Posted by
samzenpus
on from the growing-everyday dept.
Proph3t writes "The up and coming operating system, SkyOS has just announced the ports of Thunderbird and Firefox, both in their 1.0 stable versions. Moreover, they will be releasing a 30-page guide on how to port these two excellent Mozilla applications to alternative operating systems soon."
Re:Slashdotted in the mysterious future?
by
Daniel+Ellard
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I tried going to SkyOS to find out WTF it is, down already?
Search engines are your friends...
Anyone else care to tell me why this OS is of any relevance?
Because someone has the gumption to put together their own OS. This is how linux got started. Maybe it's irrelevant, or maybe it's not, but you've got to respect the attempt.
-- Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
Re:Slashdotted in the mysterious future?
by
richie2000
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· Score: 2, Funny
I am a betta tester and i can tell you that it looks really good.
Re:Slashdotted in the mysterious future?
by
djdavetrouble
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· Score: 2, Funny
Apparently they need to port Apache as well
-- music lover since 1969
Re:Slashdotted in the mysterious future?
by
Megane
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree... what the world doesn't need now is another closed-source, proprietary (in the sense of "not designed to be compatible with anything else"), desktop operating system. Windows NT is the last one that had any chance, and even that was designed with some compatibility with an already existing operating system. OS/2 and BeOS died in the desert. Apple tried multiple times to make a successor to MacOS: Pink/Taligent, PowerOpen, and Copeland. Only a reverse takeover by NeXT giving them a Unix-based OS succeeded.
Right now the only major desktop or server operating system that isn't based on the Unix model is Windows NT/2K/XP, and that one is only around because it's an 8000 pound gorilla thanks to running so many legacy apps from DOS/95/98.
IMHO, the only market where there is room for an original operating system is the Embedded space, which includes PDAs.
Re:Slashdotted in the mysterious future?
by
squiggleslash
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'd be happy with something not Unix based, as long as it's an open system - open in the sense of being open source/free software, expandable, etc. It needs to support TCP/IP, and it has to be mainstream enough to not cause massive problems with the concept of porting software. If AROS had more drivers and had memory protection, I'd be tempted by it because the UI works the way I want a computer to work.
But SkyOS isn't really it. It's a nice design, apparently, and it's got a mainstream enough design to make porting far from impossible (as this article shows), but it's proprietary (I can't make modifications to it or support myself) and it doesn't have the support of a large organization that'll be around for years.
The SkyOS fan club might want to look at Atheos. There, again, was an operating system developed by a single individual to furfill his vision. He then, for reasons unknown, dropped out of sight.
Thankfully, for Atheos users, he'd taken the precaution of GPL'ing the system. So Atheos users were able to support themselves, eventually making an official fork of the no-longer-maintained system, and continue development.
I use Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and OpenBSD. The former is proprietary but supported by a group that's not going to go away. The latter two are open and support for either's not going to go away. I have moral issues with the former, but for now, it's a good system and from a practical perspective, there's no issue with continuing to use it. SkyOS doesn't really fit as either, and past experience of pointing this out shows that, by and large, SkyOS's major online advocates are a bunch of loud-mouthed jerks who'll accuse anyone of being a free software "zealot" for pointing out the obvious (even when, as I did then and continue to do now, I said it was a choice between having major, guaranteed, commercial support or making it free software.)
So I can't really use it in the hope that if something goes wrong the SkyOS people will do the right thing and find a way to get users the support they need. I don't think they will, they're ideologically opposed to doing so. And because of that, they've created practical barriers to anyone who wants to use it for anything but the most trivial purposes.
-- You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Pretty amazing stuff
by
sowdog81
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· Score: 2, Insightful
the os has come quite far. Supposedly done mainly by 1 guy. I'd hug myself if i could write something that boots up.
Re:Pretty amazing stuff
by
guhknew
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What's even more amazing is that I saw it progressing from its infancy. I remember first hearing about it from the guy who wrote it on the now defunct os-dev.isa.net.au message board. It wasn't much to begin with, but even at the time I was always impressed by how much they had accomplished. It's been a long time since I've checked its progress and I can say with some certainty that I would never have expected it to progress as far as it has.
