Ask AtheOS Creator Kurt Skauen About His Creature

Developer Kurt Skauen, programming for fun, ended up answering the frequent cries to write a graphical Free OS not tied to the X Window system by doing just that. His AtheOS has been mentioned here a few times before -- it's a Free (as in GPL) Operating System for Intel-and-compatible CPUs with an integrated GUI, a tendency toward POSIX, and more than a hint of BeOS. There are quite a few sites with more information about AtheOS, but you may have trouble just getting past the beautiful screenshots and nearly as beautiful AtheOS FAQ. (There are also ASCII parrots.) Ask Kurt about the past, present, and future of AtheOS here (ask as many questions as you'd like, but please only one per post) and we'll forward the best ones to Kurt for his answers.

Comments

Windows apps?

[JohnTheFisherman]

I know a lot of people hate Windows here, but it certainly has the lion's share of apps. Can/will/do you plan to add a windows emulation layer, or some fairly painless way of running Windows apps? Same for X/GTK/etc.

Re:Windows apps?

[n3m6]

why not include a DirectX emulation ?? it would be easier on his OS since its not tied to X and input devices are not a seperately controlled.. if he could do that could this be the next gaming platform ?? now that would be serious competition..

Re:Windows apps?

[Bonker]

Mod this guy up, because this was my question as well.

Of course, it's possible that WINE, Win4Lin or one of the others will port or compile fairly easily under AtheOS.

Now what?

[baptiste]

My question: Sure you did this for fun and it is a beautiful OS. But as it gains attention and user interest, do you have a target audience in mind? Who do you think should use AtheOS - who will derive the most benefit?

Re:Now what?

[dr_labrat]

What did linus say when he created linux??

I think he hasically created it cause he wanted to..

Why climb that mountain? yadda yadda..

Other developers

[rppp01]

I have noticed that you prefer to work on the kernel and UI portions by yourself, leaving apps and drivers to other developers. When do you plan on allowing other developers to begin working on the core of the OS with you? This would speed up development of the OS.

Ideal applications

[Flavio]

Who would you recommend Atheos to?

In other words, where could Atheos be a better choice than other open source OSs?

Thanks!

Flavio

Developers

[Adelvillar]

Now that many developers coding for the BeOS were left hung to dry, do you have recived support from them?

Influences

[Pope Slackman]

The AtheOS UI strikes me as a bit Amiga-ish.

Was the Amiga UI an influence or inspiration for the design of the AtheOS UI?
And, if so, are there any other aspects of the Amiga platform that influenced your design?

C-X C-S
Keep up the good work!

Re:Influences

[gorilla]

The AtheOS UI strikes me as a bit Amiga-ish.

This is a goood thing. The Amiga UI was one of the best.

Re:License Freedom?

[11223]

Care to support this assertation at all?

cached!

[pjgunst]

Never complain about a site being slashdotted as long as we have google...

Atheos homepage

the FAQ

Atheos links

Screenshots are here

the parrots

Re:cached!

[tinla]

The google cached pages that pjgunst (and others) are linking to are not the same as the pages at atheos.cx.

The site has been redesigned and there seems to be substantially more content than the cached versions.

Sorry karma hunters.

Performance data

[Flavio]

I've never used AtheOS and before giving it a try I'd like to see information regarding its hardware requirements and performance. For example, how does AtheOS perform as a web/ftp/samba/db server, considering it supports multithreading and SMP?

Do you have any numbers to show us?

Thanks.

Flavio

OO emphasis and other things

[dmelomed]

Why such emphasis on OO paradigm? While building the system, did you have trouble bending some things around OO model (i.e. could some things be only done in straight C)? Do you think many developers will be turned off because objectOriented style of variable and function naming was used in the C parts of the source (as I noticed)? Finally, why do you want this to be a primarily desktop OS? What do you think of the current desktop environment offerings in *nix world?

Has anyone attempted to port X to AtheOS?

[J. J. Ramsey]

I know AtheOS has its own GUI, but I imagine that have X on board would make porting most Unix apps easier. Has anyone attempted such a thing?

Re:Has anyone attempted to port X to AtheOS?

