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Syllable 0.5.4 Released
AtheOSParrot writes "Version 0.5.4 of the Syllable operating system has been released. The lightweight, BeOS-alike is aimed squarely at finally realising the dream of bringing an easy-to-use, free software desktop to everyday users. 0.5.4 is a significant milestone in this direction with the integration of the new desktop, which is completely unimpeded by any legacy X-Windows foundations or toolkits beneath. This is no tin-pot bootloader with bitmaps snapped on; other features include SMP, networking, ATA/ATAPI, audio & video, 2D acceleration, GCC, USB & a 64-bit journaled FS with attributes. With desktop Linux still not having dented the 1% mark, will Syllable be the one to do to Windows what Firefox has done to IE? Also reported on OSNews.com, Golem.de and Linuxfr.org."
I just installed this under Virtual PC (dont laugh).. Ok first off 5.4 doesnt work you have to use the 5.3 then upgrade to 5.4.. Additionally you need to append the flags
uspace_end=0xf7ffffff enable_ata_dma=false ata_pci_force_generic=true
on ther kenel line for grub.
GCC & the other tool chains have to be downloaded etc etc..
What do I think?
Well for starters the web browser doesnt like sourceforge, so downloading the packages is a pain. Secondly it's slow. Thirdly I tried to build UAE under it, and GCC wend Zombie....
This looks nice, but it's hardly stable... maybe in a few more iterations it'll shape up.
The latest Development Newsletter just arrived too, summarizing recent developments in the community. It's a great way to keep up-to-date with the project -- no need to trawl through the mailing lists.
See September's issue, and more, here:
http://msa.section.me.uk/sdn/
Additionally, a Flash demo can be found on this page.
http://syllable.org.nyud.net:8090/ Just in case. I don't suppose their server is running on Syllable yet? That would be cool.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
The 'LiveCD' download link for Syllable doesn't have any files currently.
Syllable is a fork of AtheOS, which at the time was a sigh of relief compared to the Linux desktop experience (responsive UI with font smoothing vs. sluggish UI with ugly bitmap fonts). It also had some technical merits such as the 64-bit journaled filesystem, a user-friendly partitioning tool (could it resize partitions?), and an API that many people liked.
Nowadays, the Syllable advantage is much less pronounced. The API is still there (efforts are underway for implementing similar APIs on Linux), Linux has gotten journaled filesystems, X now supports font smoothing, and performance has increased a lot.
I agree, though, that many of those aimed-at-the-desktop projects have craptacular UIs. IMO, they had better take the example of NEXTSTEP, which I still find about the most usable GUI out there.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
This isn't an atempt to revive BeOS. Syllable is a fork of the old AtheOS project (http://atheos.cx/). What is important about this project is that they are just taking everything one step at a time. So often there are projects that talk in such grand terms and then it becomes too big for people to grasp as a project. Syllable just continues to release new versions of their software and that's important.
The article should probably have said that it seemed similar to the author. It isn't meant to be similar, but it can be seen that way. It isn't meant to be a clone like Haiku or BlueEyedOS or any of the others. It is its own entity. There are similarities which are probably because it is a modern non-UNIX OS design. There aren't many of them. Everything else seems to date from the Windows era or older or be UNIX-like. I'm sure that's an overgeneralization, but comparisons to Be were kinda inevitable if for no other reason than they are both designed for a GUI and not command line, they are both designed to use C++ in a simple way to make application writing easier, they are both meant for the desktop and not the server, they were both designed with journaled filesystems in mind, etc.
I think the similarities are simply a product of designing something in today's day that is meant only for the desktop.
It was once suggested that DEC by Apple. Use their Vax Servers and Mac as the desktop. (Vax as a big Mac?)
.
Could a Syllable desktop world with Linux Servers become a working combo.
Since applications in the FOSS world can be recompiled/ported/developed to run on both, for those applications it makes sense to have on both.
For those how want both on the same system there can use VM applications to run
Syllable on Linux or Linux on Syllable. Or they could be even more closely integrated.
More than that; BeOS hardware and network support was shocking.
I got a secondhand copy of the last release of BeOS and installed it... and discovered that it had no driver for the network card I had (IIRC an 8139 chipset card) and I had to boot into Linux, scour the internet for a driver, copy it onto a floppy, boot into BeOS and install the driver.
Then I discovered that BeOS had no support for NFS nor windows filesharing so I couldn't copy anything else onto it from the network shares where I'd downloaded more BeOS bits.
And (again IIRC) no sshd in BeOS?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Actually, most of your common hardware probably WOULD be supported -- it's just that the CD-ROM driver still has a few bugs. That's really the main thing stopping it booting on some machines.
The only thing Syllable has in common with Linux is the fact that they are both computer operating systems. Yes we're using Redhat's Bluecurve icons, and prior to that we were using some KDE icons. If some talented artist steps up to the plate and creates some icons specifically for Syllable, I'm sure they would seriously be considered as replacements.
You must have not used beos long enough to realize everything you've complained about is able to be downloaded from bebits.
They are a laughing stock everywhere but America.
Harley riders are buying into a marketing concept, the bikes are considered posing devices. Which would fit in with the predeliction for OSX I suppose.
You want a real bike? BMW, Triumph, Honda, Suzuki, Kawasaki, Yamaha, Ducati, Aprilia, there's plenty of choice of makers who don't recycle 60 year old crap decade after decade.