Getting the userbase
by
KiloByte
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, for the ordinary granny-type user, a web browser and a mail client is all what's important. So, this very move gave them a non-negligible piece of usability.
-- The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Why is this significant?
by
Agret
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Beacuse it is showing that it is not difficult to port Mozilla Thunderbird & Firefox to your Operating System of choice. It also adds more to the user base beacuse the OS is shipping with a good browser rather than a hopeless one (You all know what I mean!)
-- Have you metaroderated recently?
Mirrored files
by
GrAfFiT
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· Score: 3, Informative
Never ceases to amaze me
by
sethadam1
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· Score: 5, Insightful
...nothing particularly exciting..
I love the gumption of Slashdotters. Such an arrogance to everything. A guy decides to more or less code an entire OS by himself, ports nearly all the apps, and has a running OS that does things in a pretty unique way, and some holier-than-thou nerd, with, I might add, zero credentials that we know of, immediately dismisses it. No wonder OSS gets a bad rap, this is the attitude of our citizens.
Re:Never ceases to amaze me
by
Jugalator
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· Score: 4, Insightful
But why would it be exciting?
Yes, it's a great job on his part, few of us here would be able to pull it off, but why should we get excited? What does it offer? Just because someone doesn't get excited about it doesn't mean he dimisses his work. Heck, it might be a very powerful OS. But it's commercial. And it has basically no software developed for it, with little reason to believe it should increase in popularity, considering the already well established competition. To me it needs to offer something unique to be something else than a hobby project. And as long as it's that, why should the general public be excited? Please correct me if I'm wrong though.
-- Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Re:Never ceases to amaze me
by
Momoru
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Personally I think things like SkyOS are MORE exciting then *nix based systems. Just because linux etc are open source doesn't make it the best. Its still basically based on a 30 year old operating system. I really like the idea of a system written from scratch, and although it would be nice if it were open source, i don't see anything wrong with another commercial competitor. Just the fact that he was able to port Firefox "easily" makes it seem that he has put some thought into making an OS that will support common applications.
Re:Never ceases to amaze me
by
IdleTime
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· Score: 2, Insightful
But it's commercial.
I just love this!
It's-commerical-so-it-must-be-bad-/. attitude.
You and me and the rest of the world depends on stuff that is commercial. If not, neither you nor I would have a steady income and beeing able to post this from our nice computers.
--
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
Re:Never ceases to amaze me
by
sethadam1
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh, I'd strongely disagree. You made your own case:
What Be did with the BeOS is STILL exciting, so much so that there are no fewer than 3 groups trying to do the same thing open source, there are efforts to finalize Reiser4 and WinFS, both of which appear to build on the work on Dominic Giampolo's BFS, and I'd argue than most OS'es are still behind in UI responsiveness.
Why is it exciting? Because if Robert and crew come up with something amazing, it might be one day the next big player. And if not, maybe they can introduce some new ideas that make their way to other OS projects.
Re:Never ceases to amaze me
by
beforewisdom
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I love the gumption of Slashdotters. Such an arrogance to everything. A guy decides to more or less code an entire OS by himself, ports nearly all the apps, and has a running OS that does things in a pretty unique way, and some holier-than-thou nerd, with, I might add, zero credentials that we know of, immediately dismisses it. No wonder OSS gets a bad rap, this is the attitude of our citizens.
I have had similar observations.
If Slashdot was a religion people would call us fundamentalists or the "geek taliban".
If most slashdotters were women people would say we were catty and cliquish like high school girls.
I do see a handful of really cool people here and there though.
No offense to anyone, just an observation.
Re:Never ceases to amaze me
by
n3bulous
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Slashdot needs a moderation option for missing the point. He didn't say it was bad, but he implied that few people will shell out money for some proprietary OS lacking applications.