[be-fan]

I don't know how hard that would be. The BeOS and AtheOS APIs have a lot in common, and there is a BeOS X server. Plus, AtheOS has some networking features that BeOS doesn't, and porting Wine and X to AtheOS would probably be quite easy.

Re:Has anyone attempted to port X to AtheOS?

[spitzak]

I think any such emulation should be done by making an Xlib emulator so that the applications, as much as possible, cooperate with native Atheos applications. It would be best if many X things, in particular window managers, were not supported.

Unfortunately it appears this is difficult or people are not interested. Most "emulate X" schemes I have seen require an entire X server to be emulated. This either takes over the screen, or puts a screen in a native window, or at best actually mixes the X windows with the native windows but they interact in strange ways. I think this is the wrong approach.

AtheOS and GPL

[Midnight Ryder]

Greetings...

Another poster mentioned the idea that you were considering moving AtheOS to a different license. Is that the case?

Secondly, if you are considering putting it under a different license, why? And, why did you select GPL licensing for AtheOS as opposed to a number of different licensing choices out there? (Reguardless of if you are or aren't moving AtheOS from a GPL license.)

PPC

[mcc]

Some minor questions.

Do you consider it likely that at some point in the near future AtheOS will develop a PPC port?

I realize that the AtheOS developers are very busy with the hard work they are doing and that there is no good reason for them to expend effort on a PPC port. However i was wondering if you think that there is enough interest among extant developers familiar with the ppc/chrp/macintosh platform that someone might feel like cobbling together a port.

That being said, i was checking and trying to figure out: does AtheOS have some kind of flexible arbitrary-server auto-upgrade "package"-style system along the lines of the debian apt-get? if not, are there plans to implement one, or perhaps port apt-get and dselect to atheos?

Please excuse my ignorance.

- mcc
(I am quite curious about AtheOS, and have been meaning for some time to try to check it out (well, or at least check out the screenshots and read the API documentation, since as implied above i do not personally have an x86 machine on which to test the OS..)-- i was thinking about looking over the atheos webpage yesterday morning, actually. I'm looking forward to learning more about this OS in the future.. if only i knew more now, maybe i'd have some better questions :) :shrugs: oh well. thanks.)

Remote Access

[Delirium Tremens]

Since you don't support text-mode console without a full GUI, what are your plans to enable remote logging access to an AtheOS box through Unix-like facilities like telnet, ssh or X-Terminals?

how long

[Lord Omlette]

do you think it'll be before a partition can be installed painlessly side by side Windows? Should be the quickest way to gain mass adoption, right?

Limiting the scope of AtheOS

[brennan73]

It seems to me that it'll be extremely difficult for AtheOS (or any new OS, really) to do everything well; even Linux, which is pretty widely used, isn't a be-all, end-all solution yet (and maybe never will be, or never should be).

So have you considered limiting the scope of AtheOS (possibly severely), and aiming at doing a relatively few things exceptionally well? Here I'm thinking of BeOS, which was usually promoted as a "multimedia OS." It seems to me that this might be a way for alternative OSes now and in the future to stake out some territory: do a few things very very effectively rather than trying to be all things to all people.

Of course, if you're doing this as a fun/interesting thing, you may not care as much about a niche or widespread acceptance. But, still.

-brennan

CD-Rom support

[timothy]

Kurt:

I much prefer to install software (at least anything over several megs) with a CD than over the net, and there are a lot of old documents that I have converted to CD for storage. I wouldn't want to buy a machine without a CD-ROM drive :)

Is bootable (or other) CD-ROM support planned? Perhaps many people would be able to sample AtheOS easier if they could (for instance) order a CD from Cheapbytes and install it locally, pass to a friend etc.

Considering the progress on the other aspects of the system, how important do you think this is, or are there technical difficulties (other than time) in getting CD-ROM support to work?

Best,

timothy

GUI lib (why custom?)

[johnjones]

why have you implemeted a custom GUI lib ?

as aposed to implemeting a backend for GTK/QT/X lib which would mean alot more GUI software

regards

john jones

Re:GUI lib (why custom?)

[spitzak]

I agree that it would be far more useful to make the "official" Atheos interface much more low level, on the "create a window this shape, draw these rectangles and colors, tell me where the mouse clicked" interface, and put all the work into a powerful graphics engine (which X and Windows lack).

