AtheOS Fork Brings BeOS on Top of Linux

Eugenia writes: "Yup, Bill Hayden has forked AtheOS by using its app_server and Interface Kit (along with some other of its kits, like the filesystem layer) and ported it on top of the 2.4.x Linux kernel, without the need for X11. He already has the graphical environment working, and he also has some BeOS apps recompiled and working under Linux. Why BeOS applications? Because that was the reason of the fork. Exactly because AtheOS and BeOS have similar technical principles (highly multithreaded, truly preemptive, similar C++ API etc), by modifying AtheOS's API to match BeOS, Bill is trying to resurrect the BeOS. By doing so this way, Bill is already way ahead from the other two efforts to ressurect BeOS, OpenBeOS (dependant on the 'clean' NewOS kernel) and BlueOS (which depends on Linux and X11)."

Comments

FP?

[elvstone]

This sounds cool. Long live Be.

Rid of X

[BlackSol]

Just the thought of being rid of X and into the uber sweet arena of Be's font handling would be swell.

But what about somesort of compatibility for existing X apps? There's way to many great apps out there to just junk....

Or do we have to run X for that?

Re:Rid of X

[sfgoth]

As long as there is X-compatibility, what incentive do apps have to get off X?

Re:Rid of X

[DocSnyder]

But what about somesort of compatibility for existing X apps?

Simply run a rootless X server (AFAIK XFree 4.2 can operate without a root window) or replace your graphical toolkits (Qt, Gtk+, Tk, FLTK) with their non-X variants.

Re:Rid of X

[mlk]

BeOS has some X ports, so I guess this Linuxed Be will.

Re:Rid of X

[HanzoSan]

Esoteric features for people who like networking and programming.

Re:Rid of X

[BlackSol]

uhm, ease of use, improved gui, less of reliance on packages, and other cruft that accumulates over the life of a piece of software.

Re:Rid of X

[BlackSol]

huhn?

Are these not reasons for apps to move away from X if there is a cleaner, easier solution available?

No one said anything couldn't done, or had to be done.

And go help your mother statically compile everything into the X server ;)

Wow

[NinjaGaidenIIIcuts]

Now I can play MP3's and watch digital movies.

Re:Wow

[Jaysyn]

This is an understatment. I've had 10 or so mp3's going at the same time, while watching some flicks.

BeOS rocks, I hope this new system has the stability & speed that it's predecessor (sp?) had.

Re:Wow

[prizzznecious]

.. I know it sounds trollish, but I must inquire: why would you ever want to run 10 mp3s at once? Particularly while watching movies?

Re:Wow

[NinjaGaidenIIIcuts]

As my previous post sounds a troll, I just intended to joke around the practical need for an AtheOS or anything similar.

I was a fan of BeOS mostly because of its clustering abilities, and I become enthusiasted with the idea of running a server w/ 32 clustered boxes. Then I found MOSIX, and I'm just happy with Linux (although I have still only a few boxes).

Re:Wow

[Jaysyn]

Because I could...

:)

Jaysyn

Re:Wow

[beerits]

.. I know it sounds trollish, but I must inquire: why would you ever want to run 10 mp3s at once? Particularly while watching movies?

Obviously so you can listen to all your alternate audio tracks

Re:Wow

[h4x0r-3l337]

I was a fan of BeOS mostly because of its clustering abilities

What the hell are you talking about? BeOS doesn't have any clustering abilities.

Re:Wow

[Warped-Reality]

He most likely means SMP

Re:Wow

[NinjaGaidenIIIcuts]

Darn, I really did a mess with SMP and clustering.

Re:Wow

[Godwin O'Hitler]

BeOS rocks, I hope this new system has the stability & speed that it's predecessor (sp?) had.

Are you sure you didn't mean "BeOS rocks, I hope this new system has the stability & speed that it's (sp?) predecessor had."
;-)

Re:Wow

[Jaysyn]

Nope, and you automatically lose because of your sig. ;)

Jaysyn

Re:Wow

[Jaysyn]

Oops...

I meant your nick...

Jaysyn

Kurt is not pleased

[InterruptDescriptorT]

Kurt Skauren(sp?), progenitor of AtheOS, cannot be too pleased about this. I remember the first mailing list discussion where this had been announced and he replied with a sad smiley.

The AtheOS kernel has always been Kurt's baby; his goal of developing an OS targetted solely to desktop applications where the kernel remains under tight control is severely compromised with this split.

I like AtheOS and have even contributed a couple drivers to it, and it just kinda saddens me to think of Kurt's reaction.

Re:Kurt is not pleased

[dinivin]

No offense intended to Kurt, but Atheos has been stagnating for quite a while now due to his feeling that only he should modify the core of the operating system combined with the lack of activity from him for the past three months (or more).

Dinivin

Re:Kurt is not pleased

[tswinzig]

Kurt Skauren(sp?), progenitor of AtheOS, cannot be too pleased about this.

Sorry, tough shit. Kurt decided to release AtheOS as GPL.

The AtheOS kernel has always been Kurt's baby; his goal of developing an OS targetted solely to desktop applications where the kernel remains under tight control is severely compromised with this split.

On the contrary, Kurt's goal of developing an OS where the kernel remains under tight control is severely compromised by THE LICENSE HE CHOSE.

Re:Kurt is not pleased

[BigBir3d]

5 months.

and it is his OS. he can do, or not do, whatever he wants, whenever he wants.

just because it is GPL'ed doesn't require that he has to take the input of others.

Re:Kurt is not pleased

[phyxeld]

he replied with a sad smiley.

Where did you see that?

I was looking for a response from Kurt in the thread here, and I didn't see anything.

There is some sort of funny "you've got no right" vs "read the gpl sometime" comments in there though (from other people, not kurt).

Re:Kurt is not pleased

[Danse]

Which is exactly why things such as this split happen, and should happen. He can do what he likes, but if it doesn't suit enough people, they'll go elsewhere and make their own. So whether he likes it or not, this is how things should be. I'm glad to see someone doing something interesting with AtheOS.

Re:Kurt is not pleased

[Rick the Red]

As long as Bill Hayden doesn't call this AtheOS, why should Kurt care? Did Kurt even bother to trademark AtheOS to prevent that? If not, Bill is even free to call his new creation AtheOS, although I doubt he would in any event -- why would he want anyone to confuse his creation with Kurt's? (note that he can't call it Linux, even though he uses the Linux kernel -- that name is trademarked)

The only thing Kurt has to fear is that Bill's fork is so much better that all the people working on AtheOS shift to it. If that happens, then it should happen; if AtheOS is good enough, it won't happen.

This is what the GPL is for; if you don't like it, use another license.

Re:Kurt is not pleased

[Chris Burke]

According to an extremely dumb-ass, lazy partner I had in a class once (Hi! You're useless and stupid!), yes. If you used LiteStep, you were no longer running windows. Solaris running CDE and Solaris running FVWM were two completely different operating systems. I never asked him if he thought it'd be a different OS if you used csh instead of sh, but considering he didn't know command.com was a -shell- and NOT the entirety of MS-DOS, I can't imagine it would have been a useful question.

Anyway, yeah, you're right. :)

Re:Kurt is not pleased

[Jeremi]

Kurt Skauren(sp?), progenitor of AtheOS, cannot be too pleased about this.

If I was Kurt, I would be very pleased about this. Someone reusing your code is about the highest praise they can give it. If you're thinking that Kurt is worried about AtheOS losing mindshare.... well, he has said himself that he doesn't hope that AtheOS will take over the world; it's more of a personal plaything for him. Given that, what's the problem with another GPL'd OS using its code?

Let a million flowers bloom, I say. :^)

Re:Kurt is not pleased

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been on the developer list for Atheos for almost a year now... It's amazing how everyone is assuming anything about Kurt... He hasn't posted his comments on the forking of Atheos or for that matter if he will let other people hack at the kernal etc... No one on the list and now on slashdot has even given him a chance to tell his side of the story. If people consider silence to be apathy then I guess thats it.....

Re:Kurt is not pleased

[codexus]

I discussed the idea of a fork with Kurt a while ago and he didn't like the idea at all. No, I wasn't planning to make such a fork, this was just hypothetical.

But forks are part of the open-source life and since he wants control over his baby he probably shouldn't have released it as open-source.

Re:Kurt is not pleased

[nathanm]

Here's the post from Kurt Skauen:

Message: 8229011
FROM: Kurt Skauen
DATE: 03/27/2002 10:14:53
SUBJECT: [Atheos-developer] :(

Several of you have requested my responce to this. I don't really see
why. You all know what my stand is. That includes you Bill Hayden. I
won't reiterate that any more...

I was hoping to get started on AtheOS again during the easter wacation
(now that I'm done with the exams for the pilot license). Unfortunately
the first thing I fixed was my mail-account at atheos.cx :(

--
Kurt Skauen. ( http://www.atheos.cx/ )

"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take
credit. Try to be in the first group, there is less competition there." __
Indira Gandhi

_______________________________________________
AtheOS-developer mailing list
<EMAIL: PROTECTED>
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/li stinfo/atheo s-developer

Other than the value of the lawsuit

[pcwhalen]

as noted here, why would Be want to hold onto an OS it doesn't want to sell? It will become as irrelevant eventually as Dr. DOS

[no troll, here, kids. Just my 2 cents.]

Re:Other than the value of the lawsuit

[mlk]

Be DOES NOT own BeOS
Palm do.
Palm want to sell BITS of BeOS, in PalmOS.

Re:Other than the value of the lawsuit

[Mr.Phil]

I do believe that as late as version 5.1, Novell was using DR.DOS as the boot OS to bootstrap yourself into the Novell server OS. I don't know how Novell 6 is going to handle this, but Dr.DOS is far from "irrelevant" and is infact still a useful tool.

Re:Other than the value of the lawsuit

[cristofer8]

mlk mentioned it a little, but the code for the real os is far from being useless. BeOS sold its assets (including BeIA and BeOS) to palm awhile ago. Be is still in existance solely to keep up the lawsuit against microsoft. There are about 2 employees. For all other purposes, as they have openly stated, Be is Dead.

BeOS on the other hand, will see the light of day again hopefully in palm os 5. Rumor has it that PalmOS5 will include many of the BeOS stuff, taken from both BeOS itself and its derivative, BeIA. If all goes well, we'll get a palm os that rocks and kicks the pants off of pocketpc!

Life in Open Source

[Wesley Felter]

Forks happen. One of the goals of the GPL is to ensure that sofware doesn't stay under the control of the original author. If you want to write GPL'ed software, you need a thick skin.

'Way ahead'?

[tswinzig]

That depends on how you define 'way ahead.'

People like me who really like BeOS admire the entire structure of the operating system, from top to bottom. I have zero interest in running FrankensteinBeOS, which is what this sounds like. Therefore I am content to work on the OpenBeOS project, which may be 'way behind', but should have a nicer outcome (for people who like BeOS). The project is coming together quite nicely for something so young.

(It's easier to see really far when you can stand on the shoulders of great engineers.)

Re:'Way ahead'?

[mlk]

How is OBOS dead?
Have you been to the site, it's newsletter is updated every two weeks and the CVS is updated multiply times a day.

This BeOS API on Linux will not stop me from contiuning OBOS, and I dought it'll stop many other OBOS devs. We choose NOT to use the Linux kernal for a good reason, and have know about other Linux-based ports for some time (BlueOS).

mlk

Re:'Way ahead'?

[horse]

Go for it. I think monsters are fine so long as they are useful. Timeliness matters.

Re:'Way ahead'?

[AxelTorvalds]

How is this structurally different than BeOS? The only difference I see is that one entity won't be in control of it all. It sounds like it is very similarly modeled after BeOS ony it has a real kernel under it.

Re:'Way ahead'?

[Dr. Spork]

As long as OpenBeOS developers don't defect, this AtheOS fork can only help them. Think about it: yet another operating system that runs programs using the Be API. This means that there might actually be future programs with the Be API, and that more of the existing ones might continue to be maintained.

One real danger for OpenBeOS is that by the time it's done, no applications worth running will be available for it. FranensteinBeOS's are just the thing needed to keep the flame going until OpenBeOS is done.

