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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.
...for the BeOS and Eugenia Loli-Queru flamage to begin.
will Syllable be the one to do to Windows what Firefox has done to IE?
:P
I sure hope not!
Would be a shame to have all the countless hours spent installing my Gentoo, go to waste...
Sigs are for the weak.
All right, everybody. Brace yourselves for a flood of "what's wrong with X-Windows foundations or toolkits?!" posts!
The owls are not what they seem
Noting like the one liner comments thrown out there as quickly as possible purely to get some free mode points getting thrown away.
.54 release, AND its making significant, rapid progress. Shouldn't you be saying something encouraging like "THANKS GUYS FOR BRING An OPEN SOURCE, X-WINDOWS FREE OS TO THE DESKTOP!"
Gee, just because anyone aims to do anything doesn't mean they will actually succeed! Its not new unless it is a 100% finished product!
Come on. Its a milestone release. Quit functional for a
Or maybe "Keep up the good work"
Sheesh, no wonder people don't finish their work, pessimists get you down!
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Nope, won't be making any real waves. Face it, BeOS is as dead as the Amiga and attempts to revive it are equally doomed.
Why?
Because there just isn't any burning need for it. Windows has all the users that money can buy, UNIX has the hearts and minds of all the elite power users and the research crowd while the Mac has the fashion police in it's camp. What demographic wants to be Be compatible? What major software base is unlocked by a Free implementation? None.
Democrat delenda est
Edmund:
Yes, another great Christmas tradition: explaining the rules eight times to the Thicky Twins. The round hasn't in fact started yet. It's got to be a specific book. For instance, if it was The Bible, I would go like that [holding up two fingers] to indicate that there are two syllables in it...
Prince:
Two what?
Edmund:
Two syllables.
Prince:
Two silly bulls? I don't think so, Blackadder -- not in The Bible. I can remember a fatted calf, but, as I recall, that was quite a sensible animal. Oh, ah! It's it, um, er, Noah's Ark, with the, er, two pigs, two ants, and two silly bulls? Is that it?
Edmund:
Two syllables.
Prince:
What?
Edmund:
Look, we're getting confused; let's start again, shall we?
Prince:
No, let's not, Blackadder. I think the whole game's getting a bit sylla, to be honest. How about a nice Christmas story instead?
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Why is it that all these "new" operating systems (read skyOS, Syllable, etc) always just look like some crappy KDE theme? I mean, if you're going to write an entirely new operating system, and then just use *nix apps on top of it, why even bother?
Linux on the desktop is here. It's happening as we speak and it's fine.
This isn't some "far away dream" to "someday" have Linux work as a desktop OS. It's here now. People all around the world use it as their sole OS on the desktop and get along fine with it.
So the FUD of "Linux isn't "here" yet on the desktop" is just nonsense.
It's here there and everywhere...all you have to do is open your eyes. But I suppose if it doesn't work exactly like Windows then it can't be "here" yet. Then I guess OS/X isn't "here" yet either.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
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.
While on the topic of alternatives for the desktop, what's happening in QNX-land? QNX is a very nice system, POSIX-compliant, based on a microkernel, nice GUI, good scalability, several open-source titles available. I haven't heard any news about it in a while, though. Is anyone working on an open-source clone yet?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
which is completely unimpeded by any legacy X-Windows foundations
Or legacy applications or games...
Nah, I'm just messing, I wish them luck. Maybe I'll try it out, I always had a thing for obscure OSes.
The most common complaint about Syllable I have seen is the one that I also have, it just doesn't boot natively on my hardware. An OS that won't boot on a stock Asus motherboard with a AthlonXP 2400, Radeon9000 and plain ol' IDE drives is not going to make a dent even with Linux users.
:-P
I would love to try my hand at helping to port software over, even if it is nothing more than working on helping to get Python ported over and write native bindings for Syllable. But I don't have the time to hack away at a hobbyist OS that won't even boot on common hardware. If it only works in VMWare, it might as well not work at all for me. Even the hacked new distros of BeOS booted on that hardware for God's sake!
The syllable guys need to spend more of their time working on getting such basic necessities as actually having it bootable on all common hardware before they even think of challenging Windows. Firefox is a bad project to compare Syllable to because Firefox is built on an incredibly mature foundation that is over 5 years and millions of dollars of corporate R&D money in the making. Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't Mozilla proper actually closing in on 6-7 years old now?
