Interview With Cosmoe's Bill Hayden

Eugenia writes: "Over a month ago it was reported that a developer had forked the Athe(na) operating system and ported its GUI on top of Linux, without the use of XFree86. This combined OS, called Cosmoe, would support Linux, AtheOS, BeOS and even Macintosh's Carbon APIs (without the use of GNUStep - his port of Carbon is wrapped around the Be API). OSNews today features an interview with the architect of the combined OS, Bill Hayden, where a lot of things are explained about his plans for Cosmoe."

Comments

GnuSTEP and Carbon

[Eugenia Loli]

Duh! I made a mistake when I submitted the story. GNUSTEP wraps around the Cocoa API, not the Carbon one. Sorry for the confusion.

I was deep into porting a game to MacOSX at the time of the submission and everything was like a big knot in my head... :P

geekiness of story

[56ker]

Words/phrases in story -

operating system - 1 point

Linux - 10 points

Linux (again) - extra 5 points

AtheOS - 5 points

BeOS - 15 points

APIs - 2 points

Be - 5 points

Total : 43 points!

40-45 points: This story is so geeky it's bound to be accepted on slashdot!

Why AtheOS was impressive

[tswinzig]

When AtheOS was "outed," it was really far along. Especially when you consider it was all written by one person.

Similarly, OpenBeOS was impressive because it garnered a big crowd working on it rather quickly, and working code soon followed, to the chagrin of many. (There's already much work done on the kernel, via NewOS, BFS, the network stack, the GUI implementation, various preference and utility apps, and much more.)

AtheOS was a new OS built for fun (seemingly) by a guy that was impressed (but maybe not directly influenced) by BeOS. More power to him.

OpenBeOS is being built by fans of BeOS who want to see an open source version that can live on in binary compatability (for the first releases), and eventually progress beyond what Be, Inc. did (RIP).

Where does Cosmoes fit in to things? This guy forked AtheOS against the original author's wishes (welcome to the world of Open Source, Kurt), in order to ... what? Run BeOS apps on Linux? Run AtheOS apps on Linux? Run BeOS apps on AtheOS? Run MacOS X apps on Linux?

Honestly I'm trying to figure out what the goals are; I don't mean to be negative. If the guy is just doing this like Kurt, to have fun, then great... Otherwise, why promote this thing so much when virtually nothing is done? He admits the most of the hard stuff is waiting to be done. Instead of doing an interview, announcing the code fork, etc, why not start coding and announce it when you've got something to show for it?

Re:Why AtheOS was impressive

[tftp]

I tend to agree. The Cosmoe web site is devoid of any content whatsoever. Not even a screenshot - despite of author's claim of having a graphic artist's soul.

Experience of developing BSD and Linux already tells us that a good OS is most definitely not a one-man job. Goals of Cosmoe are highly undefined. Even if the author produces something working, it is likely to be very simple and not up to standard that BSD and Linux set every day.

IMO, the mistake #1 is to start the project without setting a reachable goal, and establishing means to reach that goal. So many projects fail (in open- and closed-source worlds) because of that. Unrealistic expectations, deadlines that are years off mark, lack of understanding of now complicated some things are (just look at QoS for example!) drive projects into the ground.

Of course, everyone is free to do whatever he likes with his own free time, but setting up a Web site to sell the OS seems to be a little bit premature.

What's wrong with XFree86? Re:I just don't get it

[po8]

As many of the responses to your post illustrate, folks just don't get the idea that XFree86 is a highly modular system. They don't get the idea that the fastest path to a high-quality GUI desktop for their favorite OS is to start with the existing XFree86 server, extend it as necessary, and layer atop it with a decent client side. Yes, Xlib's time has come and gone, and Xt has always been pretty hopeless. So use something like XCB as a base, and design the GUI API of your dreams atop it.

Also note that many of the XFree86 features you mention are either brand-new or not-quite-there-yet. For example, decent font support has only been solid for about a year now, and is still evolving a bit. Server-side affine transformations have been specified but not yet implemented. The spec for proper anti-aliasing of polygons was just finalized last week: it was implemented this week. (That's how fast XFree86 is moving these days with Keith Packard working on it full time. Keith has repeatedly demonstrated that it's pretty easy to add the "missing" functionality you want as an X extension.) As folks get used to the Render and FontConfig APIs, I expect to see correspondingly less interest in building window systems from scratch.

IMHO, the "visceral dislike" comes from several factors, including outdated ideas about what X is and how well it works (the performance claims I see around here sometimes crack me up), insufficient appreciation of the difficulty of what X does, and NIH syndrome.

The good news is that all the carping isn't slowing down the clueful folks any. KDE 3 is nice enough that for the first time since the mid-80s I'm not running twm as my window manager any more. I expect things to only get better from here.

Re:What's wrong with XFree86? Re:I just don't get

[Permission Denied]

IMHO, the "visceral dislike" comes from several factors, including outdated ideas about what X is and how well it works (the performance claims I see around here sometimes crack me up), insufficient appreciation of the difficulty of what X does, and NIH syndrome.

Disclaimer: I'm an X11 programmer. I love X. Allows me to install matlab on only one machine but use it from anywhere (instead of buying 30 licenses for the 30 people that would occasionally use it), wrote my own window manager since everyone else's window manager got at least something wrong, and the X11 APIs are extremely clean and elegant - especially if you compare it to say, win32 SDK.

Here's why I think the kids don't like X nowadays:

1. Athena toolkit. Occasionally they'll find a scrollbar that they can't figure out how to use (pre-version 21 emacs) or buttons used for popping up menus (like xfontsel or gv), and it's pretty damned ugly.