X sucks anyhow

[HanzoSan]

I mean for a desktop OS, you dont really NEED X.

Sure its nice if you could have it, but what you need is a nice looking gui, you dont need the x protcols esoteric features that only geeks and servers need.

Direct Frame Buffer is good, and there may be other ideas, but really, I hope linux gets rid of X, or at least the desktop linux's such as mandrake, lycoris, lindows and all of them get together and help fund directfb or berlin project or something

Re:X sucks anyhow

[pe1rxq]

I mean for a desktop OS, you dont really NEED X.

X isn't as bad as many think...
A raw framebuffer is useless, you need some sort of windowing system ontop of it (unless you liked windows 1.0) in which case you end up with a system that looks a lot like X in the end.
Add the bonus of being network and system transparant and X looks a lot better...

Jeroen

Re:X sucks anyhow

[HanzoSan]

No one cares about network transparecy, thats a programmer network admin thing, honestly, your average user doesnt give a damn about it, the only reason thsat would matter, is if every electronics device in their house were hooked up to some main node which interfaces with them all, but we arent there yet so why worry about that.

Directfb has a much better interface, face it. Especially when we have stuff like Gforce5s

Re:X sucks anyhow

[Baki]

Please don't put yourself as representative for "everyone". Lots of people care about network transparency. I think the only ones that don't are the "windows converts" that simply don't know better.

In many companies (including the one I work in) we have NT desktops with X-window emulator to access our UNIX servers (Solaris, AIX, Linux etc). Without X the Unix servers would be a much less nice platform to develop for (imagine having to develop and/or manage them via telnet, ugh).

At home, I have a windows desktop (so that I can play UT at any time, and I HATE dual booting) also with an X-window emulator to access my FreeBSD server. Most of the time, my windows desktop is a glorified x-window terminal :).

Re:X sucks anyhow

[Chris Burke]

Why worry? Because otherwise you fragment the GUI development arena into those that work for the people who care about network transparency, and those that don't. And not for applications where it doesn't make sense, like OpenGL games, but for everything.

At work, I can use one of the central linux boxes to run all my apps. Mozilla, emacs; you know, the important stuff. :) But these apps work just the same as they do for me at home, on my "desktop". Because of network transparency. Why get rid of that, just because your average user doesn't care? At the moment, all the friendly desktop stuffs that is what the average user is going to be using works just as well on their desktop as it does on my workstation, or running remotely on the server. Why sacrifice that?

Plus, the reason why we should worry about the future is that because by the time something else comes around with enough app support to replace X, it -will- be time to worry.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[be-fan]

The problem with X is its design. It was designed with remote usage in mind and local usage is far from optimal. Even with UNIX domain sockets (which, btw are slower than most other forms of IPC on Linux) there is all this protocol overhead that is unnecessary locally. Instead of a standardized protocal, X should have been a standardized API. That way, everything between the API call and the implementation could be optimized for the specific case being used. Think, for example, if X was based on COM. Then each API call would be a simple virtual function call locally (instead of a rather expensive socket call), and remote transparency would be preserved.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[be-fan]

A) GNOME and KDE, as good as they might be to deluded Linux users, is nothing compared to BeOS and Windows. I know. After having used BeOS for years on my 300MHz PII, KDE 2.2 and GNOME 1.4 run painfully slow, even on my new Athlon 1700+. Win2K on both machines is blazingly fast.

B) X is not perfect. There is tons of stuff that could be improved (but at the cost breaking compatibility). Also, it is not standardized. I'm sick of every single program havng its own way of doing fonts and printing.

C) Umm, you can do remote desktop on Win2K as well, its called Citrix. The damn thing is fast enough to run Word comfortably over a medium-speed DSL line.

D) Who cares if it can support apps written for a totally different architecture? There's actual useful features, then there's nerd jack-off features. Guess which one this is.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[HanzoSan]

Everyone who cares about network transparency and X and legacy unix apps, the first thing they say.

"At my job" "At work" "When i connect to my computer at work"

You guys use linux because its a job, i bet you use windows at home, I use linux as my primary desktop, at HOME.

I dont care about network transparency at HOME, and as more people use linux, more people will begin to agree with me and less with you.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[ljaguar]

You aren't really "everyone".

_I_ care about network transparency.

Just for a simple reason that there is more than one computer in my household. In fact, everyone who has more than one computer (that runs linux) care about network transparency. Many many people have more than one computer. Many are also getting linux. I'd said lot of people care (or would care if they knew such thing was possible!) about network transparency. If not, a lot of people are gonna start caring in near future.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[Chris Burke]

You guys use linux because its a job, i bet you use windows at home, I use linux as my primary desktop, at HOME.

You lose. I haven't used Windows on my home PC once since early 1998.

And hey, outside of the summer where I worked from home and used SSH to do remote development, I don't care much about network transparency at home either. I do care some, since I have 3 machines and running GUI apps remotely comes in handy from time to time. My point was -- why should I have to run different apps at home and at work? Why should the fact that I rarely use this really cool feature in one place mean it should go away? Currently every non-game app I run at home also runs perfectly at work from a central server. Why should this change, just because you mostly don't care?

And why should not caring now mean that you won't care later? What would you rather do -- have a system that does this now, or have to hack it on in some Terminal Server-ish way later when suddenly it sounds like a feature?

As more people use linux, what should not happen is that the functionality that makes it work on the desktop comes at the expense of functionality that works on the workstation and server. It doesn't have to (most coworkers use Gnome on their workstation), so don't force it to.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[Enahs]

I run KDE 2.2.2 on a K62-350 w/64MB of RAM. Shut down some unnecessary services and you'll find that the "slow" stuff isn't so slow anymore (hint: you're probably running out of "real" RAM.) And even poor old Win98 runs slow on this box.

I'm sick of every single program havng its own way of doing fonts and printing.

Hate to tell ya this, but the Windows world is standardized only in theory.

C) Umm, you can do remote desktop on Win2K as well, its called Citrix. The damn thing is fast enough to run Word comfortably over a medium-speed DSL line.

Hooray. I run VNCServer on *n?x, MacOS (including OSX), and Windows. You have to have that faster network connection for it to be worthwile, though, especially with eyecandy-happy OSX.

Back to A)...

A) GNOME and KDE, as good as they might be to deluded Linux users, is nothing compared to BeOS and Windows. I know. After having used BeOS for years on my 300MHz PII, KDE 2.2 and GNOME 1.4 run painfully slow, even on my new Athlon 1700+. Win2K on both machines is blazingly fast.

Repeat after me: there's speed, then there's stability and security. Guess what's more important? And as I said before, you're probably some poor sap without enough RAM, and you probably have Apache and all sorts of crap you shouldn't have running if you're using your machine as a desktop machine. Shut off the network services. All of 'em. Now. Now go find some small company with a fair amount of computers, and ask them if they'd like to unload any old 486's or Pentiums (or, if it's a print business, any old beige G3s or something) on anyone. Run Apache on that.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[Arandir]

GNOME and KDE, as good as they might be to deluded Linux users, is nothing compared to BeOS and Windows.

I've never used BeOS, so I can't comment on it, but from personal and direct experience, KDE blows the Windows desktop out of the water. The only place Windows is superior is the abundance of native apps. Everything else is in the dark ages of design, functionality and usability.

Look at *just* the window manager. Kwin is probably the simplest window manager out there. It doesn't do anything. Yet it has more usability than the Windows equivalent. I can maximize vertically or horizontally. I can snap windows to other windows or to the edges of the screen. I can do rollups. I can middle-click and send the window to the bottom.

Another tiny example: wallpaper. Try to display a JPG image in Windows and you need Active Desktop enabled. Huh? Why are there TWO different components for displaying wallpapers in Windows, and why do they conflict with each other? Why can't Windows do smooth scaling of wallpaper? Why? Why? Why?

Re:X sucks anyhow

[johnnyb]

I dont care about network transparency at HOME, and as more people use linux, more people will begin to agree with me and less with you.

**********

The fact that YOU don't care about this doesn't mean that X shouldn't be used. Name a PROBLEM that would be solved by removing network transparency. If removing it doesn't solve a problem, why cripple the many, many users that use it successfully?

Also, assuming that it only matters for business people, why bother porting all the apps to a different GUI? Is there that much of an advantage to be gained? I don't see any advantage to be gained.

By the way, I'm going to guess that most of what they want to do could be easily handled by an X extension.

Microsoft has finally realized that network transparency is a good thing, and built it into XP.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[Arandir]

Right now I am running XFree86-4.2.0 on FreeBSD-4.5. I have to interact with a Solaris-8 box. With X, I am able to run Clearcase, Rational Rose, Framemaker, etc. under FreeBSD. That's awesome.

If all you're doing is running some game under Wine under Linux on a standalone box in your dorm, then you don't really need X. But the rest of us appreciate the power and simplicity that is X.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[johnnyb]

Try renicing your X server to -20. Also consider renicing the panel and the window manager, and maybe even your applications. THIS is how you achieve a responsive desktop - give it the priority.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[DavidTC]

Why the heck do we have all these crazy people saying that X uses Unix domain socket locally? X uses TCP/IP sockets over a network, and shared memory locally. The only reason it opens a socket is so that it knows who to share memory with. I quote from the man pages 'The most efficient local transport will be chosen.'.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[iserlohn]

Giving scheduling priority to a program with a inefficient mechanism is not the proper way to solve the problem!!

Re:X sucks anyhow

[WowTIP]

Yes, that is one of the better ideas I have heard in a while.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[be-fan]

I run KDE 2.2.2 on a K62-350 w/64MB of RAM. Shut down some unnecessary services and you'll find that the "slow" stuff isn't so slow anymore (hint: you're probably running out of "real" RAM.) And even poor old Win98 runs slow on this box.
>>>>>>>>>
Obviously, you've got the reflexes of a slug. If I hear any more accusations of misconfiguration, I'm going to scream. I've got only a few critical services running (notably, sshd), certainly not sendmail or apache. I've compiled a custom kernel using every patch set I can think of (jp6, mjc2, and various combinations of rmap, O(1), preempt, and lock-break) and finally settled on XFS + preempt + lock-break. I've got the latest drivers from NVIDIA, and I'm using Debian, so its not the packaging. Go use a BeOS machine for a month then come back and see how painfully slow your Linux desktop is. (BTW: I doubt its the RAM. I've got 256MB).

Hate to tell ya this, but the Windows world is standardized only in theory.
>>>>>>>
I've never had a Windows program refuse to start up because it couldn't find some obscure bitmap font that I long ago wiped off my computer in favor of TTF. In Linux, programs constantly refuse to accept the fact that I like Arial as the default, and that I don't have Helvetica installed.

Hooray. I run VNCServer on *n?x, MacOS (including OSX), and Windows. You have to have that faster network connection for it to be worthwile, though, especially with eyecandy-happy OSX.
>>>>>>>>
What's VNC got to do with anything? I'm saying that Win2K and X both of network transparency, and Win2K is a heck of a lot faster. IE: Network transparency != slow.

Repeat after me: there's speed, then there's stability and security. Guess what's more important?
>>>>>>
Speed? To me anyway. Besides, KDE has bailed on me far more often than Win2K. Actually, its like 2 crashes for KDE and 0 for Win2K, but its (2/0 == infinity) times more unstable! BeOS in several years of use only crashed on me when I was doing driver programming.

And as I said before, you're probably some poor sap without enough RAM, and you probably have Apache and all sorts of crap you shouldn't have running if you're using your machine as a desktop machine.
>>>>>>>>
And as I've said before, I've got enough RAM and have been shutting off unneeded services since I started using Linux back with Slack 3.5!

Shut off the network services. All of 'em.
>>>>
But then how'd I ssh into my machine? Or ftp? I ran web, ftp, firewall, and telnet services on my BeOS box for ages. Never noticed slowdown. Now, my Linux machine is relieved of the firewall duties (probably the most taxing on the machine, and something even my 486 can handle!) and it still runs slowly. It's not my setup (IceWM runs great, compiles run great), its not my RAM (if 256MB is enough for Win2K, its enough for KDE2, plus I'm not hitting swap according to vmstat), its entirely the fault of KDE (and GNOME)!

Re:X sucks anyhow

[Alomex]

But the rest of us appreciate the power and simplicity that is X.

