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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."
It's an OS that runs on top of a BROWSER that run on top of another OS...
Could somebody explain to me the benefits of this? Please? Because I haven't the foggiest clue... Seems like a case of going around your elbow to get to your backside, but that's just me...
Remember that scene in The Wizard of Oz, with the Wicked Witch's army? I think it's like that song....
Oooooeeeeeon Oeeeeeeeeeeeon.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
otherwise it looks good, it looks real good, people friendly even.
I want 2D games back.
This actually looks like a potential OpenSource killer app. It gives most non-techie users what they need, what they want and what they will use, for a fair price. Like Lindows, but without the crappy attitude and marketing tripe. The screenshots look slick, and the stuff looks easy to use. Not something I would go all that wild over, but I can see my wife, or her parents for that matter, using this without any major hassles. Add OpenOffice.org to the mix, and you are done. Cool stuff!
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
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
"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"
:)
Oki Oki, how about Running it Under Wine in Internet Explorer window, which will be running VMWare plugin, inside which there will be RedHat Linux 7.2 running Mozilla and HomeBase on top of it... That will be really cool
At least someone is trying a tactic to finally get beyond the STANDARD desktop model. Instead with this setup you have a combo concept where you have a desktop model merged into a home page model. I doubt if you can count it as revolutionary but at least they tried to push the edge a bit.
_ _
For an end user I think it might actually be better than some lame approach of merely emulating a windows desktop on top of linux the way a couple of distros seem to be going like the Lindows stuff.
What would be interesting to see is how a real life end user would react to such a setup.
_______________________________________________
ACK
I'll have to wait til I get to work to see if the demo will work on Galeon. How ironic if this Linux-based environment has a demo that will only work on MSIE.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, I watched the flash demo and I have to say it looks like a very slick environment. Without using it, it's hard to say, but I think this is the kind of thing I could give to my mom to use.
You can argue about the technical merits of their implementation all day long but look at how elegant and aesthetically pleasing the interface is compared to say the screen shots on the website of say... your favorite window manager...
While this "desktop" does look rather elegant and has a pleasing appearance it has some rather significant issues that may not be immediately apparent.
.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.
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
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.
Considering the recent story on AOL and Mozilla/Netscape/Gecko I thought some of you would find this quote interesting. Personally I would like to see them pull off something like this.
.NET, MSN, and Passport services.
Eid is also talking to AOL. Imagine a PC with a desktop based on a Mozilla or Netscape browser, one with an AOL logo on it, that is as tightly integrated with the AOL service as Microsoft would like all PCs to be with its own
aus.music.scrapbook
Their wordprocessor does support the most rudimentary .doc files but, like most it is severly lacking and results in a bad user experience. Even Abiword an excellent WP suffers from this. Star Office 6.0 is the best supporting suite yet.
The site does work with moz, assuming you have the flash plugin, but it is specifically targeted at IE and Netscape. Have a look at the source for the demo page. It's a browser identification script and it offers three choices, IE, Netscape and screwed.
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
What's the point of having a word processing application when , all it can do is act like a viewer? While being able to read a .doc file is important, it is equally if not more important to be able to write .doc files and have the written files work correctly across platforms.
.doc is the standard, whether we like it or not. And, until we *fully* support both reading and writing in that format these other office suites are almost unusable in the real world. That's going to be a major turn-off to any would be converts.
Usually, my word processing involves creating documents that must be read by people with MS Word. This is simple enough, provided I don't care about formatting. My next major use of a word processor involves making minor edits to existing Word docs and sending them back to the original user. Won't they be thrilled to find that I corrected their spelling and as an added bonus, stripped out all of the formatting.
As I stated in the original post,
of course I thought, hey it's great someone is thinking about us stoners and providing the features that us really high end users need.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
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.
--- witty signature
I'd just like to emphasize that it apparently is an operating _environment_, not operating _system_. I guess there's a difference somewhere.. Also; they're pitching it at ugly people. Or so it appears.. They have a bunch of them on their webpage.
So somebody releases another Linux desktop. Not important. What is important is that it's based on XUL, theoretically a fully cross-platform toolkit; many simple XUL-based applets can run, unedited, on Mozilla on all platforms, at native speed.
Imagine if this OEone desktop can somehow be designed to work equally well on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. So that a user can have a completely identical desktop no matter where they are. It makes transition to Linux much easier than before. Eh?
Please forgive me for making such broad statements. They are rarely accurate. I should have been more specific by targeting the specific programmers of Yet Another Office Apps that, rather than build on the existing work and bring the .doc file format compatibilty closer to reality, insist on starting over again.
