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..

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.

Developers

[Adelvillar]

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

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.)

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

Are you happy ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

b.

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?

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.

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 :-)