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Walking Through SkyOS 5.0 Beta
Hexydes writes "TechIMO has published the first preview of the next-generation SkyOS platform. The article includes a first-look at what users can expect in the next version of SkyOS, a review of how development has progressed from previous versions, and many screenshots." SkyOS is a free operating system for x86 systems; it looks very polished for being "mainly (99.9%) a one man project."
With no clear advantage over other free unixes, why is this hobbyOS getting so much attention? i tried a beta disc a few months back, and i didn't see anything special...i mean, a one man OS is impressive, but i can't see anyone actually using it...
It seems that x86 is on its way out the door, and 64bit is on its way in.
Is there a 64bit solution in development, or is this yet another project to keep our old hardware useful?
Yes, it is hard enough to get Linux on the desktop. First, this isn't Linux. It's like it just like it's like all the other unices. The entire thing is written from scratch. Including the windowing system and all the GUI stuff. It is not compatible with Linux either. However, they are working on a Linux emulation program.
Anyway, the reason this thing is good is because it looks good. I think the menu has icons that are a bit large and all, but otherwise it looks very nice. There are other Linux distros that look very nice as well, but they are difficult to install for someone that hasn't used Linux before. Of course, it would be best to install an OS without a 50 page manual. So, therefore we eliminate quite a few of the best linux distros. The Linux distros that are super easy to isntall generally end up running KDE or Gnome by default, which are slow. If SkyOS is what it is, then the GUI will be faster and more intuitive.
I look forward to seeing how it all works out, and if I can find my 3GB hdd somewhere, I will install it and play with it - though it'll be hard to beat the speed of my fluxbox, but this one sure looks a hell of a lot better.
Oh, and unlike some of the "out-of-the-box" linux distros...this one is completely free.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
I see a couple "problems" (well, OK, they're just gripes of mine, so take that for what it's worth):
1) It's not free-as-in-speech. I take a dimmer view of projects that aren't open and have already taken a firm stand that they will *never* be open. Coupling this with some allegations of *possible* GPL violations (which were covered in the last SkyOS story), and it just gives me a bad feeling
2) I just don't see anything here to get excited about. Kudos to the author for doing this all on his own, that's great... but without something new and exciting to offer, it's just a toy project at best. I'd rather see innovative minds like this throw their weight behind projects that we do need (like better Linux games <g>).
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
I'm sure there are some people who are happy about this project, but showing off screenshots of you 'illegally' playing a Nintendo title on an emulator probably isn't the right thing to do.
-]Phreak Out[-
This is kind of an interesting post from one of the SkyOS guys. Even being a small 'one-man' OS, it seems that people get mired in politics these days.
From the /. FAQ:
Slashdot's new co-location site is now at Andover.Net's own (pinky finger to the mouth) $1 million dedicated data center at the Exodus network facility in Waltham, Mass [...] All boxes are networked together through a Cisco 6509 with 2 MSFCs and a Cisco 3500 so we can rearrange our internal network topology just by reconfiguring the switch. Internet connectivity to/from the outside world all flows through an Arrowpoint CS-800 switch which acts as both a firewall load balancer for the front end Web servers.
The Hardware: 5 load balanced Web servers dedicated to pages; 3 load balanced Web servers dedicated to images; 1 SQL server; 1 NFS Server.
All the boxes are VA Linux Systems FullOns running Debian (except for the SQL box). Each box (except for the SQL box) has LVD SCSI with 10,000 RPM drives. And they all have 2 Intel EtherExpress 100 LAN adapters.
The company I used to work for was co-located at the Exodus network facility, and I've been in it a couple of times. It is, in a word, awesome. The security is tighter than Ft. Knox. They usually don't let you past the front "desk" unless you've got a good reason. (By "desk" I mean a tightly secured room with heavy glass, steel doors, a million cameras on you). They make you wear trackable badges when you enter the building. You're instructed to not look at Altavista's boxen (which were also located at Exodus, at least when I saw it). Of course everyone looks anyway. The drool factor on these systems cannot be measured in simple liters. The battery backup system alone is massive, and there's something like 3 redundancies for each system. All the boxes are inside steel cages, most of the cooler systems use optical data transfer... There's enough heavy-iron Cisco in the building to grill yourself up a pancake the size of Texas. (Oh, that's crisco).
In other words, not IIS with a cracked copy of MS SQL running off XP Pro on an AMD Thunderbird.
But I think one thing that killed Atheos is the same thing that killed almost any alternative to X: inability to support any modern graphics cards at any resolution higher than VESA. Unfortunatley this information is locked up in X drivers that are so tightly integrated with internal complexities of X that it is impossible to extract and reuse it, despite the open source nature.
Syllable has drivers for the following graphics cards with full 2D acceleration, and the ones marked with an asterisk also support video overlays (Xv in XFree86)
- S3 Virge
- S3 Savage IX/MX
- Trident video (VLB & PCI)
- Matrox Millenium & Gx00 cards
- ATI Mach64*
- SiS 3xx/Xabre*
- nVidia TNT/GeForce*
- nVidia GeForceFX*
In fact the only notable omisions are the ATi Radeon, S3 Trio & Intel Extreme (i810), and I'm confident we'll have some support for those chipsets soon.Porting drivers from XFree86 is not that difficult and lack of specs is a problem, but not as bad as you might think.
Syllable : It's an Operating System