Using Syllable on VirtualPC means you're running a Vesa driver (Syllable supports quite a few cards but not the Trio32 that VPC emulates) on an emulated video card. There is certainly going to be some slow dragging and tearing I'm afraid.
Syllable on VMWare is much better. Syllable has a proper VMWare video driver so everything is much smoother.
Huge? Libsyllable is about 1.3Mb and talks to an Appserver about 400k in size. Less than 2Mb for an entire display system is hardly huge.
I also fail to follow your argument that the "entire industy" is moving away from languages such as C++. I still see Qt and MFC in heavy use, and I don't see much evidence of this changing in the next few years.
Same for XUL, Glade and Avalon. Heck, Microsoft have dropped Avalon for Longhorn and that was three years off anyway! Again, I see plenty of Qt, GTK+, Win32 and other such toolkits but not much else.
As I've pointed out, Syllable is a client-server architecture. It would be a good idea to become slightly familiar with your subject before you dismiss it.
By the way, the Syllable/AtheOS appserver has been doing Alpha blended composited drawing since it was written, and has always used Freetype2 to provide good AntiAliased font rasterising. All things X has only just begun to take advantage of with things like Render and Xft2. Syllable is hardly behind the times here.
Kind of sad that you've been modded Troll because this is exactly the sort of thing I've been saying for some time. Linux on the server, Syllable on the desktop. One big happy OSS solution.
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!
Will do Sir. What would you like me to work on first?
While we're at it, I heard a FreeBSD hacker say that upstart Linus should get back to hacking BSD and stop his day dreaming of writing another UNIX clone. The fool!
Instead you mess about with another OS-specific tool. And if you think dependencies won't be a problem, just wait until some infrastructure gets upgraded. If this thing lives long enough to go thru upgrades.
Sure. If I wanted to I could upgrade from Syllable 0.4.0 all the way to 0.5.4, which is 14 upgrades in total. Some manual work would be required to keep the bootloader (Grub) happy, but upgrading system components is dead simple.
The next release will hopefully ship with a new version of Glibc as well.
Show me a benchmark. After it is debugged enough to use.
Try a LiveCD. I've timed Syllable on my machine here (Athlon 750, 256Mb) at sub 10 second boots. That's the time it takes to boot from the Grub menu, login and get to a desktop. We can in fact almost account for every single peice of code being loaded during boot.
Linux isn't hard to use, but it is extraordinarily difficult to fix and maintain.
Linux is suitable on the desktop if you don't mind having to baby sit it. I've been using it for the past five years. That doesn't mean I'll spend every spare waking moment I have available to me trying my hardest to replace it with something better.
I've been using Linux for over five years now as my primary desktop. I am currently running Mandrake 9.1, which uses KDE 3 and a 2.6 kernel. If Linux is "functionally indistinguishable" from Syllable then I must have been taking some pretty scary sorts of drugs these past few years, because to me Linux still feels like a big bloated lump of an OS that tries to be a desktop OS, but bless it, you know it really wants to run Apache or Oracle instead.
No matter what I do to try and tweak my Linux desktop, something without fail will break, or just not work, or totally dispoint me. Linux just feels oh so very klunky, and after five years of it you'll have to excuse me if I'm a little tired of it.
We settled on Bluecurve for the final release of 0.5.4 but you could change them, if you wanted too. You're right by the way, it is simply because we have other work to do and there are already a huge pool of icons for KDE and Gnome already available. It's just sensible to make use of something that is already available, and quite good too.
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.
I believe there are still issues with the ATA PCI controller emulated by QEMU, so Syllable does not correctly detect the controller. I think the latest CVS versions may fix this, but I don't know.
As for IDE and VESA..well you're half right. VESA is a simple standard and it really does work perfectly in Syllable. As I said, I suspect you had a video card which Syllable was trying to use one its video drivers for. It probably never had a chance to try to use VESA. So the problems you had are really nothing to do with the VESA support in Syllable.
ATA is something I can talk about with some authority, as I wrote the original ATA driver for Syllable and continue to maintain the ATAPI portion of it, and ATA is one big honking sucking black hole of a "standard". There are so many devices with so many bugs and interpretations of the standard (Of which there are 7 versions, by the way) that while it is easy to say "Well if you support the standard it will just work" in practice it will "just break" on 50% of everything you try it with. Getting ATA and ATAPI right is a massive job which requires a lot of tweaking, register level debugging, vague standard interpretation, testing and headaches. At times ATA[PI] is almost enough to make you weep tears of blood..
