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Multi-threaded code is very difficult to write correctly and debug. It's hardly 'easy'.

I beg to difer. Multi-threaded code is dead easy to write once you understand some basic concepts and provided you don't write code like a demented COBOL hacker.

In Syllable the GUI, the kernel and even some device drivers run multiple threads. It's not complicated.

Maybe you'd be interested in Syllable. O.K, it isn't a suitable replacement for Linux just yet but it has serious potential. It avoids the exact problems you highlight (Among plenty of others).

Maybe instead of worrying about why Linux isn't suitable as a desktop OS we should think about working to provide an alternative to Linux specifically for the desktop? There's no reason Linux must be the only Free OS in use.

All of these have achieved some commercial success and are popular, well supported, operating systems. Something tells me you need to stop running Windows and come out into the real world.

When you don't use X being able to obtain usable source for drivers is very important. If we all subscribed to your model of software development, we'd all be using Windows because Linus would never have been able to write enough device drivers for Linux to make it usable.

DevFS style systems "solve" this problem. E.g. on my machine with udev:

[user@foobar user]$ ls /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/
disc@ part1@ part2@ part3@ part5@ part6@ part7@ part8@ part9@

In the case of Linux I'd once again say that maube they've gone to far; udev exposes the internal kernel mapping of devices, which most users don't care about. Other systems offer slightly less user-hostile DevFS systems.

On a 240 MHz 603e I was able to rotate a 3D cube playing QuickTime movies on all 6 sides (compressed with the "video" setting). Without GPU support. BeOS was like the new Amiga, it was amazing and would have been something truly phenomenal had it come out AFTER the DOJ trial against MS.

Syllable is a BeOS & Unix like system under the GPL and is fairly mature (you can boot, browse, play music and video). I don't think it takes anywhere near 15 seconds to boot, either. Pity they have don't have many developers.

It's no real surprize that people want to get rid of it. If not for Linux we'd have a choice of two OS (Windows or OSX)

Really? What happened to all the other free alternatives?

I'm getting a bit tired of Linux fanatics who think the OS world is limited to Windows, OS X and Linux.

--
Glass, t0tal pwnag3

Well lets be fair, in the post I respond to you never mention any OS, Windows or otherwise. I stand corrected on Linux; that does handle HT CPU's specially. I'd be prepared to believe that Windows XP with a service pack may handle HT as a special case.

unless you're a kernel hacker and can prove it, I don't have to take the word of an AC

I won't claim to be un uber-kernel-hacker on the level of Alan Cox, but I do manage Syllable and I do hack on the kernel, although the SMP & ACPI code was written by far more clever hackers than me; namely Kurt Skuen and Arno Klenke.

Of course in true "Post AC, get it wrong" fashion for some reason I kept refering to the ACPI table as "MDT" when in fact it's "MADT".

Call it a draw?

There isn't too much wrong with Donald Beckers code. At least it's consistent; once you've seen one Donald Becker driver you've pretty much seen them all. Which is nice, if you're porting them from Linux to something else. Thanks Donald!

You wern't paying attention. Documentation for other chips is usually freely available. Documentation of nVidia chips is not. If you want to support nVidia devices properly and you're not Linux, not having documentation or Open drivers is a major pain in the ass.

This is the approach that Syllable takes, or will take, with one application file representing the entire application. I think that this is a great idea. I don't know if it's been implemented yet, but there's been some heavy discussion on the mailing list.

Hi. Have you looked at Syllable? It does exactly what you want.

I don't believe that there is space in the x86 market for another payware OS besides Windows nowadays. I think BeOS and Solaris x86 are proof of that.

The SkyOS fan club might want to look at Atheos. There, again, was an operating system developed by a single individual to furfill his vision. He then, for reasons unknown, dropped out of sight.

Thankfully, for Atheos users, he'd taken the precaution of GPL'ing the system. So Atheos users were able to support themselves, eventually making an official fork of the no-longer-maintained system, and continue development.

It's called Syllable. The SkyOS guys are well aware of Syllable and vice versa; they're almost in direct competition with each other at this stage.

If this were ported to Syllable, I'd be a lot more enthusiastic.

You'd better get everyone to stop using their NVidia cards then, can't run that closed-source driver.

Or just use the X.org driver. Hell Operating Systems you've never heard of have nVidia drivers.

Actually the similarities extend far beyond one Window decorator.

Syllable isn't a BeOS clone. Really. It takes some ideas from BeOS though, because BeOS was a good design. But it isn't BeOS.

I was going to download and try this out until I saw the screenshots at their website http://syllable.org/screenshots.php

I figured, since the article stated it was a BE-OS look-a-like, that it would look like BE-OS.