Pffft. The simplicy and power of typing setenv DISPLAY mickeymouse.window.manager:0.0 ?

Or the simplicity of the most retarded cut and paste model yet developed?

Or the power to drag and drop between almost no applications?

Or the simplicity and power of having a fully functional computer (called X-terminal) being fully subutilized because the system was planned with a thin client in mind which ended up being a thick client?

Re:X sucks anyhow

[HanzoSan]

X exention? The same one which has been complete for almost a year that has no documentation and is too complicated to use?

Not to mention its slow as hell.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[be-fan]

Umm, nope. Sorry, no cigar. The default method of communication in XFree86 4.2 on Linux is UNIX domain sockets. Sure there is the MIT-SHM extension, but that is only for XPutImage and XGetImage. There is no shared memory transport for XFree86 on Linux.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[HanzoSan]

Not everyone works in the computer industry. I mean we do, but not everyone. In fact most computer users dont, and a Desktop should be designed for them, not for us, if we want X we can use the corperate Redhat Linux or Debian.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[HanzoSan]

Theres nothingn wrong with X the protocol, whats wrong is how X is implemented.

X is just done in a really bad way for Linux.
You cant improve something that was created broken in the first place, Xrender extention? please! All that effort could have put been into a new X

Re:X sucks anyhow

[Chris Burke]

And X can't have a non-programmer desktop designed for it because... ?

Re:X sucks anyhow

[Arandir]

The simplicy and power of typing setenv DISPLAY mickeymouse.window.manager:0.0

Yup! Just try doing that on Windows and you'll see the simplicity of it. My login script sets my DISPLAY, so no matter which remote machine I login to, I can display locally. Really nice and completely effortless.

Or the simplicity of the most retarded cut and paste model yet developed?

Cut and paste is a policy. By rights, it shouldn't even *be* in X. It belongs in Motif, GTK+, Qt, etc. A policy-less GUI has its disadvantages, but the advantages outweigh them.

Or the power to drag and drop between almost no applications?

Don't blame X. Blame GTK+, Qt, Motif, etc. A policy-less GUI means it won't impose a standard on you. Because of this, a KDE program can drag and drop from my FreeBSD box to a program running remotely on my Solaris box. Otherwise there would have to be some standard out there with enough teeth for Sun to adhere to. A standard with that much teeth in it is detrimental to my freedom.

As it is now, it doesn't matter which which X server is running, my X client is fine.

...having a fully functional computer (called X-terminal) being fully subutilized because the system was planned with a thin client in mind which ended up being a thick client?

Oh! If only I could subutilize Windows the same way! If only I could push that everpresent IExplorer running in the background off to another machine... If only I could compile in the background without dragging my MystIII down...

A subutilized CPU is a wonderful thing! Well worth the money. But if you want a fully utilized CPU, the answer is simple. Just downgrade.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[johnnyb]

That is how EVERY OTHER OS solves the problem. The way to get realtime rendering is realtime scheduling. Period. The way to almost-realtime rendering is super-high priority scheduling. If you can think of an OS that solves this problem a different way, I'm all for hearing about it.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[Progoth]

These tests were performed with KDE 2.2.1, XFree 4.1, Linux 2.4.8. Not the most up to date configuration, but neither is NT. The sad fact is you CAN'T GET A DECENT GUI THAT USES X TO RUN WELL ON OLDER HARDWARE IN LINUX.

if you wanna compare usability/functionality with NT4, go with KDE1, XFree3, and a 2.2 kernel.

I'm sick and tired of everybody complaining about how slow kde2 is, and they're trying to run it on a machine with as much power as a low-end TI graphing calculator. put blackbox on low-powered machines, and save kde2 for the nice desktops.

I'm using KDE3 beta3 on a 1400 athlon w/ 640megs of ram, and it is extremely snappy. I ran it for a few days, without ever shutting down multiple konsoles, evolution, mozilla, mozilla mail, gaim with 8 concurrent sign-ons, and konqueror, and it ran perfectly. I booted into windows and just tried using it with a few mozilla windows, trillian, emacs, and windows pic viewer...and it was awful. the speed decrease was inexcusable.

anyway, just another on the long list of pissing wars. I'm tired.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[rizzo420]

because using X and linux as a general desktop os (like windows) is slower than the other desktop oses out there (like windows). as much as all you linux users like to say that windows is the absolute worst operating system in the world, it has its advantages over linux and X. it's a good desktop os. it does what it needs to. i use both linux (for my personal server) and windows. i do my remote admin using ssh, not x. i won't isntall x on my server because it slows it down. my regular desktop os is win2k. you can make a new desktop environment for X for a non-programmer who wants a desktop os, but X is what will slow it down, not the desktop environment. this is what people aren't seeming to understand here. i like linux, and i like the idea of X and when i need to use it, i do. same thing with terminal services in win2k (although not fully implemented in win2k like it is in winxp). i don't think we should get rid of X completely. i think if a desktop linux were to be made, it should be made with a desktop that does not require X. something similar to the way beos, macos, and windows do it. and for those users that still want their X, they can just use an X terminal like many people do in windows. i do believe that one feature of windows terminal services that is better than X in network transparency is that you can access it through a web browser. you don't need a specific client. if that can be implemented into X, X would be much cooler.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[SmittyTheBold]

Well, a windowing system with less overhead would be a start...

(...coming from an OS X user. Ah, the irony.)

Re:X sucks anyhow

[Ozric]

you mean like this

# Display
DISPLAY=`who am i -u | awk '{ print $8 }'`:0.0
export DISPLAY

Re:X sucks anyhow

[maxpublic]

If you really object to X this much then create your own damned 'desktop' distro of linux that uses direct buffering. Cut the whining, bitching, and moaning, and do something constructive - if you're capable, that is.

Max

Re:X sucks anyhow

[perlyking]

"Just for a simple reason that there is more than one computer in my household. In fact, everyone who has more than one computer (that runs linux) care about network transparency."

Thanks, stated well but I wouldnt discount anyone who has a mixed linux/windows network at home either. I run an xserver on my win2k box to bring up gui programs from the linux server, and its exactly the kind of feature that makes linux so good .
Windows has been trying to copy this kind of behaviour, especially so with the latest features in XP. VNC is a popular application because it also provides remote graphical access, yet suddenly the troll on this page insists NOBODY wants it!

Re:X sucks anyhow

[Wdomburg]

>Everyone who cares about network transparency and
>X and legacy unix apps, the first thing they say.
>
>You guys use linux because its a job, i bet you
>use windows at home, I use linux as my primary
>desktop, at HOME.

As other pe ople have pointed out, you lose.

I've been running Linux at home since 1995. By 1996 I wiped out my Windows partition.

Now I've got three machines running Linux, one running OpenBSD, and have machines running HP/UX and Solaris on the way.

Guess what - only one of my machines has a monitor on it.

Matt

Re:X sucks anyhow

[dossen]

I second that. Network transparency is what makes this mozilla run on my work box (shitty w2k setup, doesn't work right with win32 moz). And at home too, it's just so nice to have all of the programs on the same desktop, no matter where they are running.

And just so you know, UT runs quite well under linux, if you can find the patch (Loki made it, it just requires an ordinary windows UT disc).

Re:X sucks anyhow

[asincero]

> i do my remote admin using ssh, not x. i won't
> isntall x on my server because it slows it down

WTF? All you need on the server are the X runtime libs and the X clients. How they hell will that "slow it down"?

- Arcadio

Re:X sucks anyhow

[Chris Burke]

For Terminal Server, you DO need a specific client -- the Terminal Server Client ActiveX control. And the "specific client" you need for X is... X! Sorry, still have TS beat on that front.

SSH can forward X connections... X is running on your -local- machine, not the sever.

I haven't seen any convincing arguments for why X is slow.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[saintlupus]

Cut the whining, bitching, and moaning, and do something constructive - if you're capable, that is.


Thank you. It's nice to see the old "shut the fuck up and produce some code" spirit is still alive in this wasteland of trolls.

--saint

Re:X sucks anyhow

[Christianfreak]

Don't blame X. Blame GTK+, Qt, Motif, etc. A policy-less GUI means it won't impose a standard on you. Because of this, a KDE program can drag and drop from my FreeBSD box to a program running remotely on my Solaris box. Otherwise there would have to be some standard out there with enough teeth for Sun to adhere to. A standard with that much teeth in it is detrimental to my freedom.

Unfortunatly in the real world its hard to place the blame on GTK, QT etc. when they have to make their own policies. It wouldn't be such a big problem if everyone used only KDE or only Gnome, I don't know anyone that doesn't use programs from both and lots a people do that on a completely different window manager. If things like cut and paste were an API in the X server itself we would have so much more consistancy on the Linux desktop.

How can we expect everyone to play nice without some kind of standard way of doing it?

Re:X sucks anyhow

[DavidTC]

Which would be, what? 95% of all operations?

Re:X sucks anyhow

[be-fan]

if you wanna compare usability/functionality with NT4, go with KDE1, XFree3, and a 2.2 kernel.
>>>>>>>>>>>
Umm, nope. NT4 has everything that KDE 2.2.x with XFree4 and the 2.4 kernel does. This includes a component model (COM), accelerated OpenGL, a journaling filesystem, etc. Aside from all the stupid UI gimmicks (which I turn off anyway) NT4 is feature-complete.

I'm sick and tired of everybody complaining about how slow kde2 is, and they're trying to run it on a machine with as much power as a low-end TI graphing calculator. put blackbox on low-powered machines, and save kde2 for the nice desktops.
>>>>>>>>>>>
Do you consider an Athlon 1700 a 'nice' desktop? Well it too runs KDE2 slowly.

I'm using KDE3 beta3 on a 1400 athlon w/ 640megs of ram, and it is extremely snappy.
>>>>
Obviously, you're dead. Only a dead person would consider KDE to be "snappy." (Unless, of course, KDE3 is three or four times faster than 2.2.x, I haven't tried it yet). Try using BeOS sometime and see "snappy."

I ran it for a few days, without ever shutting down multiple konsoles, evolution, mozilla, mozilla mail, gaim with 8 concurrent sign-ons, and konqueror, and it ran perfectly. I booted into windows and just tried using it with a few mozilla windows, trillian, emacs, and windows pic viewer...and it was awful. the speed decrease was inexcusable.
>>>>>>>>
Umm, you probably shouldn't be using programs like Mozilla and emacs, which aren't really Windows-native (they've got giant abstraction layers, such as the Mozilla cross-platform layer, and Cygwin in the case of emacs). You should be using IE6 and Visual C++.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[kaiidth]

Firstly I have to disagree with your assessment... I frequently make use of network transparency at home, particularly for:

1) Other machines on the LAN (it's either remote access GUIs or make ridiculously excessive use of NFS, unfortunately).

2) Getting local access on the University computers (very difficult to do everything in lynx when you're talking about accessing a somewhat patchily-written Java-based website).

One of the strangest things about task analysis on computer users (or users of any other complex system such as planes) is that few people make use of most of the features that the system makes possible. Furthermore, the procedure said users have for completing any problem is almost certainly different to that which the software designers expected. It's not surprising that many people don't make use of such an abstract concept as network transparency, given the above; however, many others do.. Now it's always tempting for a designer to look at any five random users of a system and shout 'Eureka! They do not use this feature and therefore it is useless!' but it's really not a very good way of designing a piece of software. It is probably better to design a rather flexible architecture, such that other users (or those same users, in five years' time) do not have to cope with their crippled system.

Think of this example: Bob, who lives in a nice warm town with flat roads and year-round good weather, takes on the job of redesigning cars. He checks out the opinions of several friends (who also live locally) before making any decisions, but eventually learns that two features on this car that nobody uses are the auto-de-icing windows and snow chain attachments. "Well, that's it", he says, "Those features are a waste of money".

I'll give you a clue; Bob is wrong, in the sense that a mass-manufactured item should present an acceptable profile to as large a proportion of customers as possible. Although of course, if the locally unused extensions are actually degrading the performance of the system, it's always nice to be able to switch them off and reclaim that waste.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[Caktus]

For Terminal Server, you DO need a specific OS -- Windows. And the "specific OS" you need for X is ... Unix, Windows, OS/2, OSX, BeOS, ... Hey, there's even an X server written in java. Sorry, still have X beat on that front.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[nidarus]

"A policy-less GUI has its disadvantages, but the advantages outweigh them."

