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Perlbox: A Unix Desktop Written in Perl
cascadefx writes "It appears that this programmer has created an Open Sourced Unix Desktop, PerlBox, written in Perl and Tk. I found this posted in response to an article on Perl Monks asking if Perl was obsessed with CGI?. Apparently not. Check it out, it looks pretty interesting." I wonder how fast it runs?
I wonder how fast it runs?
About
this
fast
.
I'd be very curious as to how fast that desktop ran, as well. Don't Perl scripts get compiled every time they are run?
Dammit!!! I would have had first post if it wasn't for this perlbox desktop. ;)
I wish that PERL had a GUI abstraction layer, similar to DBI for databases. Perl would kick Java's ass as a cross-platform app development language if it did.
:)
Maybe it does and I am just ignorant
I know this is a troll, but you're correct in that it's actually quite viable. Check out ROX-filer, an excellent file manager (also on the site is ROX-session for session management, and a load of tools to use with it, all in Python). ROX-Filer is an excellent example of how to use Python to create a desktop environment.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Read my old comment to Subterfuge with Subterfugue story: Re:Perl in the Linux kernel? There's some info about other parts of the operating system written in Perl: Perl /bin tools, Perl shell and even Perl kernel.
I couldn't find a working link to Perl filesystem
(PerlFS by Claudio Calvelli?),
so if anyone knows it, please post it.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
more open source projects could easily benefit from a funding model like this. There seems to be research money floating around universities (mine included) that could easily go to open source projects; it just may not be the project you want to work on, but hey, getting paid isn't so bad.
If you like stuff like PerlBox, you might also want to check out ROX-filer while you're at it. ROX-Filer an excellent file manager written in Python, and also offers a session manager, a wallpaper utility, a clock, etc, all written in Python. I'd recommend checking both PerlBox and ROX-Filer out.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Because we can?
I'd like to see distributing timesharing, so that all these people with *way* too much time on their hands could donate some to us people with sensible projects to complete but not enough time.
It's actually (almost) compiled each run, instead of being raw interpreted. In the camel book it describes it in detail, but briefly it parses it to bytecode, optimizes it, then executes it (any evals will re-do the process mid program, ect).
Non-proc consuming optimizations are done each time also. Perl6 is supposed to allow it to be permanently compiled to a bytecode with extensive optimizations much easier. Currently the methods of creating a pre-bytecoded perl script is (almost) a black magic.
You need mod_perlbox.
3 21&ycord=567
That way you can access your desktop through lynx at a speed increase of 800%. Just format your urls like this:
http://localhost/desktop/?action=leftclick&xcord=
runs as fast as KDE or Gnome!
Go program something new.
Like a desktop written in Perl?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Modules to play with and more info about it:
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
Yeah, his JavaScript sucks, lets hope he is better at programming Perl than JavaScript :-)
gosh, i'm tired of hearing this.
if you develop some actual coding discipline, you can write very maintanable code in perl. use generous ammounts of whitespace, develop style rules for yourself and stick to them religiously, use descriptive full word variable names, separate compound statements into easier to understand (and easier to insert stuff between) smaller ones and of course take advantage of perl's '-w' and 'use strict' features. and if you think something still isn't clear, then for pete's sake comment it! don't blame poor coding practices on the language itself. you can just as easily write nasty unreadable code in c.
Site's already /. ed
It turns out the webserver was written in Perl, too.
Actually, the _default_ Tk look and feel sucks rocks.
However -- the nice thing about Tk is that the widgets are
_extremely_ customisable. A bit of tweaking of the widget options and you can make it look pretty much like anything.
(Obviously within reason -- you can't change widget shapes, ferinstance).
All my Tk apps, for example, have the JFC/Swing 'Metal' look 'n feel, for a bit of consistency across Java and Tcl/Tk apps.
The only thing really holding me back from using this in my current project (front end management console for the build and test scripts used to QA $AntiVirus_app) in XUL is the lack of a nice drag and drop formbuilder. There's a project to build one - XULMaker - but it seems to be making pretty slow progress and be short of people working on it. Anyway, what I was wondering was, where's the Perl bindings? Being able to say :
...