.doc that they have already seen in MS Word. With the formatting messed up, images that aren't displayed and headers/footers trashed they go back to MS. Hopefullly they will give Star Office a try but, as close as it is, it's still not perfect.
Yes, I know that oeone is using an Abiword plugin but, unfortunately even Abiword is lacking in the compatibility areana. Perhaps not as much as KWord or whoever else you might choose but, lacking none the less. New users drop Abiword as soon as they open a
One of the most interesting things to come from the review was the potential for this to be sold as an embedded computing device. I guess many Slashdot readers grew up in the age when we had Atari 400/800s, Vic 20s, Commodore 64s, BBC and Spectrums. The interesting thing about all these devices was that that only required a TV for display and they all had costs which were in the $100 - $350 range, low enough to be affordable to 11 / 12 / 13 years olds. For a long time after that we have been educated that $1000 has been the right price to pay for a PC with Games Consoles holding the low end of the market.
:-) ). The space advantages of having a keyboard sized device should not be underestimated, many people who have a PC for their home office don't want to take up the same space again for a kids device. As broadband take up increases this could share the bandwidth with other PCs and mobile devices.
An embedded device with this plus Linux in a single keyboard device surely hold the possibility of a return to those days. This would boot directly into the browser and mail / OpenOffice and thus provide more of the functionality than todays set top boxes usually provide. The interior of Linux would be hidden but would be available for those who wanted to hack on the system. The price could then be lower than even the bare bones systems Wal Mart has been selling recently (and remember many of us in Europe still can't get systems this cheap). By using the TV as an output device it could compete with Games Consoles and run software of similar quality (Doom, Quake World, Tux Racer
If they could get the price back to the level of the much loved home computers of old, I would buy one, if only to boot up Atari and Commodore emulators....
Open-Source components are available via CVS. Directions for anonymous CVS are here:
http://www.oeone.com/developers/
Cheers,
Vic
appears to be based on Red Carpet?
:P
It is based on RedCarpet and used with permission.
> Eid, hopes to merge that slightly forked version of Red Carpet back into the main development tree before long.
The advice to use a sacrificial testing machine is very wise.
Slashdot just would not be as much fun if people actually read the articles
I'm pretty sure that they're saying "Glory of, the Old One."
That's what I (and others) always thought, and I seem to recall the rumor being substantiated. But then again, it might have been refuted.
First, as others have mentioned, the "homebase" system is just xul, meaning that it is the same layer as the browser. In addition, Mozilla does not have to call gnome/kde, and it can run without a window manager, as it is its own environment. So basically you have as much overhead as running KDE or GNOME.
This will not be faster than KDE or GNOME. It will be simpler because it will have a consistent user interface with interactivity between applications at the forefront. You can easily use this system as a standalone web terminal without the use for any other apps.
Therefore, it's better than other solutions when these are your requirements.
After seeing some of the geneology sites, he got a bit interested. This is a typical example of what I could recommend. It's rather specific, stable and can be remotely administered (given that I set up a proper firewall to shield him as much as possible from portscans from other people than me).
Stop the brainwash
LOL, this is for grandma and the aunts and uncles. The GF gets IE6 and Win98. Ensures she needs help quite often and then you get to be the hero :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
That's what the OEOne desktop was created for, thin client Internet computers, also known as NCs and network appliances. However, all incarnations of Larry Ellison's Network Computer from whatever source have failed. I don't think there are any left in the market at this point. With PC prices continuing to plummet, there's just no demand for a stripped-down computer that lacks the features of a mainstream PC.
--
Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org
Right, AOL isn't developing Mozilla the browser, AOL is developing Mozilla the application development framework.
So much time has been invested in making Mozilla into such a framework that it would be naive to think AOL just wants a good browser to replace IE with. There are much more interesting, and far more elaborate uses for Mozilla that AOL can use in its fight against MS.
They really pay attention to details, I'll give them that. Before I even install the software I have already encountered several examples of Good Thinking.
:-) Even though I personally would have named it "Tuxilla."
#1: This is their installer: $ lynx -source http://install.oeone.com/ |sh
This trick has been around for a while (I use it myself) but it's good to see a commercial developer paying attention to tricks of the trade. No need to explain to people how to use the command line to run an installer, just paste, please.
#2: CVS pserver. Once again, commercial developer paying attention.
Now, I give them a strike for providing a RedHat-only installation. A binary tarball would have been fine. But...
#3: The source code hasn't just been dumped on the net with a little "here ya go, knock yerselves out" message. They've taken the time to explain how things work and even provided hints for Going Debian.
#4: Their mascot doesn't suck.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.