Writing buttons is pretty trivial (I have done it!), the reason toolkits on X is so hard is the enormous amount of work needed to do things that should be easy, like select fonts and draw them and draw images.

I also feel that putting the toolkit into the system will lock the design into something that would quickly become obsolete. X, for all it's problems, is still used today, and able to emulate stuff invented 15 years later. Do you think X would be anything other than a joke if it required all programs to use the Athena toolkit?

However, I cannot prove from the documentation whether or not Atheos is designed this way, but I don't really like what I see. But his toolkit may just be an example, he certainly would need to write a toolkit layer so that there could be anything other than trivial demo programs, and perhaps he intends to allow that layer to be replaced.

To put it simply.

[mindstrm]

Let's say I download a copy of AtheOS. It is licensed to me under the GPL.

Let's say a year later Kurt closes it, and no longer distributes it under the GPL. He no longer has to distribute it under GPL, of course.

However, that doesn't at all change the fact that I have a copy, licensed to me under the GPL, and all that implies. I can distribute it myself under the GPL, etc.

GPL is not designed so people can 'close up the code, revoke everything else out there, and start charging for it' might be another way to put it.

If you are really concerned about the monetary value of your code, because you think you can sell it, and you think having a closed license is paramount to getting a sale, then you probably shouldn't publish it under GPL.

Are you happy ...

[Anonymous Coward]

about not having some bearded weirdo running after you, crying: 'It's GNU/Atheos, it's GNU/Atheos!'?

b.

Re:yaos...

[Lethyos]

One that can run all the damn binary forms so you aren't stuck with emulation layers and so on.

Running binaries from other platforms not native to your own is emulation. You're platform A pretending to be platform B (no pun ;), for the purpose of running code from platform B without changing that code.

a standardization of binary files probably would make applications more platform independent,

A few such standardized formats are ELF (Executable & Linking Format), AOUT, and JAVA. The last of these, with the proper VM, does make applications more platform independent (sort of :).

but what do I know, I'm just a 15 year old nerd :)

Keep learning! :)

Re:Can't retract code?

[jovlinger]

Say I release versions 1,2,3, and 4 of my Program under the GPL. These versions, by being "released under the GPL", are exactly what you say : GPL 4Life.

I am under no obligation of releasing version 5 under the GPL. I can also re-release versions 1 - 4 under someother licence. For example, I can sell them as closed source to M$. However, these actions in no way invalidate the licence on the existing released code. And only I can take these actions.

You on the other hand, are free and encouraged to build on my GPLed code, but if you do so, it MUST be released under the GPL 4Life as well. You have no rights to resell/relicence your _derivative_ work. ( I guess I could sell/transfer these rights to you tho, once again, without invalidating the licence on already released code).

Re:My question

[Tim Macinta]

Are you scared of religious groups attacking your OS because they believe it's an atheist one?

At least there's no need to worry about losing market share to christian hackers as they're already running Jesux .

Design an OS with C++

[JWhitlock]

According to Bjarne Stroustrup, the core application domain for C++ is systems programming. Having created an OS in C++, what would you say are C++ strengths and weaknesses for your needs? Has the OS evolved along with the evolving standard (the STL, templates, the new type casts, etc.), or have you stuck with the C++ that was around when you started? What features do you depend on, and which do you avoid like the plague? And, of course, if you did it today, would you use another language or make different language choices?

Re:Design an OS with C++

[be-fan]

The rationale for not programming the core of the OS in C++ is that C++ is much less predictable than C. While C is very straightforward and extremely procedural, stuff happens in C++ much more automatically. Thus, a constructor might get called at an inoportunate moment, or an STL class might suddenly run an allocator that you can't run at that moment. Then the changing nature of C++ also becomes a problem. You can't keep changing the API every time a cool new feature comes out. That's why the majority of C++ APIs tend to stick with the "core" features of C++ (which really just make C++ a better C) instead of going to the eostoric stuff. For example, BeOS's (and AtheOS's) GUI API uses virtual function overloading to replace callbacks. Instead of passing a pointer to a C function that overrides the "draw" function of a window, you pass an instance of a class that overrides a virtual Draw() function. Not earth shatteringly different, but slightly cleaner and nicer to work with.