;)
my $g = XUL->new();
$g->set_window(
title=> 'Hello world',
geometry => ([500, 200]),
)
...and so on would be verrrrry cool. And then we could ALL build our own window managers, using Perl. And this post would be on-topic
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
http://bogr46qdy22tc.bc.hsia.telus.net:9000/perlbo x.jpg
Seems to work okay.
Does this mean perl is now trying to compete with Emacs? This could get ugly...
Ruby vs Python vs Perl running Perlbox vs Emacs running everything vs Linux running KDE vs BSD running Gnome vs Windows vs Solaris running Emacs vs OSX running Virtual PC running Activestate Perl running Perlbox...
I think we need big a flow chart for this one.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
No debian packages, at least in unstable.
And as for compiling it... it's perl! You don't have to compile anything yourself.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I understood what it does.
It appears that this programmer has created an Open Sourced Unix Desktop, GNOME, written in C. I found this posted in response to an article on C Monks asking if C was obsessed with device drivers? Apparently not. Check it out, it looks pretty interesting. I wonder how fast it runs?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
> if you develop some actual coding discipline, you can write very maintanable code in perl.
The problem with Perl is that from the very first moment it was pushed as the "there's more than one way to do it" language, and that's *WRONG* (very big IMNSHO here, of course) because it leads to confusion.
You could easily write mantainable code in Perl, but what about other coders? Could you take a job that requires Perl code (written by others) maintenance and be sure that you won't have problems?
Ok, I agree about other languages obfuscation (say C and C++), but if it was for me I'd choose a more self documenting language. In the "scripting" arena today I really like Ruby: powerful as Perl and Python, but much easier to learn (and read!).
For those of you who can't get to the screenshots because of those annoying javascript errors: http://perlbox.org/screenshots.shtml
[alk]
Ummm...the camel...I have this sneaking suspicion that O'Reilly is going to pick the camel as the animal for their perl books.
* * *
It is a dada story -- it has no moral.
hell yes! i am the tech lead on a perl project which hit 100K lines of code and doesn't look like stopping anywhere before 150K. the design is *very heavily* OO (one could directly translate the object model into java no sweat) and follows the MVC paradigm to the letter (there is only a single 100 line script which drives everything).
perl can be every bit as maintainable as any other language *as long as* one is/enforces discipline. i think at times perl can be more maintainable than, say, java, simply though its expressiveness and brevity. i mean, java can be so frickin verbose sometimes...
which leads me to the conclusion that people who truly think that perl is inherently unmaintainable must be crap programmers.
I'm waiting for LainOS to take off. While I suspect that these folks have bitten off more than they can chew, if it works, it will be awesome. Basically, they're modifying FreeBSD 4.5 to resemble the computers in Serial Experiments: Lain. They're planning to have built-in voice recognition.
Steve
I swear I read someplace about how to make a Perl binary. It involved getting your Perl app to dump core and then using the core as your binary.
>"Slashdotted"? It's what Yoggi meant when he said, "No one goes there anymore. It's too busy."
FYI: It's "Yogi", not "Yoggi"...
Yogi Berra
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Hasn't anyone had the perl style guide dropped on their desk the first day they started doing perl for a company? That and a few commandments from my old boss worked wonders:
Thou shalt use strict
Thou shalt use -w
Thy subs shall fit in one page.
Thy programs shall produce output from pod2txt
Subs used in more than one program shalt be included in a module.
That and when i was writing most of my code I was also teaching one of the Jr. Admins Perl so my code was commented ad naseum (I really think that my scripts were 50% or more of just comments.)