"A policy-less GUI means it won't impose a standard on you."

Yeah right! In fact, it imposes several different standards, that do more or less the same thing, but behave a little differently (and because of that you have to learn the subtle nuances of each standard) and makes collaboration between programs that use different standards impossible.

Should I blame the widget-sets for not having a unified standard for DnD? Why shouldn't I blame X for not making this standard from the head-on?

[note: Actually, I think they did make a standard for DnD - XDND. I don't know why they (who is they? I don't know much about this standard, could someone enlighten me please on the subject?) waited so long, but it's here, and it works (right?)]

And another thing: who is "you"? I mean, if "you" is an application developer, it does mean having a wide selection of standards to choose from (if you care to learn them). On the other hand, if "you" is the user, then multiple standards is in fact a bad thing, since you have to re-learn doing the same thing many times (I wonder if I could make that sentence a little *more* redundant... oh well), and won't even mention the interoperability problems. The user does not benefit in any way from having multiple DnD/Clipboard/etc standards.

"Otherwise there would have to be some standard out there with enough teeth for Sun to adhere to. A standard with that much teeth in it is detrimental to my freedom."

How so? What makes a standard have "too much teeth"? Does the X standard have to much teeth? If so, why not? This is a really interesting statement that you did not elaborate.

Re:X sucks anyhow

[maxpublic]

It certainly beats "I'm a whining fuck of a loser who thinks he has a right to make demands of people who do this shit for free".

Max

Copy of the message

[benmhall]

Originally found on:

http://www.geocrawler.com/mail/msg.php3?msg_id=8 21 5112&list=2311

FROM: Bill Hayden
DATE: 03/26/2002 06:59:50
SUBJECT: [Atheos-developer] Atheos Fork Announcement

Well, it was not my intent to announce this quite this soon, but given
the recent conversation on the list, I feel that it's best not to wait
any longer.

I forked Atheos about 6 months ago and have been continuously developing
it since that time. I've taken it in some very new directions. I
should warn you that some of you will absolutely love the changes, and
some of you will perhaps feel that the "dream" of Atheos has been sold out.

The new project has had a name since the beginning, but I'm going to
hold off on releasing that until I can verify that the domain names and
trademark are secure. So I'll call it "New Atheos" for the purposes of
this e-mail.

New Atheos has the following major new features:
o Runs on top of the Linux kernel, not the Atheos kernel
o Atheos API has been merged with the BeOS API
o PowerPC support
o gcc 3.0.X compatiblity
o OpenTracker/Deskbar desktop manager

These features give the following benefits:
o Most BeOS programs compile and run with little or no changes
o Linux kernel means that CD-ROM, CD booting and installing, DHCP, etc.
work
o Linux kernel means that driver support is excellent
o Mac users get a piece of the action

Things I haven't even started on:
o Printing
o Media Kit
o Replicants

Existing Atheos programs will need changes to compile. I haven't found
one that took me longer than a few minutes to "convert". Where Atheos
and BeOS use different semantics, I chose the BeOS method.

I am going to hold off on a release until I can successfully compile and
run OpenTracker and Deskbar. They use just about every obsolete and
goofy BeOS construct that exists. I'm most of the way there, though,
especially for Deskbar. Kurt wasn't lying when he said it would be a
nightmare to port them. Of course, I'm doing an "anti-port". When some
BeOS program won't compile, I change the API to match it instead of
changing the program itself.

The first BeOS program that successfully came up was Pulse, and there
was no small amoung of satisfaction to see good ole' Pulse running on my
new system. Nostalgic BeOS users can perhaps understand.

I'm writing in a hurry, so hopefully I haven't forgotten something
important. And no, I can't give a release date yet. I hope to have a
CVS server up at the time of release.

Thanks,
Bill Hayden

Re:Copy of the message

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's how I read this.

"I began to suspect that others would fork this project first if I didn't do it fast enough."

Is that what open source is coming to? Don't we have any respect anymore for the people that innovate? If open source development continues to be a race to see who can stab the other person in the back and take credit for his/her work it WILL NOT improve quality.

The people who say "that's how the GPL is designed to work" really don't have a clue in my book. This seems to be a recent development of the past 2 or 3 years. Linux would never have gotten off the ground had this been the prevailing attitude back in the day. "In my day..." Gosh, I'm sounding old, but here on Slashdot, I feel old.

(Posting anonymously so the darn kidz don't fork my project)

Re:Copy of the message

[Spaceman Spiff II]

Or, is that you you feel Kurt.. ;)

Re:Copy of the message

[CrosseyedPainless]

Here's how I read this:

After evangelizing the hell out of his baby, the developer
has completely lost interest in the project. He has
totally abandoned all the people who became interested
and contributed code, and furthermore,
his ground rules say that no one else can touch his
core code.

One of these people said, "Enough!", took the code as he
has *every* right to, and made his *own* project out of it,
leaving the original project firmly and safely (albeit very
lonely) in the hands of the original developer.

It is somewhat of a misnomer to call this process "forking";
the new project is completely different from the base code.
Different in implementation, different in goals.

You feel old on Slashdot? I remember when anonymity
wasn't just for trolls and crapflooders. You really
don't have a clue in my book.

Re:Copy of the message

[EricLivingston]

Is that what open source is coming to? Don't we have any respect anymore for the people that innovate? If open source development continues to be a race to see who can stab the other person in the back and take credit for his/her work it WILL NOT improve quality.

The people who say "that's how the GPL is designed to work" really don't have a clue in my book.

I think it's extremely sad you feel that way. I feel exactly the opposite - events like this are what breath life into OSS and stand as shining examples of the power and strength of the GPL. That an individual can stand on the shoulders of great achievers and reach even higher ground, fully supported both legally and morally in an environment of innovation and creativity is incredible and should serve as both a warning and an example to companies mired in the morass of IP lawsuits and closed source development.

This is darwinism at its finest - survival of the fittest ideas in operating system design and implementation. What we are witnessing here is pure evolution of thought and concept.

Consider if natural evolution had the "attitude" you seem to espouse - what if the first organism to "figure out" replicating DNA had a lock on it, with "Mother Nature" prohibiting other organisms from taking the idea and running with it because it would "stab the other [protozoa] in the back"? Or worse, because the original organism "closed sourced" it and retained IP rights to it :) We wouldn't be here arguing about it, anyway...

I say - Great Job Bill! This is what the GPL and OSS are all about. Let's see what he puts together and consider it valuable intellectual research and contribution into the world of OSS OSs. May the fittest concepts prevail in the end.

Re:Copy of the message

[Spy Hunter]

Your evaluation of Kurt's behavior is kind of misleading. First of all, he has never evangelized AtheOS in any way, shape, or form. He has always viewed it as his pet project for himself, and if anyone else wanted to use it, fine for them. All he has ever done is make a small website and provide a mailing list. Any other AtheOS-related stuff you see on the web (like Slashdot submissions) is not his doing, he does not publicize it actively. He has not abandoned anyone, he has taken vacations from AtheOS before and will do so in the future as well. He has been working on it slowly for something like 6 or more years now, though, and he's not going to give up completely. No one is stopped from developing while he isn't working, since no one else works on the core system. Everyone who is programming applications is free to continue.

Re:Copy of the message

[dinivin]

Everyone who is programming applications is free to continue.

And everyone else? There are talented programmers who are sitting around, wanting to write sound drivers, afraid to do so since they'd have to be completely rewritten once Kurt gets around to coding up the media server. There's an IDE driver that's sitting in a limbo state, because it requires changes to the core OS. Changes that others are capable of making, but won't make since Kurt doesn't like others to work on the core OS. I'm sure there are other examples.

Frankly, I applaud their initiative, just as I applauded Kurt's when I first heard about Atheos.

Dinivin

Re:Copy of the message

[h4x0r-3l337]

If open source development
continues to be a race to see who can stab the other person in the back and take credit for his/her work it WILL NOT improve quality

I don't see it like that at all. I see someone who took advantage of the rights given to him by the author through the GPL, and bringing an obviously stagnant project (6 months of no development, apparently) back to life, while fully acknowledging the original author's work.

How close will it come to BeOS?

[Ryu2]

Wasn't one of the touted features of BeOS its low latency, single-user kernel optimized for multimedia stuff? Demos had multiple video players all playing smoothly, while 3-D animations occured in other windows.

How well can the Linux kernel deliver such performance?

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[Wesley Felter]

IIRC, the BeOS kernel actually had worse latency on various lmbench benchmarks than Linux. And that was before people started tuning the Linux kernel for low latency.

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[prizog]

Yeah, 'cause lmbench doesn't even run on Be!

http://www.bespecific.com/dialog/bedevtalk/archi ve /970310/0064.html

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[be-fan]

Back when people used BeOS, Linux couldn't deliver that kind of performance. Linux users were trudging along with 200ms latencies and ext2 while BeOS users laughed at them from their journaled-filesystem, ultra-low latency machines. In a short period of time, Linux has come an extremely long way to becoming a kick-ass workstation kernel. In fact, it has even eclipsed BeOS in latency, filesystem, VM, etc. The only place where BeOS still has the advantage is in userspace, where BeOS totally whips GNOME and KDE in terms of speed, ease-of-use, simplicity, consistancy, etc. Apparently, this fork tries to take the best ideas from both sides.

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh the poster is quite right when they talk about BeOS and it's latency issues. It was good back in 2000 and it's generally recognised to have latencies of 2.5ms, but Linux has improved with those two patches to the level of BeOS. In early 2001 BeOS still had 2.5ms latency and Linux had 4ms. Linux surpassed BeOS about six or seven months ago. Remember, BeOS hasn't been developed for two years now. And it hasn't had any significant improvement for three years - at least.

"This is one to three orders of magnitude better than BeOS, MacOS and the Windowses"

Out of the box BeOs is better. As an entire OS/Drivers/Userland BeOS is better. Most Linux latency issues are in software above the kernel.

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[foqn1bo]

So can you open 42 versions of the same .avi movie on your Linux Desktop and play them simultaneously without dropped frames while surfing the internet on a PII450? If not then regardless of the impressive numbers your assessment of comparability of Linux needs adjusting. Not to diss Linux or anything, but I don't think it is time to proclaim Linux has eclipsed Be's technology.

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[TheTomcat]

Not actual benchmarks, but look here:
http://www.linuxdj.com/audio/lad/resourceslatency. php3

More specifically:
http://mambo.peabody.jhu.edu/~karlmac/publications /latency-icmc2001.pdf [PDF]

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[Adnans]

So can you open 42 versions of the same .avi movie on your Linux Desktop and play them simultaneously without dropped frames while surfing the internet on a PII450?

Yes! Unfortunately (or fortunately) I don't have a PII450. BTW, most of those "cool" demos of BeOS running tens of player windows are done with a single avi (worthless to to test the real I/O), very low resolution, and without sound.

Not to diss Linux or anything, but I don't think it is time to proclaim Linux has eclipsed Be's technology.

You're right, that time has come and passed us! I'm playing 9 *different* avi's now (served over 100Mbit NFS btw), 3 mp3's *backwards* (haha, another stupid benchmark thrown in :), with xawtv in a corner, and typing this message in mozilla 0.9.9, and I still have CPU cycles to spare! Linux rocks ;-)

-adnans (ex-BeOS user)

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[cpeterso]

Which Linux kernel are you using? Are you using the low-latency or preemptive-kernel patches discussed earlier this week on Slashdot? That article claimed = 2 ms latency when using both Linux patches. I think that is on par or better than what BeOS promises..

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[Adnans]

Actually, none of those patches at this time. I do have a ll kernel handy for testing, but it has its problems (particularly in the disk I/O area, and VMware breaks with ll for now). Those things were done with "vanilla" kernel 2.4.19-pre3 :-)

My el cheapo trident soundcard can do sustained 1.3ms max latency audio output for hours on end with the ll patches. Not in full duplex mode though, but that's a hardware limitation (read: brokeness).