Re:Web Server

[be-fan]

\.? What is that? Is there a Windows version of /. floating around somewhere?

Two questions

[gabbarsingh]

Kurt,

I'm sure you developed AtheOS in your free time and then let me ask you what is your day job? How do you find balance between the two especially when you are in that coding bubble that everything seems to be coming together well.

Secondly, (this may be for all /. ers as well), do you see yourself doing AtheOS development fulltime? If yes, then how do you foresee this transformation? In fact, I'm sure there are many people here who once worked for a big/medium company but were good at a certain thing and went solo after a while. I'm curious to find out their journies as well.

You're doing a great job! Good luck and keep it up!

I'd love to see that...

[Midnight Ryder]

why not include a DirectX emulation ?? it would be easier on his OS since its not tied to X and input devices are not a seperately controlled.. if he could do that could this be the next gaming platform ?? now that would be serious competition..

I'd love to see that. A nice, tight Gaming OS that's Windows compatable with full DirectX emulation would be friggin' awsome. Probably never happen, unluckly - that's A LOT of bloody work to do to get even enough Windows compatibility to run games. (And, well - I was involved in a project to do something like that once. Long ago... the project in question (Freedows) appears to be dead and gone now...) None of the projects that have set out to do something like that have flopped so far. Doesn't mean it's IMPOSSIBLE, just damned hard.

But if it ever happened - I'd have me an MS free game machine built very quickly :-) (And no, a Linux box doesn't count as an MS free game machine - most of the games I want to play don't have Linux versions :-/ )

Where did the name come from?

[Tim Macinta]

Does your operating system not believe in Jesux?

Re:License Freedom?

[kurt.skauen]

Can you please show me one single statement anywhere where I threaten to close-source AtheOS? You couldn't find it? Ok, then how did you conclude that I have often threatened to make AtheOS closed source? I have never threatened to do so and I will not threaten to do so in the future.

I have said that I'm might going to change the lisense to a more liberal one in case the GPL would cause problems for non-GPL drivers, apps, or other "third-party" components somehow. How you managed to twist that into "often threathened to close-source" is beyond me.

Kurt Skauen

Re:My question

[MSBob]

A-the-OS. It's all in capitalization baby!

What type of users are you finding?

[drenehtsral]

I am curious what sort of user you find showing the most interrest in AtheOS? Also, it looks like the sort of thing that could do quite well in an Information Appliance or other embedded application because it doesn't have as much baggage as UNIX or Windows.
One more thing, were you an Amiga fan?

Porting...

[Midnight Ryder]

BeOS has Dx layer, alowing Dx games to be easly ported to the BeOS.

Ported. That's the problem here - most developers really don't seem to be that interested porting thier games to other operating system (note I said MOST, not all). A nitche operating system designed for multimedia and games already happened - and BeOS didn't get that many developers porting thier games over. Binary compatability, IE - no recompile or porting, would make for a very popular alternative OS for gamers. (but, again, probably won't happen ;-)

Not just gaming (was Re:Windows apps?

[algae]

A directX emulation layer would be very useful not just for gaming, but for a variety of real-time sound synthesis applications. Software synths frequently use DirectX to get a low-latency connection with the audio card, so that you can make realtime changes without a lot of lag between the time you twist a knob, and hear the results.

Besides, not needing windows to run Reason would truly rule!

Re:Screwed! Google doesnt cache pictures.

[Genom]

images.google.com has most of them - just do a search for atheos.

The one they don't have (of course) is the web browser one. ANyone have that one mirrored?

Embedded devices?

[proxima]

Have you ever considered promoting AtheOS as an OS for GUI-based embedded devices? The competition in that arena now is Windows CE, Palm OS, and Linux - but an OO based GUI built into the OS may be beneficial in terms of performance.

With Linux, a device developer has to get the core Linux kernel working and then build a GUI on top of it (XFree86 or a smaller X server). Palm OS doesn't have multitasking and isn't very scalable to powerful devices. Windows CE requires a royalty. AtheOS could provide a powerful operating system for embedded devices for free.

Re:Embedded devices?

