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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."
Please tell me that that IP stack on this thing is not called SkyNET.
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...
Screen shot
Basically RTFA! The whole test is done with VMWARE... also the screenshots are done using that.
My Stack Overflow user
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?
The minimum requirments are a pentium and 32MB of RAM.... And from the load time of the web page I think that web server is running on a that exact hardware.
Karma: Bad. Calmer, good.
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
30% will say "Who needs another OS when we have Linux."
25% will say "Why another OS project? He should rather concentrate on MySQL/fishing/stamp collection"
25% will say "So what, it's his damn time, he can do what the pleases."
25% will say "HA! You can't even do math! 30+25+25+25 != 100"
Sigged!
Would you or I do this? Probably not (I know I wouldn't), but I'll give this dude credit for what he has done here.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
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
Okay, come on... there is value to other OS projects, yes, linux is the big thing, and everyone should concentrate on it, yadda, yadda...
But, if people don't do other small OS's, or even dead end crazy projects, then a lot of stuff could be missed. For example if I'm going to write an OS, then I'd have to worry about a bootloader... Now let's say I write one from scratch... Great, a total waste, as me and maybe 4 other people on the planet will ever use it... But if LILO (or whatever the latest bootloader for Linux is), would have a problem, it's quite possible that my bootloader may have a fix for it, and then the experience gained from writing my own useless OS, would pay off by being used to fix the current popular OS.
And posting about these projects on slashdot may be what is required to get enough attention that someone examines it's functionality, and discovers that the useless project has something working, that their project does not...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Only if you want to stress-test your webserver. =^.^=
In all seriousness, though, it depends on the project. If it's something that you feel will go nowhere but would be useful if it went somewhere (and you feel you have the bandwidth to cope) then why not?
TiggsThe worst that can happen is that the editors will reject your article.
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
DOUBLE SLASHDOTTING!!!
Yes thats correct, we have successfully slashdotted two different sites in the same article! Keep up the good work and let's try for a triple slashdotting!!
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[-
QUIT STEALING OUR BANDWIDTH! =D
Reminds me of another "hobby OS" I ran into circa 1991 also developed by a single person. What was his name ..Linuz something. Ah yes Linuz Torousveld. Wonder what happened with that OS?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Why there is always somebody that comes with a screenshot when here is an announcement about a fscking Operating System?
I would be more interested in talking about the internals, not the eye candy (which is not part of the OS in any serious OS anyway).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
it wasn't reviewed on OSNews. Had it been, there would have been snide comments on package management, anti-aliased screen fonts, and the color scheme used for the 'Recycle Bin' icon. And Eugenia would have tried to build a custom version of GAIM, and failing dependencies would have caused another tantrum.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
No-one seems to have modded it up to a point where people might start actually seeing it.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
From what I understand it is "proprietary but gratis".
Just a few little question:
If we manage to slashdot all these sites all the time:
how come /. never gets /.'d? /. running over at /. to maintain /.'s high speed at all times allowing /. readers access? /. site so the /. site must be hammered at least as much as other sites...
What the hell are
Everyone must come through the
Karem
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
SkyOS's biggest benefit -- from what I hear, multiple SkyOS boxes across the nation could actually network together and form a pseudo-intelligent network-driven parallel processing system that could be used for scientific calculation, SETI, or even potentially combatting a very serious virus outbreak, if one was to occur. AND, because it'd be completely distributed, it'd be very hard to take it out with an attack on any of its nodes.
Surely such an idea has tremendous merit!
.... is the most disingenous comment in the history of /.
/. and you were not prepared for the slahsdotting? In which planet do you live? And gimme some of that stuff you are smoking.
You mean you posted something to
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
once they get it to the point where they think people will be able to contribute to it in a way that is meaningful to the core team. They are apprehensive about having to take patches/requests from the public yet. Or maybe they are embarrased at the state of the internals! :-)
In the meanwhile, they had the SDK and DDK which will get you very far.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
"Oh, and unlike some of the "out-of-the-box" linux distros...this one is completely free."
Nope, you are wrong. Source for SkyOS is not released or free in any way. Free beer, not free speech
Yes, but a man that wrote a whole OS by himself must have serious trouble working in a team.
So maybe its not such a good idea hiring him :)
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.
to quote the author, he "will never" release the source code. At least with a big company like Microsoft you've got some security that they're not going to suddenly shutdown -n and disappear. But if you're planning to invest your eggs in SkyOS as anything more than a toy, you're doing so without security, much like how BeOS users had with an OS from a small company.
SkyOS is receiving tons of attention. Whereas Syllable, which is being developed openly, under the GPL, and at a faster rate, is not. And why? Maybe because SkyOS's website burns through ~35gb of screenshot bandwidth per month, or its geekcooler or something. But it isn't fair to compare this project with Linux in 1991. Linus liberalised his licence from what it was originally to make it freer for others to use for their own purposes. Whereas SkyOS was relicenced and has withdrawn source-code availability with the de facto promise to "never" release it again.
Yes, but a man that wrote a whole OS by himself must have serious trouble working in a team.
:)
So maybe its not such a good idea hiring him
Actually, if you hire this guy, you can fire the team.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
1) VesaFB supports NVIDIA.
