AtheOS Interview

JigSaw writes: "BeNews has a very interesting interview with Kurt Skauen, the AtheOS creator and almost its sole developer. In the interview, Kurt is discussing the design of his OS which features a (nearly) micro-kernel, memory protection, 'true' multitasking, real C++ OOP design from the ground-up and all the rest of these buzzwords. AtheOS uses its own GUI, it does not rely on X or KDE libs, so porting Konqueror to his OS was a bit of a challenge."

Comments

Re:What I don't understand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Try QT/Embedded: It's a fully working GUI engine, backed by TrollTech, on Linux, that has the full QT widget set. And it's GPL'ed. And it does anti-aliasing, etc., etc., etc. It's even got konqueror.

Re:vmware?

[Anonymous Coward]

pre-packaged 0.3.2 for VMWare - includes optional components - 120Mb ish IIRC

you can update to 0.3.4 once installed.

http://www.ethernalquest.org/VmAtheOS.zip

I haven't tried this, don't have the bandwidth.

No more complaints

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time there's a discussion about BeOS the /. OSS/Linux zealots cry BeOS is good but that they'll never support closed source commercial software (as they run off to happily play Quake(TM)(C)(R) on their Linux box). AtheOS brings some of the best of the BeOS world while being open source and POSIX compliant. No more whining, go get to work. I just hope they make the API as elegant as the BeOS API, which is a jewel.

Big F'n' Deal

[Valdrax]

He may be a crackerjack programmer but his English leaves something to be desired...

It's not like most of the American-born readers (and editors) of this site have a better grasp of the language. That doesn't make them less intelligent, just less articulate. Plus, I'm halfway sure the guy isn't a native English speaker anyway. Let's see how well you do in your second language, if you even have one that is.

I respect his C++ skills better anyway. I have to have a lot of respect for a man who will singlehandedly write his own preemptively multithreaded kernel, taggable journaling filesystem, GUI & event-driven programming layer, and system drivers, and who ported GLIBC and a web browser to his home-brew system. Sure, the grammar threw me for a bit of a loop initially, but just how high did your average native American Slashdot reader score on their verbal SATs/ACTs anyway?

This guy has a crazy mix of genius and dedication that could've changed the world if applied to things like military strategies or politics or if they had appeared on the scene at the right time and place. How different do you think things would've been had he started his OS 5 years ago? He'd be Linus right now and have his own cult following. (Of course, his OS might've gone in a completely different direction without his BeOS-loving friends to influence him.)

Of course, this is yet another pointless response to a blatant troll. Disregard as you see fit.

Troll

[Valdrax]

Get a grip, yourself.

He says that he's wanting to perhaps switch the core system to the LGPL so that he doesn't discourage people using other licenses. He's doing this to allow 3rd-party developers more freedom in designing their software. He never mentioned taking the whole OS to a closed source license for profit reasons. You're either trolling or grossly misinformed.

You know what? Even if he felt like doing that, then your choices are (1) shut up and (2) like it. It's his personal project that he's poured blood, sweat, and tears into. You're obviously not a user of AtheOS, so it's not like it effects you anyway. You claim that he's "no Linus" and that his "poject is no Linux," but let's see you write your own OS from scratch, especially one as advanced and fully featured as his. His OS is in many ways on par with Linux and BeOS for functionality, and he's been doing it all himself. Let's see you do better.

Futhermore, exactly where does he bash on other OSes or brag about how great his project is? Nowhere. You're just making up crap to troll, and it's not even a very good one at that. This man has done something that 99.9999% of the population simply isn't capable of and you dare to slam him for it because of a simple potential license change?

Whatever. You people are the reason that the Free Software movement feeds on its young. I can't believe you'd slander this man over such a petty thing.

What I don't understand...

[Betcour]

Why is there not one workingd GUI/graphic engine on Unix that is not X11 (eventhough there are regulary some attemps at it that appear here and there), and why a guy alone manage to make one that fully work (from graphic driver to widgets and API) and an OS to go with it ? If it is feasible on a "made from scratch" it should be already done on Linux for a long time. I mean - X11 has it's strength, but nowhere near the responsiveness and lean of BeOS GUI (or some other OS I won't name because I can already feel the flames...)

the homepage, if it's slashdotted

[ChristTrekker]

AtheOS is a free desktop operating system (currently) under the GPL lisence. AtheOS currently run on Intel, AMD and other compatible processors and support the Intel Multi Processor architecture. I have seen quite a few anouncements of "promising" OSes with "great potential" during the development of AtheOS. The problem is that when I follow the links I normally find a description of the concept, a floppy-bootloader written in assembly, and not much else. AtheOS is a bit more mature, and is already running quite a lot of software. This server for example is running AtheOS. The HTTP server is a AtheOS port of Apache, and most of the content is generated by the AtheOS port of PHP3 and perl.The native AtheOS file system is 64-bit and journaled.

