are a few more whom I forget right now.

Install? You should just unzip the package wherever you like and run it.

If only there were a Free operating system that accepted that premise.

btw, I thought that BeOS was sold to Palm. How come it's Zeta now?

x86 is for weenies. We all know real computers use UltraSPARC processors. Linux runs very nicely on them.

:-)

...laura who downloaded and played with Syllable over the weekend

That's because Linux is trying really hard to mimic Windows-isms

True enough. Even the screenshots for SkyOS and Syllable, the two discussed in the article, look like conventional GUIs (using GTK and Be respectively).

Cheers.

And what non-linux, non-BSD OSes are around now?

You should give Syllable a look.

You might want to take a look at Syllable. It's a non-Linux OS that addresses the very problems that make Linux ill-suited to general desktop use.

I don't know about OpenOffice or Firefox (Yet), but I know I've successfully ported Glibc to Syllable. Since we started testing our "new" libc, I've recieved patches and bug fixes from two or three other people.

Just because you're not doing it, it certainly doesn't mean no one else is. Hell, using your own example of GCC: have you looked at the number of posts to the GCC mailing list each and every day? Even if the majority of patches being fed into GCC are "backend changes", how are they any less valid? I don't see anyone patching or porting the Intel compiler, or Microsoft Visual C++.

It's been like this for the whole last decade with Linux. It's never going to happen. Linux isn't a desktop OS, it's a geek and server OS. We wouldn't try to run Windows 95 as a server would we? The solution is to look elsewhere instead of trying to make Linux into something it's not and never will be.