What would really help is if some of the Linux kernel hackers would take a break from Linux and work on the Syllable kernel. OSS does need a plan B for the desktop, and going from Fedora or Mandrake to Debian sadly doesn't count
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I think that Syllable or not, thinking of an alternative OS that has the same relationship to Windows as FireFox has to IE is exactly the right mentality.
FireFox was the browser that was supposed to be targeted at people knowledgable enough to install it, who we're limited by the IE experience.
When we talk about Desktop Linux for example, we often talk about "easy enough for my grandma to use" which is precicely the wrong litmus test. I've been idlling on a linux distro at home some, and my goal has always been to make the Linux distro that all the XP power users want to use.
Think about it. Every windows user I know who ran or runs IE has a popup blocker installed, the google toolbar, AdAware, and has half a dozen windows open most of the time. FireFox is perfect for them, because it was targeted at them. Grandma (well, not mine, she won't touch the computer, and my grandfather is a computer geek) will just click on the three icons she knows how to use - Linux, Windows, SkyOS, Syllable, Macintosh, it's all pretty colors to her. So don't target her!
I've got an OS here. It's multiuser design makes it hard to get viruses or for your sister to install spyware which screws over everybody else. It comes with a firewall, it comes with antivirus, it comes with a multiprotocol instant messeging client, it comes with a tabbed browser, it comes with a pop up blocker, it comes with a spam filter, it comes with a word processor, it comes with a spreadsheet, it comes with an image editor. It comes with all of the things you pirate to make your pirate copy of WinXP not suck, all nicely polished and working together out of the box. It's legal, it's free, it's simple, it's featureful. It doesn't dumb things down for your Grandma, it doesn't pander you with saturated colors and friendly but unhelpful error messages, it doesn't talk down to you for not already understanding everything about it. It's the OS for people who care what OS they're running.
Build it and they will come. Be it Syllable, SkyOS, Linux, BSD, or hell, Windows.
I have been using Linux off and on as a desktop, but have been using MacOS X as my main desktop for about 2 years now. You can't even compare the two. Linux with KDE or GNOME is, no offense to those projects, barely a 9 year old child's bicycle with training wheels, while OSX is a Harley. Linux is barely at the point that Windows was with Windows 2000, and it isn't showing much signs of competing with XP-SP2 and Longhorn.
.app bundle to the hard disk, with Linux you either have to use some vendor specific tool to manage the myriad dependencies or run rpm manually. Linux is a great desktop, provided you want to only use the software that you are given by the distributor and/or have someone to maintain it for you. OSX, all that is quite unnecessary.
OSX is a very fast desktop oriented OS and it is the only desktop OS capable of really competing in a market whose needs go beyond the strictly utilitarian, like the home market. When a complete novice wants to install something from a CD on OSX all they do is drag the
I like Linux, but it really isn't there yet. The majority of the people I know at least, would be scared to death of it.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
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.
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?
No it won't, because Linux has something that took it a lot of time to achieve: mindshare. At best, Syllable can be a training OS that is unencumbered by Unix's long history to develop things that haven't been done before. Then those ideas can be ported to Windows and/or Linux.
Having said all that, I hope the Syllable team can prove me wrong.
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But the best thing to do with it now is abandon it.
To make an OS useful requires a ton of device drivers. These guys have barely scratched the surface of what's needed. Even today, after thousands of man-years of effort, GNU/Linux hasn't achieved the level of driver support that Windows has.
Abandoning X has the consequence that lots of apps will not run on Syllable. Seems a giant leap backwards. Presumably, Syllable is aimed only at home users who just have one PC? Somebody who has a LAN is going to want X. I couldn't work without it.
The free-software community has barely enough resources to support one OS really well. GNU/Linux needs all the work we can put into it. Trying to promote a competitor will, if successful, divide our resources and make it much harder to establish any free operating system as a serious competitor to Windows on the desktop.
X is flexible, configurable, extendable, and easy to make do what you want.
Giving novice users too much rope makes it easy to hang themselves.
A typical Linux desktop these days is getting pretty crufty. There are a lot of configuartion files (a good number of which are related to X), a plethora of files in a number of locations, and a mish-mash of scripts, loaders, and utilities.
Diverse widget sets are great; diverse font rendering systems are great, diverse printing system is great.
But all those things are not great for general-purpose novice level computing.
Ahh, the spirit of open source:
Developer: "I'm working on Y. It is a better version of X!"
OSS community: "You foolish mortal! You should be working on X! Not Y! You can't possibly best X!"