Anyway, hopefully we've got most of the big nasty hairy bugs worked out of the majority of the ATA[PI] stuff now so I hope you'll give Syllable 0.5.4 a try when it is released?
The last few times I've tried to install it it either messed up the display (without which it doesn't work), or crased during boot (IDE driver problem). This was using standard VESA and IDE interfaces
The ATAPI driver was crap, but the latest version will hopefully fix all of the problems we've had with it so far.
If your display was not working I'd suggest that Syllable was not in fact trying to use VESA at all, and either your card was unsupported or the driver did indeed have a bug which caused you problems (Some Millenium I's have a known issue, Riva TNT's do not work etc.). You don't say what video card you have and you don't mention if you reported these bugs to us, so I can't help much more than that.
I don't think there's any excuse for it.
Until the entire Syllable development team are being paid to work on Syllable full time and we have access to all possible hardware devices and support from the OEM's we have a perfectly valid excuse: PC hardware sucks, PC hardware is bloody difficult to get working correctly and we don't have the time or resource to fix every bug. Sorry, just the way it is. You're welcome to lend a hand though.
The mess of toolkits on X is one of my major issues with X. Porting GTK+ and Qt without X would create just as big a mess as using X in the first place.
Well hardware is fairly easy; we just port from Linux or X or BSD.
Applications are going to be a problem, although I don't know that it's "impossible" to create your own; KDE managed to write and maintain their own web browser and office suite.
Will we support Java and.Net in the future? Yes, probably. Will we have a port of Gecko/Firefox? Almost certainly. Will we chicken out and add X support so that we can use Linux applications without any modification? Probably not.
Linux is a really, really, poor desktop OS. It just isn't designed to be one. Without serious hacking, involving everyone from Linus and Alan upto Miguel and the KDE developers, Linux will always be poorly designed for the desktop. In over five years of using Linux as my primary system of choice at home, I still find it clunky, rough around the edges, obtuse and anoying. It's only redeeming feature is that it is free, and it annoys me less than Windows.
I'll be honest with you; our goal is to replace Linux as an Open Source desktop Operating System. Linux is a fine OS but using it as a desktop system is like trying to balance an elephant on a unicycle. It's clumsy, slow and liable to fall over and squash you.
Now, back to working out why I'm getting "ID X is respawing too fast" errors from Fedora Core 2, yet "startx" works perfectly..
Whats wrong with asking people? I'm not suggesting we start doing it. Trying to discern meaning from a poll on our website is about as useful as looking at the poll on Slashdot and discerning that CmdrTaco wants to put everyone to sea on a raft.
If you already have the binary module for your distro, you can copy it in the/lib/modules tree.
If it is the exact same version as your kernel, or compatable, and you have module versioning enabled, and your kernel contains the correct "core" modules already. Otherwise you're SOL.
And I doubt Syllabe can magically solve any driver installation problem. I still have an ancient ISA NIC, no OS autodetect it, but at least I can set it manually in Linux and Windows 98 (No, XP doesn't support it).
Same with Syllable if we're talking about ISA hardware. You'd have to configure it manually, but then it is an ISA device which by their very nature require manual configuration. PCI and USB devices are handled much better.
As for hardware detection, well in the five years I've been using Linux it's always been quite bad. Just the other day a Redhat 9 installation managed to munge the X configuration. Trying to run through First Boot with a garbled display was fun..
Bridging the gap between Linux and Windows? We're not trying to bridge the gap between Linux and Windows; we're trying to replace Linux on the desktop totally!
I think Syllabus..
Syllable
I'll not bother to reply to the rest of your post. It's very silly.
Thanks, but we already have hardware swapping and automatic configuration down and it works pretty darn well.
We support a whole bunch of video cards straight out of the box, and if your video card happens to be unsupported then Syllable will indeed fall back to a Vesa 2.0 driver.
The answer then is to ensure that you do not delete anything which derives from os::Looper..
Rules like this exist in any programming enviroment; don't free() memory twice. Don't dereference an invalid pointer. Don't take a semaphore and call sleep(). Don't delete an os::Looper object.
In all fairness, it should be more robust. There isn't much reason why the appserver or kernel should panic just because you try and delete an object. The application, maybe.