The site's down so I can't see whether it supports the whole set of GNU tools and judge potential for porting other OSS software. However, history shows that the barrier to entry is having end user applications that the users _want_. There are thousands of applications for Linux, but most of them suck and are not wanted by general users. It's not Windows, the same excuse that few Linux ports of popular software packages exist.
So what's to get excited (as a user) about a commercial OS that does nothing but allow you to read email, surf the web, and probably a few applications that do not play with the rest of the world's applications?
If Linux had started out commercial, it would never have grown. Even still, it's been around for 10+ years, had a bunch of press-hype, and it's still used less than the Mac. Where was SCO before the lawsuit mess? Where is AmigaOS (everyone says it was awesome)?
What chance does SkyOS of becoming relevant given these restrictions? Unless it fulfills a need it will remain obscure.
My livelyhood (and probably most of/.) depends mostly on free software because most of our clients are financially challenged. Additionally, if you haven't noticed, most (American, at least) jobs tend towards the service sector. Nothing is actually being produced, but money is changing hands.
Apologies for excessive use of the word "most".
-- "The area of penetration will no doubt be sensitive." ~ Spock
Unless you can spare a few mb ( > 5-10 mb ) on your device, its really difficult to get a browser with almost full feature functionality on a small footprint device. I am not sure how much Opera takes though.
I think mozilla/firefox allows you to use xlib or gtk when you compile. So, your device must support either one of them - Minimo is gtk based and can be used on a ipaq with GPE environment. A friend has been trying to get firefox running on a handheld based on ARM - takes a bit of time and space - but you get the best browser on your handheld. A bit of optimization in terms of what modules are compiled should help the reduce the size and increase the performance
Re:The Hidden Strength Of Open Source.
by
squiggleslash
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's ironic really, isn't it? The authors (and supporters) of SkyOS are hysterically opposed to FOSS, yet SkyOS wouldn't even be credible to them if it wasn't for the work done by the Free Software and Open Source communities to create cross platform applications that provide certain critical features.
-- You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
So, when is somebody gonna port Firefox for the Xbox? Those of us who use all the other wonderful user built apps and homebrews on the Xbox only have one choice at the moment for web browsing: Linksbox. While decent, I'd love to have Firefox on there. Would be useful for those times where I'm too lazy to get up and use the computer. Any takers?
Being a beta tester and all...
by
Gacek
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm on the betatesters team and additionally I'm on the translators team at SkyOS.org which is working terribly slowly at the moment, we've underestimated the slashdot effect I'm afraid. Still we're happy with the publicity SkyOS gets. It's becoming a great alternative OS for the home desktop users. For $30 dollars you can be a betatester, you'll receive all the betas and the final product when it comes out. You can get it here http://www.skyos.org/getskyos.php (when the slashdot storm is over).
Re:Possibly interesting for Syllable developers
by
Vanders
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm looking forward to reading the HOWTO. It should be useful. I wasn't really involved in the discussion on porting Firefox to Syllable but the information from various people on the mailing lists, which in turn came from the various documentation available from the Mozilla guys, was that in order to port FF we would have to port the entire Mozilla codebase, starting at XPCOM and working up. That is obviously not the case; Robert has ported FF directly to SkyOS, so we must have taken a wrong turn at some point. I beleive that Roberts port is actually the first port os Firefox that was not already based on an existing Mozilla port, so maybe the Mozilla documentation was wrong? I don't know.
Anyway, fair play to Robert for completing the port. At this point Syllable has a new version of ABrowse which is based on a much newer KHTML, and once Robert releases his HOWTO I'm sure we'll see some activity in porting FF to Syllable too.
Slashdot Mirror
dollars to doughnuts it will be plagued with viruses as soon as they hook it up to SKYNET.
We are all doomed.
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
I tried going to SkyOS to find out WTF it is, down already? Anyone else care to tell me why this OS is of any relevance?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
the os has come quite far. Supposedly done mainly by 1 guy. I'd hug myself if i could write something that boots up.