-adnans

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[dimator]

I went and tried those two patches after reading that report. I must say, I'm impressed. Things like switching between desktops in KDE3 is very snappy, where as before there was a noticable flicker before all the apps on the desktop appeared. And it might be my imagination, but mozilla seems more responsive as well.

I can also play 4 porn AVI's without any problems, where as before I... did I say porn? I meant mp3's... ;)

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[dimator]

from their journaled-filesystem

Hmm.. I was under the impression the only thing journalling was good for was quick recoveries after a system crash/reboot. I didn't know it directly affected filesystem performance...? Maybe I've been hittin the crack pipe too hard.

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[be-fan]

So can you open 42 versions of the same .avi movie on your Linux Desktop and play them simultaneously without dropped frames while surfing the internet on a PII450?
>>>>>>>>>>
It depends ;) Using proper drivers (NVIDIA, which allows the use of XVideo extensions), a lightweight WM (IceWM), and a good player (MPlayer), yes. Under KDE 2.2.2 and Noatun, no. It's all in the userspace! That's why these BeOS on Linux things are so great!

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[be-fan]

In general, journaled filesystems tend to have two advantages:

1) They tend to be more modern as a whole because journaling became popular comparatively recently. BFS (BeOS filesystem) was a very fast, modern filesystem, and journaling (or some form of crash-protection) is one of those checklist features modern filesystems are expected to have that aren't present in older filesystems like ext2.

2) They allow the use of asynchronus metadata writes. While ext2 tended to care little about crash protection and did asynchronus metadata writes without crash protection, most systems (like BSD) used (slow) synchronus writes for metadata.

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, that time has come and passed us! I'm playing 9 *different* avi's now (served over 100Mbit NFS btw), 3 mp3's *backwards* (haha, another stupid benchmark thrown in :), with xawtv in a corner, and typing this message in mozilla 0.9.9, and I still have CPU cycles to spare! Linux rocks ;-)

Stop, you're scaring my Windows partition.

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[tswinzig]

BTW, most of those "cool" demos of BeOS running tens of player windows are done with a single avi (worthless to to test the real I/O), very low resolution, and without sound.

1. Bullshit.
2. The demos were most popular 3-4 years ago, and did not have the benefit of running on our much faster hardware now, btw.

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[themassiah]

Let's figure developers into that. How many developers does linux have? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions?

How many does BeOS have? 1.

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[SmittyTheBold]

Just to be fair, BeTV rocked sooo much more than pretty much any TV player I have ever seen, and there have been apps to play MP3s backwards on Be for ~3 years now.

Thank you, come again.

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[h4x0r-3l337]

it's generally recognised to have latencies of 2.5ms

You're off by a factor of 10. As you can read in this interview, the scheduling latency in BeOS was around 250 microseconds back in july 1999, when a Pentium III 550 was the fastest Pentium CPU you could get. I'm pretty sure latency didn't get 10 times worse since then, in fact I'd be suprised if wasn't much better on current hardware.

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[h4x0r-3l337]

Let's figure developers into that. How many developers does linux have? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions?

Hundreds. At most. It may have millions of users (although even that is highly debatable), but the number of people who actually write software for it (let alone contribute to linux itself) is a very small percentage of that. Note: recompiling your own kernel does not make you a developer :)

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[otomo_1001]

Just so you guys know, this is the guy who wrote BeMP. (Amp for BeOS, think WinAMP)

Side-note: Thanks Andy for the awesome BeMP. I used that mp3 player more than I can remember. The buttons got me. I have a thing for the look of BeOS buttons, what can I say? And thanks for giving me the BeMP R4 source, I learned alot about BeOS programming from that.

I ported the thing to R5 a loooong time ago. (last time I checked there were still ~400 warnings and a cast bug that made the playlist useless in mp3's encoded with more than 128bps unless your songs really are 6534453435.0 seconds long :D ) I still have the source code lying around on one of my backups. I have to say though, some of the code was nasty. I rewrote a good portion of it before I gave up and created my own personal BeMP, then promptly stopped using BeOS.

And yes BeOS was awesome. It also sucked for hardware support. Have fun getting *ANY* support now. If anyone wants to fight over which os is better here or there, I can break out my old K6-2 350 and we can have a battle royale on latency and what-not. But it doesn't really matter does it?

Anyway, enough rambling.

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[mmusn]

The only place where BeOS still has the advantage is in userspace, where BeOS totally whips GNOME and KDE in terms of speed, ease-of-use, simplicity, consistancy, etc. Apparently, this fork tries to take the best ideas from both sides.

Can you be more specific? What interesting ideas does BeOS actually contribute? When I looked at the documentation, I didn't see anything other than a fairly run-of-the-mill C++-based toolkit.

Merely being fast, low latency, and simple isn't exactly a new idea, and it isn't very hard for a system that is only a few years old. X11 has been up against plenty of fast, low latency, and simple GUIs before, and it has always come out ahead, by user choice.

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[Adnans]

Side-note: Thanks Andy for the awesome BeMP. I used that mp3 player more than I can remember

Me too! *g* Great to hear that it was useful to other folks too!!

I have to say though, some of the code was nasty.

BeMP was actually my first (and last) BeOS GUI app so the code was basically a collection of hacks, experiments and discoveries all massaged in such a way that it still compiled :)

I rewrote a good portion of it before I gave up and created my own personal BeMP, then promptly stopped using BeOS.

I actually stopped using BeOS in the R4 days :(

Thanks for the nostalgia trip!

-adnans

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[FooBarWidget]

42 versions of the same .avi

I don't understand this... how in the world is it even possible to play 42 avis simultanously?
Let's assume we're playing 24 DivX files (30 fps, 800 kbps) here.
I can barely play 1 file on a Pentium 233 MMX, on Windows, with some framedrops.
So on a Pentium 450 it takes about 50% CPU to play that file (on Windows).
2 files take 100% CPU in theory.

Now you're saying it's possible to play 42 AVIs on a Pentium 450 without framedrops?
How is that even possible? And if that's possible why do we need faster CPUs at all?

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[fpu]

Are these patches available for kernels later than 2.4.0? I did find Mingo's page, and various FAQs/HOWTOs on the subject, but most of them stop at the 2.4.0 series. The thought of a responsive Mozilla really makes my mouth go wet...

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[Adnans]

It depends ;) Using proper drivers (NVIDIA, which allows the use of XVideo extensions)

Unfortunately the Xv extension only allows one application to open a port at a time, so only the first movie will benefit from Xv hardware scaling for example. However, this is a hardware limitation and not X's fault.

-adnans

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[h4x0r-3l337]

The GNOME team page lists 89 developers. Some of those are "big names" that are also working on other projects, so there's already some overlap there. You might be able to list close to a thousand developers, but I doubt it'll be much higher.

Re:How close will it come to BeOS?

[dimator]

I believe Mingo's patches are out of date now (or did I read somewhere that they've been taken over by Andrew Morton?) Either way, Andrew's page has current patches:

http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/schedlat.html#do wnloads

As for preempt, there's:

http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml/pree mpt-kernel/v2.4/

I used preempt-kernel-rml-2.4.18-2.patch, and 2.4.18-rc1-low-latency.patch with kernel 2.4.18.

(I was willing to go all adventurous and throw in the O(1) scheduler too, but that didn't patch without errors so I skipped it.)

Good hacking.

If BeOS gets enough development support, then

[HanzoSan]

Forget about linux on the desktop, my votes going to BeOS.

They got rid of X, bold but great move

I hope the Hurd GNU OS doesnt get stuck using X

Re:If BeOS gets enough development support, then

[mlk]

> Forget about linux on the desktop, my votes going to BeOS.
This _IS_ Linux "for the desktop".
Linux == kernal
BeOS == dead
this == OpenSource port of BeOS API's on Linux kernal, imo Linux for the desktop.

At this rate the BeOS APIs could become the POSIX for advanced "extras" like GUI, node watching etc, which would be great! IF properly maintained.

mlk

new name!

[Arctic Fox]

that's GnuBe/Linux to you sir....

Re:new name!

[His name cannot be s]

GnuBe...

is that Guh-noo-bee

or is the 'g' silent:
NewBie?

AAAAAGH! That's just wrong!

"What are you Running"....

"Oh I'm a newbie!"

Yikes!

Re:new name!

[King of the World]

I like it.

Re:new name!

[mikeage]

that's GnuBe/Linux to you sir....

Funny, I thought Newbie/Linux was called Mandrake :)

Re:new name!

[kybernator]

should be BeAtOS, or GNU/BeAtOS for rms and the 5 HURD-developers

Re:new name!

[extrasolar]

Sure. We should rename all operating systems "Linux".

Re:new name!

[h4x0r-3l337]

How about: "BeAtCH" ?
(we'll figure out later what the 'CH' stands for)

So why call it New Atheos?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me it would be more appropriate to call it BtheOS.

But, hey, it's his fork, he can call it Fred if he wants to.

BeOS the Pheonix?

[extrasolar]

A long time ago, I wrote an article called "The Rise and Fall of OS Empires". It concluded on how with free software, the software lives on beyond its environment. Underlying the article, though very subtle, was an argument against the BeOS operating system. I've always been critical of any proprietary operating system since the control of the software always rests with the developer.

Now first, a minor argument before I continue on. Names are like symbols in that they stand for something. So when people think of BeOS they think of a great many things, mostly good. But with software, these kinds of symbols aren't very useful and often serve to confuse things. To say that BeOS has come back from the dead is a definite misconception.

Any software is a mix of algorithms and technologies--each which are more general than the code itself. So to reintroduce these things in another piece of software can be said to in a sense recreate that software.

This new AtheOS, from my perspective, is welcome. Hopefully this software will provide interesting technologies which can be implemented in other software.

Hopefully BeOS users and developers are more aware of the risks present in proprietary software. I'd hate to see the same mistake being made a again.

Kudos.

Let's port Gnome and KDE to the GUI

[discipledaniel]

This has the potential to be the X replacement tons of people have wanted. If we port Gtk(there was an initial BeOS port before) and Qt to the new GUI we get our apps. I for one would love it. I would also like to look into getting a VNC server working on it so I could have some cross platform network transparency. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's see what this looks like when it's released.

Daniel

Re:Let's port Gnome and KDE to the GUI

[Wesley Felter]

If you just want an X replacement that supports Gtk and Qt, check out DirectFB.

Re:Let's port Gnome and KDE to the GUI

[discipledaniel]

As far as I understand, DirectFB is much more for embedded systems and it's design is lacking for workstation replacement. But I do admit I don't know much about it.

Daniel

Re:Let's port Gnome and KDE to the GUI

[__past__]

And, of course, Berlin, which happens to rock hard.

Re:Let's port Gnome and KDE to the GUI

[abigor]

KDE's DCOP relies on ICE, which is an X protocol. There's more to do than just port Qt.

Re:Let's port Gnome and KDE to the GUI

[Z4rd0Z]

I don't see how Berlin is really a replacement for X. It does not have any low level drivers, but instead relies on other consoles such as DirectFB, or even X to run. It would probably take at least five years at the pace development is going to even have something useful.

BZZZZZT!

[tlhf]

I can find absolutely no evidence that LMBench was even ported to BeOS, let alone that it shew that it was slower.

Look for yourself

.

tlhf
xxx
woop!

Re:I'm glad

[SirRichardPumpaloaf]

X can do all of the things you mentioned via extensions like Xrender. Software needs to be written to use these extensions, but it's certainly easier to do that than to rewrite everything for a completely new windowing system. Like it or not (I personally like it) we're stuck with X for the foreseeable future.

Re:I'm glad

[King of the World]

Prove it.

(against the latest XFree)

speak for yourself

[browser_war_pow]

I'd rather have FrankensteinBeOS than deadBeOS R5 that can't run on my new hardware. Perhaps you should help him rather than just bitch about it being a patchwork of different projects

Re:speak for yourself

[BlueGecko]

He's not just bitching; he's working on OpenBeOS, which is architecturally far closer to BeOS than this bastard child of AtheOS, Linux and Be. By your argument, all of the GNOME people should have quit "bitching" and joined KDE. OBOS and this Linux-AtheOS-Be hybrid have very different goals (a true clone of BeOS including the architecture vs. pretty much just the user experience), and they will suit very different groups of people (OBOS will hopefully be practical for very heavy media processing, whereas this will be more suited to areas where Linux already excels). Personally, while I view this as a nice stepping stone, I am looking forward to OpenBeOS very eagerly.