It could be easier, but it's certainly much easier than E.g. Win32, or even MFC (In my opinion, and I'm biased, and I havn't done very much MFC programing at all apart from one small dialog based application but that sucked enough to warn me off anything more complex with MFC!)
..so why wouldn't you start with a Linux kernel that supports just about every graphics and sound board on the planet...
Not to be too crude, but it is because the Linux driver model sucks large Dyson Spheres through capilary tubing. It has an extremely high Lovelace value. Anyway, the Linux and Syllable kernel APIs (I'm talking about the driver->kernel API, not the API's that define how a driver is managed) are very similiar, so much so that most drivers are ported from Linux in about a week or two. The SiS 900 NIC driver was ported by Michael Krugger in half a day. I ported the Ymfpci OSS driver in about a week of a few hours a day. Syllable has the advantage of being able to draw on a large driver codebase while at the same time totally avoiding what many of us see has the total sucktitude of Linux driver management in general.
Maybe gstreamer is a good support library for what you're doing, perhaps not.
Actually, ffmpeg drives almost all of the media codecs currently available.
Syllable did not spring into life from a total vacum. It was forked from AtheOS, when AtheOS was already at quite an advanced stage. Kurt wrote AtheOS for fun. I and many other developers thought AtheOS was very cool, and I created Syllable to keep it alive and keep it cool. If I were to sit down today, and AtheOS and Syllable did not exist, I would probably do exactly as you describe and start with Linux. I don't think it would be half as well designed as Syllable is.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the similarities extend far beyond one Window decorator.
Syllable isn't a BeOS clone. Really. It takes some ideas from BeOS though, because BeOS was a good design. But it isn't BeOS.
Using Syllable on VirtualPC means you're running a Vesa driver (Syllable supports quite a few cards but not the Trio32 that VPC emulates) on an emulated video card. There is certainly going to be some slow dragging and tearing I'm afraid.
Syllable on VMWare is much better. Syllable has a proper VMWare video driver so everything is much smoother.
Huge? Libsyllable is about 1.3Mb and talks to an Appserver about 400k in size. Less than 2Mb for an entire display system is hardly huge.
I also fail to follow your argument that the "entire industy" is moving away from languages such as C++. I still see Qt and MFC in heavy use, and I don't see much evidence of this changing in the next few years.
Same for XUL, Glade and Avalon. Heck, Microsoft have dropped Avalon for Longhorn and that was three years off anyway! Again, I see plenty of Qt, GTK+, Win32 and other such toolkits but not much else.
As I've pointed out, Syllable is a client-server architecture. It would be a good idea to become slightly familiar with your subject before you dismiss it.
By the way, the Syllable/AtheOS appserver has been doing Alpha blended composited drawing since it was written, and has always used Freetype2 to provide good AntiAliased font rasterising. All things X has only just begun to take advantage of with things like Render and Xft2. Syllable is hardly behind the times here.
Kind of sad that you've been modded Troll because this is exactly the sort of thing I've been saying for some time. Linux on the server, Syllable on the desktop. One big happy OSS solution.
Maybe in a few years. Who knows?
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!
Will do Sir. What would you like me to work on first?
While we're at it, I heard a FreeBSD hacker say that upstart Linus should get back to hacking BSD and stop his day dreaming of writing another UNIX clone. The fool!
Instead you mess about with another OS-specific tool. And if you think dependencies won't be a problem, just wait until some infrastructure gets upgraded. If this thing lives long enough to go thru upgrades.
Sure. If I wanted to I could upgrade from Syllable 0.4.0 all the way to 0.5.4, which is 14 upgrades in total. Some manual work would be required to keep the bootloader (Grub) happy, but upgrading system components is dead simple.
The next release will hopefully ship with a new version of Glibc as well.
Show me a benchmark. After it is debugged enough to use.
Try a LiveCD. I've timed Syllable on my machine here (Athlon 750, 256Mb) at sub 10 second boots. That's the time it takes to boot from the Grub menu, login and get to a desktop. We can in fact almost account for every single peice of code being loaded during boot.
Linux isn't hard to use, but it is extraordinarily difficult to fix and maintain.
Linux is suitable on the desktop if you don't mind having to baby sit it. I've been using it for the past five years. That doesn't mean I'll spend every spare waking moment I have available to me trying my hardest to replace it with something better.