AtheOS is not meant to be a new Unix clone (like Linux and *BSD) but a new clean desktop OS. It does support large parts of the POSIX standard and hence are able to run most of the UNIX CLI tools and it comes with a standard UNIX shell (BASH) but this does not compromise anything in AtheOS as a desktop OS. AtheOS have a integrated GUI that works in conjunction with the kernel and various other components to create a complete and consistent system. The GUI is server/client like X11 but communicate through the native messaging system and the protocol is private to the server and client library and entirely hidden from the applications. Both the client library and the server is heavily multithreaded. The fine-grained multithreading and the low latency messaging system make the GUI much more responsive than X11.

Not using X has its ups and downs. The big down is of course the lack of applications that can be easily ported to AtheOS. Another down is that the current GUI does not support remote display, even though implementing it should not be hard at all. The up's is that the GUI interface is much more high-level, and is much better at defining how a GUI should work. This leads to better consistency between applications. Drag and drop, clipboard, and other forms of high-level communication between applications are defined by the OS. This will hopefully lead to applications that work well together and that give the user an impression of a complete system with consistency between applications. I believ this consistency is important so the user doesn't have to start from scratch each time she learns a new program to know.

The AtheOS GUI consists of two main components: An application server and a dll providing a C++ interface between the server and the application. The GUI is therefore programmed through a C++ API providing windows containing a hierarchy of widgets that all have their own graphical environment.

The kernel was written from scratch. It supports SMP (Symmetric Multi Processing), has a built-in network TCP/IP stack. It supports loadable device-drivers and file-systems. It provides threads and processes with several powerful communication systems that makes it easy, efficient and safe to create server/client implementations where both the server and the client run on the same machine. Threads can communicate through message ports (most common), shared memory, posix signals, semaphores, named and anonymous pipes, pty's, TCP/IP, and probably a few other methods as well.

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.

If you have any questions or comments you can reach me at kurt@atheos.cx

I have zero tolerance for zero-tolerance policies.

Re:The AtheOS homepage.

[kurt.skauen]

It's not down. It is a bit loaded though :)
The server link is only 2Mb/s so it tend to be a bit hard to access when slashdotted.

Re:Kurt on slashdot

[kurt.skauen]

>Can Atheos compile itself yet?

Yes. I have been developing AtheOS solely under AtheOS for about 3 years now.

>Is anyone working on a GUI RAD tool for AtheOS (something in the spirit of KDevelop or Glade)?

No.

>Are you trying to gather the momentum among application developers now or is it too early?

It's a bit early. I have never ever anounced AtheOS anywhere myself since many important "desktop features" and other things that I whould like to have firmly defined from the beginning are still missing.

>Do you have a Component Model yet? If not are you planning to add one soon? A CM would definitely help keep the look and feel consistent and help avoid code duplication. Two things that marred Linux's acceptance as a desktop OS.

Nothing like COM or CORBA but AtheOS have an object oriented design and it is component based in the sence that you can build abstract components that communicate over the flexible "builtin" event system.

Re:the one question I have...

[connorbd]

"because it isn't there"

I think AtheOS is actually a very valuable project for the Open Source world because not everyone is a Unix fan. A modern GUI but non-Unix operating system under GPL is a good thing for the OS scholar, as it gives a different perspective on how to do things.

/brian

what you want is plan 9!

[rpeppe]

for an OS done by people who really know what they're doing, rather than yet another "i wanted to understand operating systems so i wrote one" project, check out Plan 9.

It's open source, written by some of the best people in the business, (the source code is beautiful) and its whole raison d'etre is to investigate how things should be done, instead of how they are usually done.

you might find some of your fundamental assumptions challenged and your paradigms shifted, but isn't that the point?! it keeps fundamentals of UNIX while discarding all the crud that's built up since the 7th Edition...

Kurt on slashdot

[MSBob]

I saw Kurt replying to other comments here so this may be a great chance for the masses here to ask some questions. After all this guy put together an entire OS. Even Linus hasn't accomplished that.

My questions to Kurt:

Can Atheos compile itself yet?

Is anyone working on a GUI RAD tool for AtheOS (something in the spirit of KDevelop or Glade)?

Are you trying to gather the momentum among application developers now or is it too early?

Do you have a Component Model yet? If not are you planning to add one soon? A CM would definitely help keep the look and feel consistent and help avoid code duplication. Two things that marred Linux's acceptance as a desktop OS.