Re:speak for yourself

[talonyx]

Yes, all of the gnome people SHOULD have quit bitching and joined KDE. This ceaseless reduplication of efforts hurts the community and damages the prospects of an open-source system ever evolving real standards or gaining mass-market mindshare.

Re:speak for yourself

[johnnyb]

Yes, all of the gnome people SHOULD have quit bitching and joined KDE. This ceaseless reduplication of efforts hurts the community and damages the prospects of an open-source system ever evolving real standards or gaining mass-market mindshare.

***

I've always preferred GNOME. There are many, many reasons to prefer each over the other. So why only have one?

Re:speak for yourself

[tunah]

Sorry, but it _has_ to be the other way round. KDE does not begin with G and thus is unsuitable for use on GNU G/ GLinux. The upcoming GNU/GNOME G.0 must be gthe standard gdesktop. Yours sincerely, GRMS

Re:speak for yourself

[Arandir]

And I prefer KDE. That last thing we need is some bonehead telling you to KDE or me to use Gnome. I love the choice. But some people are truly frightened by freedom.

Re:speak for yourself

[drimmeeper]

And all the X fans should consider the BeOS enviroment. I have used both KDE and Gnome and think that they make a decent intermediate step to the future; they are not however the future because they rely so much on X. I use xf86 on FreeBSD and triple boot to BeOS and AtheOS on a daily basis. I long for the responsive gui of BeOS whenever I run X. WindowMaker is nice but I think Be's elegant design is better. I see this AtheBeNux fork as a great way for the Linux community to experience a better windowing system than X.

Shouldn't there be...

[be-fan]

A "Like OSNews except slower on the uptake" department?

Re:'Way ahead'?~

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends on how you define 'way ahead.'

People like me who really like BeOS admire the entire structure of the operating system, from top to bottom. I have zero interest in running FrankensteinBeOS, which is what this sounds like. Therefore I am content to work on the OpenBeOS project, which may be 'way behind', but should have a nicer outcome (for people who like BeOS). The project is coming together quite nicely for something so young.

Yes, but there's something to be said for taking the middle road, too. It may be true BeOS was a radical departure as opposed to Linux's adherence to legacy POSIX. But I suspect this new fusion may have more success as a desktop OS than either Linux or BeOS had alone. While not as radical a departure as Be, it is still a very significant departure for Unix/Linux. As nice as Be was, commercialy it went over like a lead balloon. Perhaps a more incremental approach to innovation will have more success.

This is the beauty of open source - you can mix and match as you please, and the cream rises to the top. And now that one of the nicest desktops has migrated over to one of the most advanced (and popular) kernels, I expect to see some interesting developments going forward.

[OT] Re:I'm glad

[little_fluffy_clouds]

(The story of a demented bread boffer)
(Cucumber pud annexed to a fine whole-wheat loaf)

Sheik Yerbouti has to be one of my favourite Zappa Albums :)

Re:[OT] Re:I'm glad

[SirRichardPumpaloaf]

I'm glad there's a least one Slashdotter with taste. With all of the lame buttsex jokes around here you'd think BHAFA would be practically the trolls' theme song...

Garage sale this weekend

[t0qer]

My neighborhood is having a block sale this weekend. In my garage there is 10 pentium PC's with memory ranging from 24-64 megs and the processors from 60mhz to 233mhz. I was going to just toss them in a landfill to make some space.

I thought of trying to sell them, but windows is way overbloated to run effectively on any of these beasts. I happened across a BE cd that I bought last year and thought I would try it. To my amazement these machines run REALLY nice!

I haven't tried AtheO/S yet, but I plan to give it a spin tonight.

Re:Garage sale this weekend

[Anonymous Coward]

>I was going to just toss them in a landfill to make some space.

Now why would you do that? Give 'em to the neighborhood kids or donate them to your area high school or voactional-technical school. Even if they can't run Windows they can't still be very useful. They can be used for teaching computer troubleshooting/repair or for showing young kids the internals of a machine. Heck, I bet there are even some charity orgaizations or churches or seniors groups that could use them as simple email stations or for keeping their accounting info on.

A computer remains useful for a really long time even after it's considered obsolete for today's applications. Remember most people who've never had a PC or have limited access to one would be satisfied even if it only ran Win 95 and had a 28.8 modem.

--Paul

Re:Garage sale this weekend

[dvdeug]

You had 10 Pentium class PC's, and all you could think of was to throw them away? Linux will run fine on them, as will Window95. I'd give you $20-40 for one, and I know a number of friends who probably would too. There are a number of charities that would take, and a lot of computer geeks that might like a new box to play with. Put up signs around the local college campus. Just don't fill our landfiles with stuff that still has life left!

Re:Garage sale this weekend

[/dev/trash]

Well as I post his you're comment was rated a '1'.
And lay off Tom Ridge, he's gonna be our next President.

Re:Garage sale this weekend

[haggar]

Back in 1995 when Win95 came out, I had a 486/33 MHz with 4 MB RAM. And a 81 MB drive. Anyway, nobody thought I can run Win95 on such hardware. Well, I succeeded. I had no problems with the installation, and the interface was reasonably fast, but all I could run on it was some gfx viewer and Wordpad.

Mind you, this was Win95 "OSR 1". OSR 2 got more bloated, and Win98, which I am using nowadays on a laptop, is horribly slow in comparison.

BTW, I had another attempt at impossible Windows installations, the same year: I installed Windows NT workstation 3.51 on a 486/66 MHz with 8 MB RAM. Boy was that SLOW! But it worked.

very impressive

[minus_273]

i think getting rid of x is a good an logical step. There is no reason for a normal desktop user to have all the features that X provides.
it would result in a serious performance infrease. i think Apple got it right when they implemented OSX without the X windows part. Linux shoudl follow that model.

Re:very impressive

[SIGFPE]

Unfortunately, though not using X11 should result in a major performance increase, Aqua isn't any better. Even viewing pdfs (which MacOS X renders natively) is painfully slow. Try resizing a window under MacOS X next time you're by one and see how it performs.

Aqua is nice. But it's certainly not fast.

Re:very impressive

[SmittyTheBold]

Ther are two real reasons Aqua is like that: drivers and transparency.

Current drivers don't accelerate all the hardware can do, and there are still parts of Quartz that are really beyond acceleration with current hardware. After driver writers really understand the problem before them, Aqua and OS X should get a lot faster.

The massive amount of transparency is also a big CPU killer. Right now, the CPU has to render upwards of 20 layers of transparent 2D much of the time. That's an awful lot of alphas to handle.

Re:very impressive

[Jeremi]

Aqua is nice. But it's certainly not fast

Keep in mind that Aqua is the all-singing, all-dancing, vectorized, resolution-independent, Altivec-blasting, next-generation UI engine. As such, it's doing a lot more work that your standard blit-the-pixels window manager. Whether you think it's worth it to do things at a higher level like this, is up to you; in my opinion, it is, or will be in a few months. If you've got a 5GHz G5 sitting in your Mac, you might as well give it some work to do....

Re:very impressive

[SIGFPE]

I'm hoping that they pull their fingers out and get down to work on the optimisation. I hope they haven't got the transparency routines running the whole time when I have no transparency anywhere on the screen. But anyway...the problem must be more fundamental: a slow PC can render pdf files much faster. Rendering PDF files requires many of the fancy features that Quartz supports. And this doesn't use PC hardware (as far as I know). As far as I can see the Quartz renderer must simply be badly written.

Re:very impressive

[SmittyTheBold]

I think a lot of it isn't badly written, it's just got a huge emphasis on quality rather than quantity.

Pretty much everything in OS X is shaded and antialiased, where Acrobat Reader doesn't do a lot of the hard work by default.

no

[HanzoSan]

This isnt GNU Linux, this is Beos Linux, its therefore not the same OS anymore, because the official Linux OS ia vastly diffrent and they arent compatible.

This is like saying GNU HURD is the same as GNU Linux.

Re:no

[mlk]

I did not say GNU/Linux, I said Linux, i.e. the kernel.

Linux is just the kernel.

As to "GNU HURD is the same as GNU LINUX", there is the GNU System, which currently uses Linux, but can use HURD. The GNU System (Of which the most popular version of is GNU/Linux) is a GNU Kernel, plus the GNU tools (GNU/ls, GNU/make etc), the X windowing system and TeX (plus some other stuff).
This is why Stallman etc insists on calling Linux "GNU/Linux"; he is on about the complete system, not just the Linux kernel.
So GNU HURD and GNU Linux are the same system, it's just the GNU system does not depend any one kernel.

If this is a new OS really depends on what you consider "an OS", it will use the Linux kernel, and the GNU tool set, that is a BIG old chunk of the GNU System, but then it does not use X (woot, note to none-X-bashers I like X, in it's place;) so it's not a GNU System.

So, in conclusion it IS Linux, but not (as you rightly said) GNU/Linux, and GNU/Linux, while not the same as GNU/HURD are both GNU System, which I did not clam this new system to be.

Mlk (posting a very long /. post!)

Re:no

[HanzoSan]

Linux is not an official part of the GNU system, is Linux even GPL?

And just having a version of the Linux kernel does not make your OS Linux. It makes your os Linux based just likee Linux is not unix, but unix based.

Re:no

[mlk]

> Linux is not an official part of the GNU system,

Yes it is

> is Linux even GPL?

Yes, very much so.

> And just having a version of the Linux kernel does not make your OS Linux.
If using the LINUX KERNAL does not make you OS a LINUX BASED OS (which is what I've typed) WHAT DOES?

EXACTLY!!!

[HanzoSan]

The desktop users dont care about network transparency. DESKTOP Linux = Mandrake, Lycoris, etc etc, the Linux for people like you, Debian Linux, Redhat Linux, Slackware.

Face it, most ordinary users, in fact i'd say most linux users currently, dont care about that stuff, the corperate users and hackers are the only ones wo care.

Theres more mandrake users than theres debian and slackware users combined.

Redhat outnumbers everyone but redhats not a desktop linux.

Re:EXACTLY!!!

[Sunda666]

Dude, since Linux has that wonderful feature called VT (Virtual Terminal), you don't need to get rid of anything.

You can run some X servers, some consoles, some SVGALIB apps, and probably some DIRECTFB stuff to, all at once.

And please, realize this: X is GREAT. It may be slower that direct hadware access, but the newer versions seem to have addressed this in a pretty elegant way with the DRI. Network transparency kicks ass, and I would probably stop using computers if I suddenly was deprived of it. It is essential, only windoze lusers think it is useless.

Give it a try, its pretty addictive.

Re:EXACTLY!!!

[uchian]

Wha??? EVERYONE cares about network transparency these days! (even if they don't realise that they do)

I hardly know any windows users nowadays that don't access their email through a web interface, so they can access it from any computer they happen to be on. Outlook Exchange is the next thing up, which true - is still a corporate thing at the moment.

But think - how long will it be before your wordprocessor is running on a remote machine and you just have a dumb terminal? What would be the advantage of this? Well it doesn't take much hardware to run a dumb terminal, compared to having to carry around a hard disk, cdrom, lots of memory, etc. etc. etc

And the extension to this is distributed computing - I mean true distributed computing, where your wordprocessor uses other peoples run time if it needs it, and theirs does likewise. Eventually you end up with the idea of one _massive_ computer, distributed around the world so that it never goes down in one go, which everyone connects to using dumb terminals.

Network transparency is the future, for these and for numerous other reasons (control your fridge from your computer! Yay!)

In the same way that "Only a geek sends text messages & emailswas 5/10 years ago, the same is happening now with network transparent computing.

We can't help it if we are ahead of fashion ;-)

Re:EXACTLY!!!

[WowTIP]

Well, I have used Amiga, BeOS, Linux and Windows. I can not say that I missed X in any of the operative systems that did not have it.

In my experience Linux feels a lot slower than the other OS:es, independent of what graphical enviroments you are running.

Re:EXACTLY!!!

[WowTIP]

how long will it be before your wordprocessor is running on a remote machine and you just have a dumb terminal?