Holy shit! Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I couldn't work out how the blurb was trying to spin it.
Jonathanjk.com
Well, for the ordinary granny-type user, a web browser and a mail client is all what's important. So, this very move gave them a non-negligible piece of usability.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
A 30-page guide on avoiding Slashdotting would be more helpful I think.
:)
http://www.skyos.org.nyud.net:8090/
Hehe, they used Slashdot in the Firefox screenshots, it's like they are asking for it
"I wonder how useful the document on how to port Mozilla will be for porting in general?"
Hopefully very useful, Firefox on Symbian (OS mainly used on Nokia and Sony Ericonsson phones btw) anyone?
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
How many new Firefox users is this really going to contribute to the global pool, in the long run?
Good for SkyOS, possibly, rather a non-event from a Firefox perspective, at least numbers-wise.
Forgive me oh Stallman, I know not what I speak!
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
Beacuse it is showing that it is not difficult to port Mozilla Thunderbird & Firefox to your Operating System of choice. It also adds more to the user base beacuse the OS is shipping with a good browser rather than a hopeless one (You all know what I mean!)
Have you metaroderated recently?
A Firefox screenshot.
A Thunderbird screenshot.
And the about page of SkyOS.
...nothing particularly exciting..
I love the gumption of Slashdotters. Such an arrogance to everything. A guy decides to more or less code an entire OS by himself, ports nearly all the apps, and has a running OS that does things in a pretty unique way, and some holier-than-thou nerd, with, I might add, zero credentials that we know of, immediately dismisses it. No wonder OSS gets a bad rap, this is the attitude of our citizens.
Unless you can spare a few mb ( > 5-10 mb ) on your device, its really difficult to get a browser with almost full feature functionality on a small footprint device. I am not sure how much Opera takes though.
I think mozilla/firefox allows you to use xlib or gtk when you compile. So, your device must support either one of them - Minimo is gtk based and can be used on a ipaq with GPE environment. A friend has been trying to get firefox running on a handheld based on ARM - takes a bit of time and space - but you get the best browser on your handheld. A bit of optimization in terms of what modules are compiled should help the reduce the size and increase the performance
>> Techflock-flock onto the best bits of technology
That's ironic really, isn't it? The authors (and supporters) of SkyOS are hysterically opposed to FOSS, yet SkyOS wouldn't even be credible to them if it wasn't for the work done by the Free Software and Open Source communities to create cross platform applications that provide certain critical features.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
So, when is somebody gonna port Firefox for the Xbox? Those of us who use all the other wonderful user built apps and homebrews on the Xbox only have one choice at the moment for web browsing: Linksbox. While decent, I'd love to have Firefox on there. Would be useful for those times where I'm too lazy to get up and use the computer. Any takers?
The Kingdom of Retarsia
I'm on the betatesters team and additionally I'm on the translators team at SkyOS.org which is working terribly slowly at the moment, we've underestimated the slashdot effect I'm afraid. Still we're happy with the publicity SkyOS gets. It's becoming a great alternative OS for the home desktop users. For $30 dollars you can be a betatester, you'll receive all the betas and the final product when it comes out. You can get it here http://www.skyos.org/getskyos.php (when the slashdot storm is over).
I'm looking forward to reading the HOWTO. It should be useful. I wasn't really involved in the discussion on porting Firefox to Syllable but the information from various people on the mailing lists, which in turn came from the various documentation available from the Mozilla guys, was that in order to port FF we would have to port the entire Mozilla codebase, starting at XPCOM and working up. That is obviously not the case; Robert has ported FF directly to SkyOS, so we must have taken a wrong turn at some point. I beleive that Roberts port is actually the first port os Firefox that was not already based on an existing Mozilla port, so maybe the Mozilla documentation was wrong? I don't know.
Anyway, fair play to Robert for completing the port. At this point Syllable has a new version of ABrowse which is based on a much newer KHTML, and once Robert releases his HOWTO I'm sure we'll see some activity in porting FF to Syllable too.
Syllable : It's an Operating System