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Syllable's Kristian Van Der Vliet Interview
Andreas Louca writes "OSNews.com has a nice interview with Syllable's Project Leader, Kristian Van Der Vliet. Syllable is one of the teams that raised off the ashes of AtheOS. They talk about the future of Syllable and the current status. "
easy there boys, Kristian is a guy.
No, really. I must have missed this. What happened to AtheOS? When did it die? Why? When was this?
Wasn't AtheOS the OS that was all being done by that one guy and had the amiga-like GUI with the nice c++ API? If that's the one i'm thinking of, is this a big mark against the single-benevolent-dictator software development model that AtheOS was the shining example of, or a mark for because the project got so far before the guy wandered off for whatever reason?
Well, at the least, this explains why I suddenly stopped hearing about AtheOS after so much noise was made about it..
Does AtheOS's previous developer still use it on his home machine?
-super ugly ultraman
To "raise from the ashes" ("raise off the ashes" would be an acceptable alternative way to say this, since "off" and "from" are in this contxt synonyms) is an expression meaning that one thing has died, and another thing has arisen in its void.
The expression is a reference to the mythical Phoenix, which would periodically die and burst into flames, and a new Phoenix would be born among the ashes.
In this case, the implication is that AtheOS died in flames, but Syllable was born among the metaphorical "ashes", and is now some kind of reincarnation or successor to AtheOS.
"To Raise from the Ashes" is a trademark of Phoenix BIOS Technologies, incorporated. For more fun facts about the mythical Phoenix, you can visit your local library and read J.K. Rowling's excellent documentary in book form, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix", to be released in just four days.
NeXTSTEP looks quite nice to me as well. A helluva lot different than Motif.
Plenty of newer NeXT boxes and white hardware running NeXTSTEP or OpenStep were color. Even for copies of NS/OS on b/w machines, NeXT still paid the Pantone color licenses. NeXT was a platform that did many things very well. And when your display is greyscale, you better have accurate colors when you're going to be printing. Heck, back then, a Pantone license was a good idea on a color monitor. Apple's ColorSync existed before the first NeXT cube was released, though.
And Motif was designed with Windows 3.x in mind. I don't think it's close enough to think of Motif as a knock-off, but there are similarities that make it a bit uncomfy.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Why, then, is Syllable an ugly looking, instable OS?
Because Syllable is a development, alpha version. Ugly can and will be fixed in time. We inherited the GUI from AtheOS and thats how it looks. Why spend time and effort changing the look of the GUI when the GUI isn't complete?
Instability is inherent in the development process. Yes, we are very poor at testing before release, but that is because it is alpha quality. I don't have a release schedule, and there certainly are not enough users to form a FreeBSD style release team.
Release testing generally consists of me trying out common actions for about half an hour after a build. As we finalise and stablise API's we can build automated test harnesses and formalise a testing plan for new releases.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
"...he suggests that as easier-to-code interfaces like PS/2 and the floppy are rplaced with harder-to-code interfaces like USB, the end of the hobby OS may be at hand."
Why? At the very least, developers can use freely code from the BSDs with no strings attached. If the OS developers are planning on GPLing their code, they can pull code directly from Linux.
If using code from either of those OS's is unacceptable (say, the new OS is being written in a different language), the developers could actually read the BSD or Linux routines and use that as a starting point.
The Syllable API (And of course, the AtheOS API before that) was often compared to the BeOS API. It is not a clone and there are no plans to turn it into one, but it is certainly similiar. An application is built by deriving from a toolkit of C++ classes, which in turn talk to an application server.
So it is a lot like OpenBeOS in that respect, except that Syllable has much more development behind it and works now. We are also not trying to clone BeOS API by API; if it suits our purpose we can and will use something completely different (For example, BeOS had a user-space TCP stack. AtheOS and Syllable have always had a modular kernel space stack)
Syllable is also mostly under the [L]GPL, whereas OpenBeOS is MIT. Apart from the various idological reasons that don't interest me, Syllable can also draw on a large base of drivers available in E.g. Linux. Which is nice.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Ah. Your perception of Syllable is incorrect I'm glad to report.
:)
While a large part of the kernel has been written from scratch, there is nothing wrong with that. For the effort Kurt put into writing it, we have a kernel with a kernel space ELF loader and runtime linker, written with SMP support from day one, with an efficient micro kernel IPC mechanism. At the same time, he used code from Linux were it was beneficial. The allocator is essentially from Linux for example.
The terminal emulator (ATerm) was written by the author of AtheOS as well. It is not a lot of code and can be maintained by one person. The AEdit text editor was my very first application for Syllable, so that was hardly a huge time sink. The Web Browser uses Khtml as its rendering engine; way before Apple started on Safari!
A large majority of drivers come from Linux and X, along with some BSD and even Be Sample Code.
The appserver, GUI API and associated support applications are all written from scratch, yes. A lot of the lower level stuff is GNU or GPL'd software, we use a version of Glibc and the entire GNU toolchain for development, run Bash as the shell and offer the same basic toolset as Linux (E.g. GNU fileutils, textutils, shellutils, Perl, Python etc.)
So a large amount of stuff is reused. We only re-write were it makes sense to do so
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Motif is older than Windows 3.x. PCGEOS was developed at the same time as Windows 3.x, and shipped around the same time. It licensed Motif for its interface, which means Motif had to have already existed before Windows 3.x.
Sadly not. The best I can offer are the Doxygen docs of the GUI API That, the code itself and asking questions on the Syllable-Developer mailing list is the best way to find out how it works.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Well its not really from scratch. We already had AtheOS which most of us were already part of. I didn't do too much back then, more of just a lurker.
However, once Kurt abandoned AtheOS it seemed a shame to waste such a promising system.
From my own experience, I'm the manager of ABrowse our web browser. ABrowse is based off of KHTML which is a nightmare. I'm currently thinking of some drastic changes because I can't keep up with porting the new versions. I don't want to write a html render engine from scratch, but I am seriously thinking of stripping just about all the none render code out of it. So yeah, there is a point where sometimes it is better to start from scratch.
Well we don't have remote displays yet. However it is rather trivial to add that. As for right now, there are no great advantages over Linux or any of the BSDs. The the other hand, all of our developers listen to the users so any input is appreciated and noted.
We support just about everything that is posix compliant, so that pretty much covers the GNU tools.
As for building a system on top of already existant kernel, well thats what cosmoe is. Its the atheos api tuned to run beos apps, running on a linux kernel. Its kind of a kludge if you ask me. Our kernel while rather immature has some nice features. Its SMP friendly and is completely pre-emptive, the former not done by *BSD until recently and the latter being something Linux doesn't truly have.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
If you are interested in Syllable, here is an overview of Syllable 0.4.4.
Well, I've used Atheos once long ago and it was themeable, with some default themes derived from Amiga (that's Amiga, not NextStep) and BeOS. I did find the themes to be a little bit too "fat" (compared to Amiga itself, and I never liked the BeOS look -- at least not in Atheos or Linux). So no, I guess they don't try (= intend) to look like NextStep.
That the looks aren't all that much is another thing, though. But to just discuss taste -- I guess the users must decide here.
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
he used code from Linux were it was beneficial. The allocator is essentially from Linux for example.
and the design for Linux's slab allocator ripped off Solaris (see "UNIX Internals: The New Frontiers" by Uresh Vahalia).
cpeterso