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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.
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.