Probably a very long time, imho. I have heard this buzz about thin clients and "controlling the fridge from your computer" since the early 90's. Still I have not seen anyone using it or even wanting to use it.

Face it: People like their hardware too much. You will not run UT/Q3/whatever anywhere near as good on a client as on a separate computer. And what about the fridge were you thinking about controlling from the computer? The temperature? While that probably was an example, why would you need network transparency to control any hardware in your home?

Re:EXACTLY!!!

[HanzoSan]

DRI? Ok use DIR to render the GUI.

Oh right, its not fast enough, you cant.

Face it, DRI, and all of these exentions cannot save X, its almost as bad as Netscape was in its final days, you can only extend a broken program so much before its so complicated that its utterly useless.

The X extentions are so damn complicated that no ones using them, KDE isnt using Xrender, Gnome isnt using Xrender, hell even Enlightenment isnt using Xrender, the only people who seem to be able to make Xrender work, are the programmers working on it.

NO where else have I seen alpha channeling in linux than from keith packard the creator of the Xrender extention.

What good is an overly complicated undocumented hard to use API on top of a bloated badly designed implementation of X?

Re:EXACTLY!!!

[HanzoSan]

Most windows users are just checking their email, surfing the web, playing games and chatting.

You are talking about the corperate world, which i personally dont give a damn about, I'm concered with the DESKTOP for USERS.

When X provides an OSX quality interface, thats when I'll believe all the BS about the extentions and X being saved.

Its almost as silly as gnutella, sure you can extend a broken program, but it only makes that broken program more and more complicated until it gets to the point where no one can use the extentions except the people who wrote them (Xrender)
(Microsofts undocumented API features)
etc

Re:EXACTLY!!!

[HanzoSan]

Linux cant even do alpha channeling, its on Windows98 level!!!!! How do you expect it to somehow all of the sudden have distributed computing like you claim

I mean sure its possible but i dont see anyone rushing to use linux when it cant compete with OSX.

OSX is the unix desktop of choice, Even I'd be using OSX if i could afford a mac

Why should I use X? OSX is better, Berlin is better, hell WindowsXP is better

X just is stuck in the past, playing catch up via extentions will only make it slower, more bloated, and more complicated

I say its time to scrap X and start over while you still can.

Re:EXACTLY!!!

[xmalenko]

how long will it be before your wordprocessor is running on a remote machine and you just have a dumb terminal?

-9 years ago actually, and thensome. A computer lab used by the English department in my old high school used a system just like that. There was one server, a whopping 486, and everyone used a word processor remotley (the name escapes me, but it made Word Perfect 5.1 look modern). The terminals were all old cheap 8088's with nice burnt-in monochrome monitors, and it all ran on an Novell network. And it was fast and worked great, except for one time I was at the second node and knocked out the network cable and everyone mysterously froze ;)

When I look at labs now, with all thier fancy P4's at every station, it almost makes me cringe. All that power gone to waste for no more than Word. It's a sin I tell ya!

Re:EXACTLY!!!

[1010011010]

Gnome, KDE and Enlightenment all use XRender.

Re:EXACTLY!!!

[BRTB]

was that WordStar possibly? Ah for the good old days... fit the OS (DOS 4.01), word processor and spreadsheet (Lotus 1-2-3 of course) all stored on the 5.25" full-height 10MB hard drive with plenty of room to spare for the text games =]

Re:EXACTLY!!!

[BRTB]

ok, that'll teach me to post at 2 in the morning. wrong parent and forgot to turn the +1 off. doh! you can go ahead and mod me down for both of these, lol ;)

Linux users are hackers. . .

[Bastian]

Out in the general populace, "programmer network admin things" might be something no-one cares about.

But this is the Linux community. Honestly, how much of the Linux user community doesn't fit the "programmer/network admin" description? 1-2%, maybe?

Every single Linux user at my school is a heavy user of X's network transparency features, and I doubt my school is all that abnormal.

Getting rid of X, no. Fork of the whole system (X version, noX version), maybe. Redesign of X to include both directfb and network transparency? great idea!

No! No! OpenBeos! OpenBeos!

[foqn1bo]

I appreciate what this guy is doing, but seriously folks, why the hell is everybody so intent on making some sort of BE/Linux hybrid? I support OpenBeos for the following very good reasons:

1) Has over 100 developers now
2) Intent on rewriting original Be api so that compile and eventual binary compatibility is attained
3) Uses an alternate liscense to GPL so that open source is maintained without frightening away commercial developers due to fear of *GPL Contamination*
4) Already has contacts with commercial developers and distributors (albeit kept well under wrap right now)
5) Misc. Beos fans don't want to touch Gnome/KDE with a ten foot pole, and I know it would be way too tempting to port them for application compatibility purposes. Beos booted on my PII400 in 15 seconds, and was fast as hell. Would a BE/Linux combo keep Beos' vastly ease of use and configuration, or would it inherit Linux's most dreaded characteristics?

I'm rambling like a rabbit with the flu. But these are some valid concerns. Check out OpenBeos right now and sign up if you have the time and skills.

Re:No! No! OpenBeos! OpenBeos!

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Because it'll be done a lot fater than openbeos would.

2. Because some people actually like apps. This is what kept on people from NOT using BeOS in the first place.

3. Because linux has much better hardware support (including closed-src drivers), than openbeos would ever have, unless it become popular fast.

Re:No! No! OpenBeos! OpenBeos!

[haggar]

I agree with number 3. '
I don't agree with number 1, because this si something you can't tell at this point of the projects, but I know that OpenBeOS is quite a bit far ahead with a precise implementation of variou API kits. So, this point is very much open to debate. Give it some time, and then we'll speak again.
Number 2.: BeOS has a smaller number of applications than Linux, and yet it has a greater number of applications that I can and like to actually use. It has media players that are nice and easy to use, it has a few USABLE MIDI sequencers, it has many other media-related applications that are really useful. I don't really miss the applications existing on Linux, except for JDK and FreeCIV. That's really all I miss from Linux in BeOS. I think this point is also debatable.

But heck, this is /., this is for debates, I don't mind reading different opinions.

Re:No! No! OpenBeos! OpenBeos!

[Adhoc]

A couple of reasons.

1. Drivers.
2. Stable (mostly) underpinnings, so one can concentrate on porting user and developer visible things (Programs and APIs)
3. Drivers
4. Different interests. Some people just aren't interested in kernel developement. This gives them a base to work off.
5. Did I mention drivers? :)

Seriously, all your points are valid, but what you want to work on depends on your interests and your goals.

I won't even try the 'competition is healthy' argument here. This isn't about competition. It's about driving the technology with one's passions towards one's goals. I'll be interested to see where both side end up. After all I love linux, but X seems stagnant and sucky. Hey, if Gosling says it, (see interview on javaworld.com), it must be true.

I've rambled enough.
cheers,
AdHoc

Re:No! No! OpenBeos! OpenBeos!

[trumpetplayer]

I don't care this kind of benchmarks IF I STILL CAN'T USE THE OS. I don't give a shit for a car going from 0 to 100 in 2 secs if nobody is selling the special fuel it needs to run.

If Linux, like Be, had no support for any of my hardware (network card, graphics card, CD-WR, sound card) it would also boot in 15 secs in my machine.

For example, some years ago I switched from OS/2 (awesome) to Windows 3.1 (crap) because of this. I was more or less "forced" by my hardware to do this switch.

Re:No! No! OpenBeos! OpenBeos!

[drimmeeper]

BeOS runs all of my hardware just fine! No component of my rig is more than 1 1/2 years old. I have a GeForce2 for video, a SB 128 sound card, and a realtek nic. The only problem I have had is the flaky sound card(has the same problem relating to my motherboard in all OSes including windows, linux, *bsd) Granted, although BeOS has far less supported hardware than linux, Be made sure that it supported a major cross section of PC owners. I boot FreeBSD, Linux and BeOS from the same machine(all hardware optimised) and Be definitly boots faster and utilizes ALL of my hardware. Yes, I admit, I USE THIRD PARTY DRIVERS! So what does that mean, that I'm inferior just because I use a newer OS that requires me to manually load software to get everything to run? BTW drivers are still being developed for Be. Do you realise how many Win/DOS users said the same things about hardware compatibility in Linux' youth?

Re:No! No! OpenBeos! OpenBeos!

[trumpetplayer]

You are right, and I fully agree. Choice is good and _if the software is free_, then you will have your drivers sooner or later. This is in fact what Linux has demonstrated, and this is what makes this story different from the one I first mentioned, that of OS/2 and Windows 3.1 (both closed software).

Re:Way cool

[rapidweather]

Looking at this, I note the criticism of X11. I have always wondered why Netscape Communicator looks and works better in Windows 3.1, 95 than in Redhat or Mandrake. Is is X11 overall, and it's handling of the fonts? If so, then the Bill Hayden project is something that needs doing, so some of us can perhaps one day get an installation cd of his work, and try it out on some of the older machines (some say BeOS won't work on the newer ones). I have Redhat 6.1 on this souped-up PS/1, (25 mhz bus), with 32 mb ram, and evergreen 486 upgrade processor. It works very well, but not nearly as well as the Windows 95 I have in the other partition (I'm using Windows 95 now, and Communicator 4.78). Would appreciate some thoughts on on the subject of an eventual release, and it's ability to run on something like an AMD K6-2, for instance.

X works, but not everoyne follows standards

[swv3752]

I know you are a troll, but I'll bite.

On My Bro-in-law's 300mhz K6-2, KDE2 and GNOME 1.4 ran fine. Win2k was a bit of a bear though. On my 366 Celery Notebook, MDK 8.2 runs like the wind. Win98 was a dog on the same notebook. The only problem with the notebook is the slow 6gig HDD.

How is X the problem, when it runs fine on my Agenda VR3? This is a 66mhz MIPS, 16mb Flash, 8mb RAM machine. If there is acceptable performance for a PDA, X is not the bottleneck for faster machines.

Re:X works, but not everoyne follows standards

[HanzoSan]

KDE is faster than Win98, but its slower than Win2k.

Its faster than XP, but XP has more special effects.

Win98 is sslow as hell, and crashes, KDE crashes once in a great while and its about the same speed, maybe alittle bit faster at very specific things.

2k is faster than KDE at everything.

KDE uses less than than all of these versions of windows, its slow because of X, not because of KDEs design, not because of bloat, because of X.

Re:X works, but not everoyne follows standards

[be-fan]

Don't be daft. Win2K is a good deal faster than Win98 in the UI department (and after service pack 2, in the gaming department as well)! Moving from the 16/32 bit mess that is Win98 to the pure 32bit code of WinNT made a big difference.

Wow.

[Jslick]

This topic got me back into BeOS in a big way. Sadly I only have R4.5 and the personal edition of 5. Does anyone know where I can register to get a Pro copy of 5 seein as how Be is bust? I forgot how much I love that lil dog tracker, and pulse is hella sweet w/ the dual pentiums. Kinda like back in the days of the BeBox w/ front panel LED's that displayed processor usage. Thanks in advance. J.

Re:Wow.

[Jslick]

because 5 PE installs to a limited 500 meg partition, which isn't enough to really run a decent swap file. correct me if im wrong or missing something. I don't have a lot of 5 knowledge.

Re:Wow.

[haggar]

Where have you been, sleeping under a rock for eons? Don't you know how easy it is to install PE in it's own partition of any size you like?
http://www.betips.net/chunga.php?ID=495
Or even put it in a virtual filesystem of any size you like!
http://www.betips.net/chunga.php?ID=510

For heaven's sake, even the birds on the trees are singing it, these tips have been out for ages, and in every BeOS-related thread on Slashdot they were mentioned at least 3 times.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Perfectly good!

[dmaxwell]

A machine of that class serves as my mp3 jukebox/cablemodem firewall (I know...I know...but all of this stuff is in my living room and two pcs next to the desk is quite geeky enough......so I'll just have to do without a proper DMZ). For that matter, the guts from some of them could be reworked into a nice audio component for your stereo system. One could transparently handle mp3, ogg, various tracker modules, midi whatever. A cheap video card with TV out and and IR transciever would even give proper stereo component control over the device...with visualization going to the TV even.