[johnjones]

this depends on how resource hungry and Divice drivers are done

GUI has to be faily light weight and done in software only as hardware bliting is still a novelty

the link loader also would have to be tweaked for a differant arch (e.g. gnumach can not run on mips because of the linker and loader at presant (nor can apple darwin only ppc and intel))

keep in mind that in terms of microprocessors out there intel is very small

PPC sells more than intel and MIPS may be 10-20 times as much with ARM arch well ahead of these (do you have a cell phone ?)

my advice to kurt is target it generically and try and build it for MIPS ARM and PPC as well as intel and this will make it very easy to add any others that you want to

regards

john jones

Re:unfortunate name, perhaps ...

[Pyrosz]

In case you couldn't read the faq due to /. effect. He states that he didn't know that atheos was even a word. He picked it as a short form of Athena (iirc) and OS = AtheOS.

Re:My question

[Tim Macinta]

Is this a troll, or did you really not grasp that the site is a joke?

None of the above. I was passing along the joke because I thought it was appropriate given the topic of conversation in this thread. I think that a holy war between AtheOS and Jesux would be far more entertaining than Gnome vs. KDE or Emacs vs. VI. The Jesux kernel could refuse to talk with AtheOS daemons and AtheOS could refuse to recognize any Jesux binaries as authentic. The possibilities are endless!

How does Atheos handle Binary Compatibility?

[MeowMeow Jones]

(As I'm sure you know) one of the problems with C++ is that modifying a class changes the binary structure of an object. This then breaks any programs that were dynamically linked against this. This problem has been addressed in several ways (CORBA, COM, staticly linking in the code, or keeping 800 copies of MFC40.dll on your machine, etc, etc)

This seems (to me, at least) the biggest problem with writing an OS in C++. How does AtheOS deal with this problem?

Application framework & Development

[absurd_spork]

Two questions, actually:

• I think that not having X on board is a good idea, actually, because if you had X on AtheOS, everybody would start porting over X applications and then you'd have a lot of applications with an entirely different look & feel, which would spoil the integration that AtheOS currently offers. However, for the future, there's going to be need for a well-documented application framework in order to facilitate application development (for options such as component development and so on); since you already ported part of Qt to the native AtheOS system, what would you think about porting as much of KDE over to AtheOS as possible without including X, so that not too much of the native system's advantages would be lost, yet you could use the portability of KDE to ensure a broad supply of end-user applications?
  
• I realize that you do very much of the actual development yourself, at the moment. What would you think of partially delegating development, such as putting up a list of "what is needed" to-do's, discussing the actual implementation with some developers, but letting them do more of the actual work? Because you've come really far with the OS, but I presume it's at a critical point at the moment where it needs to gain momentum. You could assume some sort of "benevolent dictatorship", we have at least one case in operating system development history where it worked out fine :-)
  

Throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

[Picass0]

Do you consider AtheOS to be born as a curiousity? Or do you consider Linux, BSD, and other growing OSs to be flawed in some fundemental way that only a fresh start could fix? If the latter, what are the biggest strikes against these OSs and how do you plan to overcome them? And what do you think other *nix need to do to match your goals?

Ascii Parrots...

[Vermifax]

Out of curiosity, anyone know what program he used to generate that webpage?

Poooortable?

[absurd_spork]

Would you consider AtheOS a portable OS? I mean, with BeOS, it ran on at least three platforms, not including BeIA, and they said it was because 90% of the code was platform-independent. What is your opinion of porting AtheOS to other platforms, such as the PPC, some Amiga-esque hardware :-), the PlayStation 2 or whatever?

Re:Stress-testing

[kurt.skauen]

This is the fourth time www.atheos.cx (running AtheOS) hit the front page of /. and it still have not crashed a single time due to the load it generates. This time (with a new link and much work spendt on the TCP/IP stack lately) it even seem to be quite easily accessible. It choked quite badly in the beginning but after moving images and static downloads to a spearate HTTP server (on the same machine) it now seems to be quite responsive.

Java for AtheOS

[harmonica]

Is anybody working on a JRE for AtheOS? Although Java has hardly taken over the desktop (*cough*), there are quite a few useful apps.

Kaffe seems to have been ported to a huge number of platforms, so it may not be too hard to do an AtheOS port as well. The Kaffe homepage has some instructions for people who want to do a new port.