It made me feel all warm and fuzzy when my acolyte e-mailed me a year after I'd left and told me that the Sr. SA had taken one of my scripts and converted it to a module in 1/2 a day to extend one of their applications.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
I suggest you get your allegations straight -- It just fine under IE for me, Javascript and all. View source shows that the site was obviously developed with DreamWeaver, and there isn't a lick of IE-specific code in there. It's one thing to say that there's bugs in the site with IE, but when you talk about sabotage, you damn well better show some proof.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
In a momentary fitof insanity ,I installed windows XP last night and noticed that one of the options when you install IIS is the "Terminal Services ActiveX demo website" which apparently uses and ActiveX control to give full access to your machine to anyone viewing your sample website. I thought about this for a while and decided it might be cool, given appropriate security precautions on the site.
or:
shell# perl -MMOD::Desktop -e 'desktop_app while(1)'
Don't ask me. I use Opera. The site looks fine to me. :)
My journal has hot
Something really funky is going on. I type in www.perlbox.org, and the page that loads up is www.camelotnaturals.com
What the hell?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Magius_AR
No RPMs or tarballs either. Some very nice scented candles, though.
Since I haven't seen the original, nor had the opportunity to download anything, can I assume the folks at perlbox.org did this JUST so they could get free advertising for camelotnaturals.com? Seems like typical marketing BS to me...
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
And I can say from experience that it works incredibly well. I've compiled a script which used 20,000 lines of code amongst the various modules I'd built, not including Perl/Tk and the many other CPAN modules I used, and out popped a nice binary which worked just as if run from Perl.
I develop on Linux, but I can use it to generate binaries for Windows users. It opens up a whole new audience for me. I develop quickly on the platform I am efficient on, and all the Windows users know is that they get something with a nice GUI that works as advertised and which was developed in half the time.
Needless to say, I recommend it highly.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
and nobody notices. :)
I think they were vhosting on the same box and the cluebie admin thought he could stop the slashdotting of perlbox.org by removing the VirtualHost entry for it. :)
. .
is it only me, but when I clicked through to the frontpage link PerlBox.org I'm getting redirected to http://www.camelotnaturals.com/ a site selling herbal bath salts????
seriously, mod me down if I'm wrong (I can take it :) but this is silly, has someone effectively spammed the front page?
Can someone else check?
Could someone have switched on a redirect after the editors posted the story, for profit? Did the editors check?
Somehow I've checked this now 6 times, and I still have a problem with disbelief . . .
In this way, I suppose, Perl 6 will be kinda sorta like Java in that it will target a VM, rather than a CPU. The Parrot VM is not exclusive to Perl - from what I understand, idea is that eventually Python and Perl will share a common VM. It's conceivable, I suppose, that some sick bastard could write a Java compiler that targets Parrot.
Parrot isn't finished yet, but there are a few "toy" languages that target it (Jako and Cola, and more recently BASIC).
In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
It works fine if you just use the latter node_id parameter, as here
It would be nice to see more links to PerlMonks, and Perl articles in general. As far as I know CPAN is probably the biggest group of modules built by a single programming community which actively mixes and matches them. While there isn't one brain to it, PM is the best place I think to talk about them. Thanx
mattr
Well, if we're going to get into it...
There also:
Sawfish which is written using rep, which is a lisp-dialect similar to elisp.
GWM, another lisp-based WM, dialect is called "WOOL" (Window Object Oriented Language). Interesting and old.
GwML, a WM written in O'Caml. You even get an emacs clone scriptable and written in O'Caml as part of the package!
Tkwm doesn't look maintained, for creating WMs (not just desktops, mind you) in Tcl/Tk.
There are straight-up X11 bindings for other languages, which could also be used for creating window managers, with the same method of doing so in C. Ruby and Squeak Smalltalk has them for sure.
A lot of people scoff at the idea of doing this, but frankly, I can't imagine how and why people deal with static, inconsistent environments. Having your parts of your system written in a dynamic language that you can grok means that you can make the changes to your enviornment when you want to. May seem stupid to a lot of computer users and self-proclaimed hax0rs, but for me, that is what makes a computer personal. Same reason people like emacs, I suppose.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
So you're too dim to turn off pop-ups on script errors and turn them into that little alert icon, so that constitutes malicious sabotage against IE users? Yes, there's errors. They either hand-hacked the code and broke it, or ended up checking the netscape compatibility box and not the IE one. Half the sites I visit have javascript errors. Does that mean there's some vast conspiracy?
And what the hell am I doing responding to some anonymous accuser anyway? (I may make it sound like I wrote the site -- I didn't) . And why the hell am I expecting any better from slashdot?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.