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Walking Through SkyOS 5.0 Beta

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the shades-of-atheos dept.

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."

2 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. hobby os by wed128 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  2. Re:Atheos by Vanders · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Development of AtheOS stalled for various reasons. Syllable was created over a year and a half ago by Henrik, Rick & myself to take the AtheOS codebase and open it up for further development. So while AtheOS itself is dead, the code and its spirit lives on quite nicely in Syllable. Some more developers have joined us (Arno and Kaj, with submissions from other developers such as Micheal Krugger and Hilary Cheng) We've developed the original AtheOS 0.3.7 codebase rapidly and released Syllable 0.5.2 only last week. I'd suggest you take a look at the Changelogs or just try it out to get an idea of how much work we have put into it.

    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