Upon looking at the screenshots, however, you can clearly see it looks like a standard Linux distro.

Compare the difference between BEOS and this.

Syllable -- http://syllable.org/screenshots.php

BeOS -- http://www.verpixelt.de/blogpics/beos.png

The icons look nothing similar. The way the icons looked in BEOS was what made it cool to me. The icons were similar to the way Mac OS icons looked (before that OSX crap)

I liked the old pretty icons, before the whole "24 bit" 3d crap came out. I liked it when icons were hand-drawn 3d icons instead of done in Photoshop.

Having such hand-drawn icons in BEOS was what made BEOS so popular to me.

The only similarity this OS has to BEOS is the style of the windows. The similarities end there.

I was going to download and try this out until I saw the screenshots at their website http://syllable.org/screenshots.php

I figured, since the article stated it was a BE-OS look-a-like, that it would look like BE-OS.

Upon looking at the screenshots, however, you can clearly see it looks like a standard Linux distro.

Compare the difference between BEOS and this.

Syllable -- http://syllable.org/screenshots.php

BeOS -- http://www.verpixelt.de/blogpics/beos.png

The icons look nothing similar. The way the icons looked in BEOS was what made it cool to me. The icons were similar to the way Mac OS icons looked (before that OSX crap)

I liked the old pretty icons, before the whole "24 bit" 3d crap came out. I liked it when icons were hand-drawn 3d icons instead of done in Photoshop.

Having such hand-drawn icons in BEOS was what made BEOS so popular to me.

The only similarity this OS has to BEOS is the style of the windows. The similarities end there.

Who cares? Syllable 0.5.4 is out: the open source desktop OS!

http://www.syllable.org

Complaining doesn't work. One must transform the pain of the current experience into a set of recommendations for a future platform

Or, we could just write the damn code.

The point I gave up on Mandrake was when I tried to copy an 8 meg file from one folder to another on a stock Mandrake installation on a Pentium IV 3.4MHz with 2G of RAM and a 120G HD. I was sitting there for more than 20 minutes, doing something that would have taken a few seconds on my Pentium Pro running NT 3.51. 20 minutes. And during this time, Mozilla was frozen, and VIM was virtually unusable.

Can anyone tell me why people still use Mandrake when there are superior offerings out there?

Does this version work any better?

Can anyone tell me why people still use Mandrake when there are superior offerings out there?

My SBLive! and GeForce 2 have always worked fine in two K133[A] boards I've owned, with a variety of Athlon and Duron processors, running all sorts of operating systems.

Looks like Syllable's site has been slashdotted. What a shame. As to the complexity of Linux issue. It appears to me that Syllable is a Linux based system using Gnome and it looks similar to Fedora in some ways. So I ask you, how can a Linux system be less complex than Linux?

Sorry, user mode doesn't really make much sense here, drivers need full hw access and context switching to a different privilege level would only hurt performance.

There is nothing to stop a usermode application mapping the PCI memory which covers the device registers and framebuffer memory into their own process space. Once you've done that, you can drive the hardware perfectly fine without any need to run in kernel mode, and without any need to context switch (Other than the usual process switching that goes on in any system).

The only issues are design and security. How do you reflect interupts to user space, for example (Although almost no graphics card relies on interupts, but it is an issue for other devices E.g. sound cards) How do you ensure that only privileged user processes can map what should be privileged PCI memory address? On *nix you usuall restrict it to suid processes, on other systems you may be able to use a capability or ACL style system to control access.

Either way, user-space drivers are perfectly acceptable, if the system is properly designed to allow them. Linux really isn't, but some are. On Syllable all framebuffer and 2D drawing operations are performed by the drivers in user space.

Thats actually the solution we use with Syllable. Packages go into their own directories under /usr/ Syllable has an extra step of running a tool which creates symlinks from /atheos/autolnk/ into the various files and folders within the package directory. That way PATH only needs to contain the directories in /atheos/autolnk/ instead of all those package directories, which speeds up searches.

Syllable, where no mainstream geek has yet to venture!

1. AtheOS is no longer developed, and the codebase has not been updated in several years.
2. Syllable is our community-driven fork of AtheOS, which was started two years ago.
3. AtheOS domain lapsed and is now hosting a knock-off website hawking drugs

1. AtheOS is no longer developed, and the codebase has not been updated in several years.
2. Syllable is our community-driven fork of AtheOS, which was started two years ago.
3. AtheOS domain lapsed and is now hosting a knock-off website hawking drugs

I really miss the custom attributes that were such a unique feature of BeOS - I don't believe any other OS has implemented such a scheme.

Some have. XFS on IRIX and Linux can too, but on Linux support for those attributes suck.

Hi, you might be interested in this. The hardware detection works, too..