OEone HomeBase Desktop

Mike Potter writes "OEone has released its OEone HomeBase product as an open source project, and a free download. HomeBase is a complete operating environment that runs on top of Mozilla, with the base operating system being RedHat Linux 7.1 or 7.2. There's a review of it over at Newsforge. Some of the OEone software has already been released as open source to other projects. For instance, OEone's calendar was the basis of the Mozilla Calendar project."

Comments

Re:Hang on here...

[passthecrackpipe]

Hi,

The Newsforge article states it is not an OS, but a Frontend/Desktop for an OS - in this case RH7.x. Not half bad either, according to Newsforge. when they have a SuSE version, i'll be checking it out.

Re:Hang on here...

[Jucius Maximus]

Ironically enough, 'HomeBase' was one of the names considered for what eventually was named 'Microsoft Bob,' a 'friendly' computer interface where the computer was represented with a house and a variety of characters - try looking up the old slashdot column "Who Remembers Bob?"

I can't find it because the slashdot search engine does not index 3 letter words.

Re:Hang on here...

[Jack Hughes]

It isn't built on top of the browser.. it is built on some of the the same building blocks that Mozilla is built on. Perhaps the most important is XUL (XML User Interface Language).

So rather than using KDE/QT or GTK+ or Motif or whatever it is using XUL and a load of other technologies to create the interface, widgets, look and feel and whatever.

The intention is to create a relatively clear and simple user interface that can be used for key tasks but also lends itself to "kiosk" type applications - for example embedded systems such as set top boxes.

They aren't necessarily trying to come up with a completely new general purpose desktop system but one which is appropriate for a, potentially, significant niche - set top boxes, internet kiosks and so on. They hope to make money by flogging the system to OEMs

Re:if it runs on top of mozilla

[spdw]

It's currently only been tested and verified to run on top of redhat 7.1 and redhat 7.2. If you wish to download the pre-packaged binaries they are all in rpm format. Should you want to try to compile it on another system other than redhat 7.1 or 7.2 you're more than welcome to download the source code and give it a try! Dan

Ok, but..

[FreeLinux]

While this "desktop" does look rather elegant and has a pleasing appearance it has some rather significant issues that may not be immediately apparent.

First there is the question of speed. Layering browser type apps on top of Mozilla, on top of Red Hat is surely going to mean a performance hit.

Then of course is the age-old problem of application compatibility. Or, more specifically, file format compatibility. Here we have yet another office suite with the most important file format glaringly absent. How long will it take developers to realize that .doc *is* the standard, regardless of whether we like it or not. Without support for this file format and the other MS Office formats these Yet Another Office Apps(YAOA) don't have a chance.

There is also the question, a *major* one in my mind, of why a Linux based company builds their website targeting IE and Netscape base browsers. I take major issue with this, regarless of the fact that IE is the dominant browser. If you are going to use, sell or advocate open source and open standards then your web site should too. But oeone gives us Yet Another IE Site(YAIS), and one that requires Flash to view the screen shots. At least they, thankfully, didn't host the site with IIS.

Sorry oeone, I've already lost all interest.

Not another Office app, its Abbiword

[gnugnugnu]

If you look closer you will see that it is not yet another office app that it in fact uses Abiword which they have successfully turned into an Abiword plugin for Mozilla.

Checkout the screenshot at mozdev.org small screenshot of Abiword mozilla plugin
big screeshot of Abiword mozilla plugin .

As for speed i would expect this would be no slower than running both mozilla than Abiword at the same time, so if you already have mozilla open all day everyday the speed difference is probably not noticable

Re:Does this seem familiar?

[Darth Maul]

Same here! I had to resort to a clean install. The Ximian red-carpet installer totally trashed my system. It kept installing multiple versions of the same package, and dependencies were far more busted than I thought possible. I also couldn't update past 7.1, so I just decided to do a fresh install and never touch Ximian again.

*shudder*

In fact, the whole Ximian Gnome experience was the final nail in my personal Gnome coffin. I made the switch to KDE after all that mess.

Before you install...

[Jodrell]

You might want to know the following before you install...

• The installer appears to be based on Ximian's Red Carpet. This is actually a pretty snazzy tool, but it can be unresponsive while it resolves dependencies. It will download any packages it needs into /var/cache/redcarpet and clobber the installer file in that directory, so backup if you think you're going to need it.
• It wants to install a huge great pile of dependencies (115MB on my system), like Abiword and OpenSSL and many others, even some perl modules, even though most of them were already installed. So be warned that it may clobber (and possibly break) a lot of your existing software. My advice is to use a sacrificial machine if you want to try it out.

Re:Is this really open source? ... doesn't seem so

[Vic]

Open-Source components are available via CVS. Directions for anonymous CVS are here:
http://www.oeone.com/developers/

Cheers,
Vic