2) XFree86 supports NVIDIA.
3) NVIDIA supports Linux.
4) SkyOS does not fully support NVIDIA cards --- no hardware OpenGL.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
What happened to "Atheos" (it was called something like that). It was also a one-person effort to make a Unix-like system designed for the desktop, with integrated GUI. A few years ago that sounded very interesting, but nothing ever came of it. Not a good precedent for this project (unless this is the same project, it is hard to tell).
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. Perhaps XDrive will help here by making the driver interface cleaner. In any case this project sounds like it has some hardware acceleration, so maybe they will escape this trap.
Personally I am not thrilled with putting widgets into the OS. My feeling is that this locks GUI design and innovation. I would prefer a design where there were powerful graphics and event handling calls, so it is easy to write a widget, but the interface is designed so that it is obvious that you can write different widgets that have not yet been invented.
If the main developper dies, or scraps his box and all his backups, the whole project is sent to /dev/null.
All right, other developpers may have the source code but how many of them? Five? If two of them get children and stop working on SkyOS, another one dies, another gets arrested and the last one simply switches to another project, well... SkyOS will be pinin' for the fjords. Too risky for a big project like that.
Frankly, I just don't see why some developpers, especially with an OS project like this one, release softwares for free but not the source code. Call me paranoid but I wouldn't be surprised if huge chunks of GPL'd code is ever find in SkyOS.
All Hail Discordia. Hail Eris. Fnord.
"Installing SkyOS seems painless enough, assuming you already have experience with Linux or another Unix-type platform."
Heck... having your teeth pulled without anesthesia seems painless enough, assuming you already have experience with Linux or another Unix-type platform.
Oh, wait. This is a pro-*nix forum.
How 'bout:
"Having your teeth pulled without anestheisia seems painless enough, assuming you already have experience with or another -type platform."
That green slime had it coming.
Now they are calling it software I think (what I think don't mean squat though) in most cases you are allowed to make backup/archival copies of software.
I think the ROM images were in limbo because technially software but almost considered hardware (plug in, it works. Newer games using optical media, need to read the data into memory(hardware) to use it)
On a side "not necessary to protect your software", does this mean that A) Discs don't scratch, B) Incredible error recovery so scratches don't matter, or C) The discs aren't actually used for data at all, just to prove you purchased the game and the data magically gets into the Gamecube. or I guess another option: D) They will replace the disc at a significantly lower cost than you buying the game again @ retail (i.e. just shipping and handling).
Any body got any thoughts on this?
Even if right now SkyOS is a "maybe we'll open the source...later" project, I really like seeing new desktop options.
Part of that is because I'm sick of the same old discussion: "Is Linux ready for the desktop yet?" "No." "Yes." "NO!" "YES!" "Use OS X if you want a good desktop." "But Apple is as evil as MS!" etc.
The thing is, although the wide range of choices and features that Linux(as a whole) has steadily gained in are nice etc., they don't always help to advance it onto the desktop. An OS that is designed "light" and with the specific task of desktop use in mind from the beginning might be a more successful strategy than "Linux Distro X" vs. "Linux Distro Y," where both X and Y are doing a lot of the same things, and usually make stabs at trying to do everything, but neither are really good at one or two SPECIFIC things.
Of course, only time will tell whether a complementary solution is needed. Linux is already poised for dominance in a number of fields, but that doesn't make it the best choice in all of them. It may well only be "good enough" or "better than the others" until a more specialized solution comes along.
Consistency, accountability, and responsibility is something that you hardly get assured of with proprietary software. On the other hand I would argue that you actually have a better chance of getting these three values with Open Source and Free software.
Let's take consistency first (yes, there is no letter 'a' in that word). What kind of assurance do you have that your proprietary software will remain consistent with your needs? All you can do is take the developer's word for it, and trust that they won't force you into upgrades that contain features you don't want or don't need, and make the software less suited for you. Not a particularly strong assurance to me, and one that I see Microsoft along with many other proprietary software vendors routinely violate. For Free/Open Source Software on the other hand, you have the source code, and the right to change it, and you have a better chance of achieving consistency with your needs by either making the changes yourself or paying someone to make them for you.
How about accountability and responsibility? Let's see... Some proprietary software vendors (e.g. Microsoft) have EULAs that totally shirk this, and actually disclaim all accountability and responsibility for their software. Strike one. Other vendors may give this to you only at great price, because their privileged access to the source gives them a de facto monopoly in this. Strike two. Even if the vendor does give you the level of accountability and responsibility you require, what assurance do you have that they will continue to provide this for as long as you need it? The vendor could go bankrupt. They could get acquired by someone that has no interest in supporting their products. They could just simply and unilaterally decide that it's no longer worth it for them to go on supporting the software you're using. You've basically tied the accountability and responsibility for your software to the fortunes and whims of its vendor. If they decide to screw you, all you can do is bend over. If they eventually get screwed themselves, then so are you. Strike three. Open Source / Free software suffers from none of these problems. Nobody has a monopoly on supporting OSS/FS, and you have a much better chance of getting the level of accountability and responsibility that you need by taking your choice of support from many possible sources. If all else fails, the fact that you have the source and the freedom to modify it for your own needs gives you the ability to provide that support yourself should it come to that.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.