   I don't know how to solve this problem: XFree86 programs like xfontsel, bitmap or xvidtune shouldn't depend on GTK or QT, but at the same time, we should limit exposure to Athena. At least use Xaw3d instead.

2. Fonts still suck. XFree86 4.2 doesn't come with any truetype fonts, you have to recompile QT and set an environment variable to even get konqueror to look decent, old apps like netscape won't ever use truetype fonts and even getting netscape to display legible text involves venturing through Dante's ninth level.

   This problem can probably be solved by the Linux distributers - include decent truetype fonts, set up QT correctly, etc. I imagine they're probably doing this at this point, but I don't keep up with them.

3. Configuration still sucks. Only once - once - did I find that XF86Setup correctly set up a graphics card, and I've worked with a lot of machines. Same deal with "X -configure" on XF86 4.x. I have to fix XF86Config on every machine, and a number of times, I rewrote the thing from scratch as the default template is extremely long and verbose (eg, it has commented-out examples of how to set up multi-monitor systems, something I've never seen in all my years of computing). In addition, the little XF86Config generators still won't set up vital options such as ZAxisMapping, so you end up editing it by hand anyway. They still expect you to know your monitor's sync frequencies, which is absolutely unreasonable.

   Solution to this problem? The config generators must be fixed. This is really a very, very big problem. I shoudn't ever have to choose my graphics card from a drop-down list - the config generator program should figure out what graphics card I have by snarfing its PCI id. "X -configure" does this, but it's none too friendly and still doesn't make for a usable XF86Config - it should be integrated with something like XF86Setup from the 3.x days, which allowed you to also set the various other options. No keyword should be added to XF86Config until the config generators are updated to set up the new option.

   I've never managed to watch a DVD using Linux/XFree86. I'm a unix systems programmer, so I'm not some noob who's afraid to read docs - however, the last time I checked, oms still doesn't do sound sync, so it's completely useless. In XFree86 4.1, the ATI drivers were completely broken and wouldn't correctly do DGA, etc on every ATI card I've seen. It's much better now with XFree86 4.2, but it's extremely dangerous to say that watching DVDs in Linux is feasible at this point. This will only encourage the neophyte to actually try it - they'll have to upgrade and recompile their kernel, upgrade their XFree86, mess with some crap in /proc to enable DMA on their DVD drive, get a CVS checkout of oms as the published tarballs are outdated, search for the correct css plugin, as there are at least three different ones, and then, maybe, perhaps, they can try to see if it will even work. I didn't write down the crap I went through while trying this, so I'm missing a whole bunch of steps here - suffice it to say, this will take a few days. If you try to run quake3 or any other 3D game under Linux, you'll run into the same things.

   Solution to this problem? Cut back on the advocacy. Let's be honest and admit that very few people will be able to watch DVDs or play newer games in Linux at this point.

DVD Playing on Linux

[benjj]

Woh woh woh woh!

I think it must have been a while since you tried dvd playing on linux. AFAIK oms isn't even developed anymore. I use xine with the dvdnav plugin. It installed easily on debian, and the only sound sync problems I had were when I tried it using esd.

I also run 3d games under linux. Both the Wolfenstein and Quake III work, as does max payne running under WineX. All with no trouble after I installed the NVidia drivers.

I do agree with you about the X configuration issues, this seems to be something that each commercial distro is trying to solve in their installers (somewhat unsuccessfully in my experience).

Re:What's wrong with XFree86? Re:I just don't get

[po8]

Your points are mostly well-taken.

1. There is a serious effort underway to remove all Athena dependencies from the sample X apps, and not to replace those dependencies with Gnome or KDE dependencies. But it'll be a while before this happens: the replacement has to be designed and built first.
2. Font support is being improved as we speak. Distro vendors can certainly help. The KDE and Gnome groups are helping. I'm using anti-aliasing on most every font on my screen now, and although it was decidedly non-trivial I didn't actually have to stand on my head to do it.
3. IMHO the configuration situation, while bad, is not as bad as you describe. Certainly the only viable way to configure X is to run "XFree86 -configure" on a 4.2 server and edit the output. But the edits aren't that hard any more. As you note, card detection is automatic, and usually works. The VESA bits make modern monitor detection also automatic, eliminating that source of confusion. Mostly it's input devices that are a continuing source of grief. Keith Packard finally rewrote the mouse protocol autodetect fairly recently: XFree86 now successfully autodetects your mouse type the first time you move the mouse around. (This, BTW, was surprisingly hard.)

   The default XF86Config file format may be moving to XML. This would help a lot with newbies being able to use sensible tools to edit their configuration. In particular, XML editors are pretty good at not messing with parts of the file they don't understand...

The DVD player thing is a special case, since there are folks in the world actively trying to make it hard :-). But if you run Debian, you can very easily install usable XFree86 bits, a usable kernel, and the current Xine bits. It's then just a question of finding a .deb for the Xine CSS plugin, and you should be able to watch movies---I can.

The DRM/DRI support for 3D has stabilized to the point that it mostly just works. As you suggest, if it doesn't, you are probably out of luck unless you have direct access to a guru. This is true in Windows-land as well. The traditional solution there is to buy new hardware to make your software work. Buying a modern Nvidia card means you automatically get usable Linux drivers and some tech support, so this is always an option.

I agree that there are some things that still require some expert help, and that this is too bad. But all of this has gotten pretty off topic. If you check out the 3D and video HW support of the competition to XFree86 (e.g. Cosmoe [which is apparently going to call its initial distribution potatoe :-)]) you'll find it to be far inferior, to say the least. X may not be perfect, but it's tremendously good. Help out or just be patient, and it will get even better.