Developer: "I like working on Y though!"
OSS community: "You're just wasting your time, work on X and make it like Y!"
There are very specific reasons people don't use it, X-windows being one of those big reasons.
I call bullshit.
Perhaps it's cool for the Slashbots of the world to keep complaining about X. You've been doing it for years. You've been complaining about it while not noticing that X has been improving by leaps and bounds lately -- particularly now that some innovative people are back at the helm of X.Org and FreeDesktop.Org. There's virtually no performance penalty for network transparency, there's all that cool alpha compositing stuff in there now, and some very sophisticated desktops have been built on top of it. X IS NOT A PROBLEM.
In fact, by building a new operating system that doesn't have the X Window System in it, all you're doing is throwing away the existing pool of applications. The "average user" doesn't care how the window system was built; he only cares whether his applications run. And run they do, every time you boot up one of the millions of desktop Linux systems already in existence.
The only reason Linux has not yet penetrated the desktop market in double-digit percentages is because of the chicken-and-egg problems surrounding application development vs. end user take-up. It's happening, but it's happening very slowly. And it's not going to happen with a BeOS knockoff, because that reduces your application pool to almost zero.
True, Linux has a few more technology hurdles to overcome, such as automatic detection and mounting of various types of removable storage, and these problems are currently being addressed by projects like D-Bus. We're just about at the point of pulling past Microsoft in the desktop ease-of-use department. The problems are all people-related now.
If the marketshare of Windows is going to fall, it's going to fall to Linux and Mac, not to some BeOS knockoff. Stop deluding yourself.
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Its easy to look at it and pick holes (and I can see a lot of holes to pick from the comments about tar and attributes onwards) but it is still a great way to learn to program and to do stuff.
What would have happened if everyone told Linus "there's already Windows, Minix, Hurd, OMU.. why bother' ?
Alan
Sorry, it IS here. Just because it doesn't act like OSX doesn't mean anything. No, it's not OSX...so what?
Does everything have to behave like everything else? OSX is very elegant...so what? I enjoy KDE...I think it's very elegant. Who's right and who's wrong?
OSX is right for you. KDE is right for me. But just because OSX is a nice UI doesn't mean everything else is crap.
And more to the point, Linux is the Harley...where you can tinker with it and customize it totally to become anything you want. While OSX is more like a crotch-rocket Ninja or whatever the kids are riding now adays. Very sleek, very fast...but can't really be totally (and I mean totally) customized to where you want it.
Thanks for the analogy...you just had it mixed up. Glad I could set you straight.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
You don't want the hoops, don't use it.
The hoops are a feature.
They're designed to make the OS as customizable as possible. This is why it was originally referred to as a "metadistribution" - so customizable that you can even port it to cygwin and OSX.
Less hoops mean less more is done automatically, which means less is customizable.
Put up with the hoops and the users, developers, and documentation are more than willing to help you through them.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
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 wish that more of these small os groups would get together and create 1 independant OS from MS and Unix. They all seem to follow the same general ideas the Syllable or BeOS have... give the user lots of power, a new non-X display core and make it quick. But this all seems like a country divided. Nothing is ever going to take off with all of these small groups.
If the leaders of a few of these groups would get together and work on one project, there's a slim chance that it might get somewhere. If I were going to try to organize something, I'd be looking seriously at OpenBeOS, as it has all the API documentation nicely created for it. But hey, it's never going to happen, and MS will continue to rule the desktop, with Linux being a lowly contenter waiting in the wings, never to really get a chance.
kiwi
When a complete novice wants to install something from a CD on OSX all they do is drag the .app bundle to the hard disk,
Complete novices don't install applications on their machines at all--they use whatever comes preinstalled. That's why both Apple and PC vendors sell machines with entire software suites preinstalled.
with Linux you either have to use some vendor specific tool to manage the myriad dependencies or run rpm manually.
There is nothing to "manage": the major Linux distributions handle all the dependencies for you. That's a big advantage Linux has over both Windows and Macintosh.
Linux is a great desktop, provided you want to only use the software that you are given by the distributor
Yes, that's quite right. And unlike Macintosh, Linux vendors give their users single-stop solutions for all their software needs.
OSX, all that is quite unnecessary.
Installing and maintaing software on OS X is a lot of work: for most third party applications, you have to manually download, install, and update applications. If there are dependencies, you have to track those down manually as well.
Worse, unlike Windows, Macintosh doesn't even have a single, consistent way of installing or removing packages.
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)