Deleted
Actually, no. You might be thinking of Haiku.
The real story of the name Syllable is this:
I hate choosing names for projects. When I decided to fork AtheOS I knew we needed a name, but I did not want to use the old and hackneyed "SomethingOS" formula that so many other small OS's were using. I also quickly realised that all the really good OS's used short names, usually two or three simple syllables E.g. Windows, Unix, BeOS.
The word syllable is three syllables. So there we go, my search was over and I could get on with more important things.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
I have to use OSX quite a bit during the past few weeks. From listening to the Slashdot blather, I would have assumed it was several orders of magnitudes easier than KDE/GNOME with a correspondingly greater degree of flexibility and power.
Hah!
While is was a bit easier than KDE/GNOME, it certainly did not have more flexibility or power. By "a bit easier", I really mean "marginally easier". Some areas of the desktop were actually more complicated than what I was used to.
Don't mistake me for ragging on OSX. I am not. I am merely pointing out that it isn't the instinctually intuitive interface everyone declares it to be.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
You can't fix the things that I'd like to see fixed within X, because they're baked in to the design. The application is responsible for the operation of the user interface in the most miniscule detail, but it has to manage it through a narrow channel that's better suited for a much higher level protocol. It's not terrible, but there's all kinds of things that you can't do within the confines of pretty much any current window system, and X is more restrictive than most.
...). But most other modern window systems tend to retain more information about more objects all the way to the rendering engine. About the best you can do to render an arbitrary X window on a modern GPU is to render it into a texture... if you want to take advantage of the GPU for more than speeding up that 2d rendering you have to use a different API (PEX, for example) in the application... and *that* requires rewriting the toolkit to use the new API or have a window managed by one toolkit wrapped about another.
For example, it specifies the behaviour of drawing operations down to the pixel level, so that updates by overlays work well. With today's GPUs, a window system that operated on GPU objects (textures, surfaces, etc) rather than pixels and did updates by changing the list of displayed objects would work better. Oh, and it would be possible to make it work better than X over a network as well.
Most window systems have similar legacy issues, of course, and the ones that are built around really high level objects or GPU-like operations are obscure (Berlin, NeWS,
One way around this is to not write an "X11" application, but to write an application for a toolkit, and then implement that toolkit in each window system that provides the operations it needs. The Tk library takes that approach... an application using Tk (whether in Tcl or using another language binding) handles windows the same way natively under X, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, or Windows.
But this isn't adding something to X, it's breaking out of it.
There is no performance penalty when you are not using the feature. Yes, when you are running the client and the server on different computers, you will notice some lag depending on how fast your connection is.
That's not what he's talking about.
When you are running the client and the server on the same computer, there is NO PERFORMANCE PENALTY. Period. The client and server talk using *NIX domain sockets, which is FAST.
So his point is this: there is no advantage at all to designing a desktop that doesn't offere network transparency. When you aren't using the feature there is NO PERFORMANCE PENALTY, and when you want the feature it is there. And as he noted, X11 just gets cooler and cooler now that the XFree86 guys aren't in the loop anymore.
The Basic CD is the total, complete, 100% install-and-go CD. The only difference between the Premium CD and the Basic CD is that the Premium CD also includes all of the available software packages and a CVS snapshot; all stuff you can just download from Sourceforge. There is nothing on the Premium CD which is not directly downloadable from Sourceforge.
The Premium CD is intended for those who do not have fast internet connections and do not want to download 300Mb+ of files for a complete Syllable development environment. It is not a super-sekrit World Domination And Evil Closed Proprietery Binary Only CD Mu Ha Ha Ha [strokes white cat]
You were so quick to judge that you jumped to a very wrong conclusion. Please do download the CD and give it a go!
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Either this is a badly written troll, or you really need to drink your morning coffee before posting.
a) The parent was discussing LOCAL network connections, not remote.
b) X works perfectly on 10Mb/s -- try it sometime. Sure, I wouldn't want to run gimp or mplayer like that, but e.g. surfing the web is fine. X certainly doesn't need 100Mb/s, and even mplayer will run fine at that speed (though of course you're better to use mplayer's built in streaming and run it locally). There is no X app which needs more than 100Mb (can Doom III run on X? that might), your theory of requiring gigabit is just crazy.
c) NoMachine is free, or rather 99.5% of NoMachine is free (the libraries that do everything). Sure, a point-and-click app is available for cash but a point-and-click app is also freely available (using the same free libraries).
You know, I was used to Windows (mostly NT4), and I got a Mac because I heard so much good about OS X. I was lost, angry, disapointed. I hated my Mac. Why did I spend over 2000€ for this piece of crap? No, seriously...after two weeks of usage, I learnt that my mind had been deformed by Micosoft Windows. I let Windows loose, and now the OSX interface makes sense. For me it took two weeks of getting used to.
And you know what? I gave my Mac to my sister, a "Jane Sixpack" as we say in this place. She didn't ask any question. She was surfing, used iPhoto and iMovie, and whatnot.
You fail to see that once you learnt something you are inevitably linked to it. "unformatted" people don't have this problem. Ask my sister....
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
What are you talking about? All of the sourcecode is in CVS and licensed under OSI approved licenses, with most of the code under the GPL and LGPL.
Where did you ever get the idea that Syllable prevented free access to the source code?
Syllable : It's an Operating System