Configure them properly and give em away if you have to. Mine had a home once I accumulated enough spare parts to put it together. The point is these machines aren't trash by any means. Oh well, I'm glad you found a use for them after all.

Xis is not the bottleneck for speed

[swv3752]

X runs fine on my Agenda VR3. If it gives decent performance on a 8meg, 66mhz PDA, then do you really think it is slowing down your Desktop? If properly supported Video cards (Rage128 or Nvidia's) give equal or better fps in Linux over Windows.

I copy cd's, download large files via ftp, play mp3's, and play games at the same time on my Linux box. I don't see latency as a big thing on Linux.

final scratch

[skyhuv]

final scratch runs on beos if im not mistaken... so now can we run it on linux? How bout a mac os x port for the real playaz :)

Re:final scratch

[Adnans]

FinalScratch runs on Linux now, since BeOS is pretty much dead. At least that's what I heard.

You can simulate a cheap Finalscratch by using AlsaPlayer and feeding the speed parameter via an external program, using libalsaplayer. Some folks are already doing this in a lab. There's this rumour that FinalScratch is using some bits of AlsaPlayer (plugins), have to check if this is really true ;)

-adnans

A Linux with Be's GUI would be great

[horse]

...since the biggest weakness in Linux as a desktop is X and its window managers. (KDE has made the situation much better, but.)

An open BeOS in top of the Linux kernel sounds terrific.

I've never missed X

[horse]

and I've used Windows, BeOS, and MacOS (9 & 10), as well as various Linuxes and Unixes.

X is fine for when you need it. I seldom need it, and I could run it as a separate app (inside a real windowing system) when I do. Anyhow, these days everything is migrating to the browser. X's approach is obsolete.

I'd choose fragmentation over X

[horse]

I'd rather fragment and have something better. Sorry, I've been using X for years. I still think it sucks.

GnuBe-doobie-do

[horse]

Just had to add that... ;-)

this sounds cool

[jml]

Can we call it Finux?

Re:Excellent - and in the interim...

[tswinzig]

... all those people working on OpenBeOS or AtheOS can comfortably do so within an environment that more closely resembles their ultimate goal.

Sounds cool to me. All those AtheOS and OpenBeOS developers can soon use FrankensteinBeOS as their development platform.

For most aspects of OBOS development, this is not true. FrankensteinBeOS is not binary compatible with BeOS/OpenBeOS, which is pretty useful when I go to compile my BeOS/OpenBeOS project! Just because it LOOKS like BeOS doesn't mean we can use it for development. Those of us working on OBOS usually work in BeOS R5 (until such time as we can work within OBOS of course :).

Maybe the low-level guys for OBOS would like to use this new variant, though.

Good and Bad...

[sethadam1]

As a former Be fanatic (and to the dismay of many who know me, still fairly insistant about it...), I can safely say that it will be great to welcome many of the comforts of BeOS to Linux. But at the same time, it will still be Linux. Though this has been touched upon in this general thread, no one is recognizing poigiantly that this is not the BeOS replacement we are all hoping for. Both this, as well as BlueOS, are truly Linux at their heart. Only OpenBeoS (or OBOS, as it appears it will eventually be called), is going to be a true replacement for BeOS.

Re:'Way ahead'?~

[tswinzig]

OBOS will support mmap() and have real fd() sockets, FWIW...

Or perhaps...

[garethwi]

...Obi Wan GnuBe.

Non-Microsoft utopia?

[drimmeeper]

This should be a great way for most of the non-MS community to bond together. BeOS and AtheOS already are similar enough that only minor source changes are needed to compile for either OS. GNU/Linux without X, running apps that only need recompiling with or without a few source changes to run on an original BeOS, OpenBeOS, BlueOS or even an AtheOS box and vice versa. If this can be done with the GNU/Linux kernel, why not another *nix variant's kernel too. This idea could be the unity that the non-MS community needs to finally overthrow the beast! Chose your kernel to suit your specific needs. Modify and recompile the apps you need to get the job done. File compatibility would not be (i think anyway) the issue it is today. I personally can't wait for OpenBeOS to mature, and am very enthusiastic about all of the different projects and forks related to it. What is your opinion?

Open your eyes

[marm]

The X extentions are so damn complicated that no ones using them, KDE isnt using Xrender, Gnome isnt using Xrender, hell even Enlightenment isnt using Xrender, the only people who seem to be able to make Xrender work, are the programmers working on it.

This only goes to advertise to the world exactly how little you know about X and how little attention should be paid to your misinformed rants about it.

• Fact: Qt 2.2 and later (and by extension, all recent versions of KDE) have been using the Render extension to display anti-aliased text for over a year. This was achieved through support of the Xft library, which uses Render to composite text on-screen.
• Fact: Qt 3 and up composite QPixmaps onscreen using... yes, the Render extension (allowing for a full 8-bit alpha channel). This is used to great effect throughout KDE 3, where it is used for alpha-blending of icons, translucent menus, and various other neat effects, all with hardware acceleration where it is available.
• Fact: GTK+ 2 and up composite GdkPixbufs using... the Render extension (again, allowing for a full 8-bit alpha channel). I'm sure it'll be used in GNOME 2 for all sorts of neat eye candy.
• Fact: Xft (which of course, uses Render) support has been hacked into Mozilla. I point this out especially, as in previous posts on /. you seem to pride yourself on being an ardent supporter of Mozilla...

NO where else have I seen alpha channeling in linux than from keith packard the creator of the Xrender extention.

Open your eyes then. It's everywhere, certainly all over my desktop anyway. If you want to live in the past, feel free. If you want to ignore it, feel free. Spreading misinformed, baseless FUD about one of the most significant modernizations to have happened to X in its entire lifespan isn't appreciated however.

What good is an overly complicated undocumented hard to use API on top of a bloated badly designed implementation of X?

The Render extension is a sensible, well-thought out solution to many of X's previous shortcomings. It's not perfect, but then - it's not finished yet. As for documentation, what do you need exactly? The wire protocol for Render is pretty comprehensively documented, and if you're merely trying to use it in an Xlib program, well, there's always the source code to look at. Yes, that's not perfect, but Render is the work of just Keith, and XFree86 is short-staffed enough as it is. Again - it's not finished yet! In any case, it seems that's enough for Trolltech and the GTK+ developers...

I'm also going to argue here that XFree86 isn't bloated and neither is it badly designed. What it is is massively short of good developers, especially those that are interested in working on the internals of the X server as opposed to just getting the latest and greatest features of their new graphics card working. It's an engineering project as big as the Linux kernel or KDE or GNOME, but with only about 5 people working on the core parts. Is it any wonder it develops more slowly?

Of course, if you were that concerned about X, I'd suggest you go and start hacking code for it, because that's the only way it's going to get better. Except, you're not a graphics programmer are you? Because if you were, you wouldn't have made such baseless allegations about X, and certainly wouldn't have made such basic factual errors as you did in your post.

Re:Open your eyes

[einer]

What good is an overly complicated undocumented hard to use API on top of a bloated badly designed implementation of X?

Does this guy sound like a programmer who can't figure out an API?

"I can't figure it out so it must be broken, badly designed, undocumented, overly complicated and bloated!"

K12ltsp.org

[Daengbo]

Install their OS on one of your better machines (not those ten), network them all together as X terminals, and open an internet cafe.

Bill, bill, bill - Windows?

[krath]

Wasn't Bill the one who came up with that Windows XP thing?

Ohh, Bill Hayden you say.

hooray for OSS

[Pflipp]

OK, so remember this: the next time someone asks you about the benefits of OSS, you'll have another great example. Especially as this project is said to work better already than some of the Be emulation projects that mostly wrote everything by hand. Stuff like this couldn't be done in a closed source environment.

Having said that, it may not really sound like news to you, but I believe that this is a very good example of this benefit of OSS.

Just give me...

[jonr]

BeFS and fast, consistent GUI. I miss BeFS live queries the most. The simple, yet effective API (Simple even though it was all in C++). Rest in piece...

Re:Why?

[OrangeHairMan]

This link shows you how to install Be Personal Edition on its own partition.
http://www.betips.net/chunga.php?ID=495

Orange

So what does this mean for Linux?

[FooBarWidget]

Does that "BeOS on Linux" or whatever it should be called run as good as the real BeOS/AtheOS?
Do apps run just as smoothly?

It's called TRANSPARENCY (Was: X sucks anyhow)

[dossen]

Well, if I have to run my apps inside a browser or some terminal window,then it's not network transparency. I want all of my apps to look, feel and act the same, wether they are local or remote (speed will of cause differ between local and remote, so I can't get total transparency). The only apps where I think any difference is justified is games and video, networks supporting that remote (not sending the video then decoding it, decoding and then sending it) are still somewhat out of my pricerange. And even in that area I hope we will get more transparency.

Might be what Linux needs for a larger market

[StringBlade]

If this BeOS GUI on the Linux kernel turns out to be all it's cracked up to be (at the least a better-looking, easier-to-code-for windowing system) then perhaps it may become more attractive to both GUI app developers and "mainstream" users alike.

I know from talking to friends and family who've tried Linux, part of their reluctance to change is due to the way X behaves and how it works (or doesn't work) with video and applications such as Netscape or RealPlayer.

Another advantage is the ability to port many of the nice-looking/functioning BeOS programs to run in Linux.

Someone mentioned it before, but take MacOSX as an example - they did it right: Use a powerful backend (BSD) and slap a much prettier interface on top. Joe Sixpack doesn't care or need to know what OS is actually running in the background as long as the interface is easy-to-use and clean (enough). As a developer new in the world of OS programming, it seems like Linux is a good choice for open source driver support and overall popularity of the operating system among open source developers.

Give me a good OS or give me WindowsXP! (read: death)

Re:'Way ahead'?~

[HiThere]

Personally, as someone who has never used Be, I find this an interesting test.

Some people have been saying that X Window needed to be replaced, and this will be a replacement. It will be quite interesting to see what difference it makes in performance. Also in compatibility (which X Window seems to be quite good at).

It's always important to occasionally go back to the basics and redo them from a different perspective. That's one reason that the Hurd is important. I suspect that there will turn out to be major differences between how Linux and the Hurd scale to multiprocessor systems, as n increases beyond 4 to ... 16? 64? more? There are major problems with inter-process scheduling and communication which cause real scaling problems. Perhaps one architecture will be a lot better than another.

Similarly, as full motion 3-D becomes important there may be major differences between X Window and BeWindows (whatever it's called... I said I wasn't a Be user). Perhaps both will have advantages in slightly differing areas. In that case it will be very nice to have them both sitting on top of the same base layer. With enough RAM (and an additional monitor? [OK, I'm oversimplifying. I want to have shared disk files between the systems.]) you might have one session of each running at the same time. This would slow things down of course, but depending on what the difference in advantages turned out to be it might still be worthwhile. Or not.

This can only help OpenBeOS

[Dr. Spork]

The real danger for OpenBeOS is that when it's done, no one will care. Consider that an OpenOS/2 would generate very little interest these days even if it ran OS/2-native programs as well as the original. Basically, there are no compelling OS/2 native programs anymore, so in 2002, only real computer perverts would ever be interested in an OS/2 clone. As enthusiastic as BeOS fans are now, how much of that enthusiasm will remain when OpenBeOS is done? A few geeks prone to nostalgia, but not enough to ignite a "movement".

However, with this AtheOS fork, there is right now a working OS that runs the Be API. This means that updating Be-native programs is not totally in vain, and it also means that some people might even write new apps for the Be API. This wouldn't happen if the only hope to keep that API alive was the promise of OpenBeOS somewhere down the road. This is not to slight OpenBeOS; it's just a very ambitious project that will not produce well-functioning results for a while. By the time it does, it can count itself lucky when Ahte-Linux-BeOS apps will run on it after only a recompile.

hardware compatability?

[The Wooden Badger]

I know it isn't exactly BeOS, but does it have the same horrible hardware compatability? I like what I see in (what was) BeOS, but I never seem to have hardware that let's me really open her up. I thought about migrating to BeOS, but I didn't feel like upgrading my box just to switch to a different OS. While on this topic do any of the other flavors of BeOS have improved hardware support?