I've been using Linux for over five years now as my primary desktop. I am currently running Mandrake 9.1, which uses KDE 3 and a 2.6 kernel. If Linux is "functionally indistinguishable" from Syllable then I must have been taking some pretty scary sorts of drugs these past few years, because to me Linux still feels like a big bloated lump of an OS that tries to be a desktop OS, but bless it, you know it really wants to run Apache or Oracle instead.
No matter what I do to try and tweak my Linux desktop, something without fail will break, or just not work, or totally dispoint me. Linux just feels oh so very klunky, and after five years of it you'll have to excuse me if I'm a little tired of it.
We settled on Bluecurve for the final release of 0.5.4 but you could change them, if you wanted too. You're right by the way, it is simply because we have other work to do and there are already a huge pool of icons for KDE and Gnome already available. It's just sensible to make use of something that is already available, and quite good too.
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.
I believe there are still issues with the ATA PCI controller emulated by QEMU, so Syllable does not correctly detect the controller. I think the latest CVS versions may fix this, but I don't know.
As for IDE and VESA..well you're half right. VESA is a simple standard and it really does work perfectly in Syllable. As I said, I suspect you had a video card which Syllable was trying to use one its video drivers for. It probably never had a chance to try to use VESA. So the problems you had are really nothing to do with the VESA support in Syllable. ATA is something I can talk about with some authority, as I wrote the original ATA driver for Syllable and continue to maintain the ATAPI portion of it, and ATA is one big honking sucking black hole of a "standard". There are so many devices with so many bugs and interpretations of the standard (Of which there are 7 versions, by the way) that while it is easy to say "Well if you support the standard it will just work" in practice it will "just break" on 50% of everything you try it with. Getting ATA and ATAPI right is a massive job which requires a lot of tweaking, register level debugging, vague standard interpretation, testing and headaches. At times ATA[PI] is almost enough to make you weep tears of blood..
Anyway, hopefully we've got most of the big nasty hairy bugs worked out of the majority of the ATA[PI] stuff now so I hope you'll give Syllable 0.5.4 a try when it is released?
The last few times I've tried to install it it either messed up the display (without which it doesn't work), or crased during boot (IDE driver problem). This was using standard VESA and IDE interfaces
The ATAPI driver was crap, but the latest version will hopefully fix all of the problems we've had with it so far.
If your display was not working I'd suggest that Syllable was not in fact trying to use VESA at all, and either your card was unsupported or the driver did indeed have a bug which caused you problems (Some Millenium I's have a known issue, Riva TNT's do not work etc.). You don't say what video card you have and you don't mention if you reported these bugs to us, so I can't help much more than that.
I don't think there's any excuse for it.
Until the entire Syllable development team are being paid to work on Syllable full time and we have access to all possible hardware devices and support from the OEM's we have a perfectly valid excuse: PC hardware sucks, PC hardware is bloody difficult to get working correctly and we don't have the time or resource to fix every bug. Sorry, just the way it is. You're welcome to lend a hand though.
The mess of toolkits on X is one of my major issues with X. Porting GTK+ and Qt without X would create just as big a mess as using X in the first place.
Well hardware is fairly easy; we just port from Linux or X or BSD.
.Net in the future? Yes, probably. Will we have a port of Gecko/Firefox? Almost certainly. Will we chicken out and add X support so that we can use Linux applications without any modification? Probably not.
Applications are going to be a problem, although I don't know that it's "impossible" to create your own; KDE managed to write and maintain their own web browser and office suite.
Will we support Java and
Linux is a really, really, poor desktop OS. It just isn't designed to be one. Without serious hacking, involving everyone from Linus and Alan upto Miguel and the KDE developers, Linux will always be poorly designed for the desktop. In over five years of using Linux as my primary system of choice at home, I still find it clunky, rough around the edges, obtuse and anoying. It's only redeeming feature is that it is free, and it annoys me less than Windows.
I'll be honest with you; our goal is to replace Linux as an Open Source desktop Operating System. Linux is a fine OS but using it as a desktop system is like trying to balance an elephant on a unicycle. It's clumsy, slow and liable to fall over and squash you.
Now, back to working out why I'm getting "ID X is respawing too fast" errors from Fedora Core 2, yet "startx" works perfectly..
Whats wrong with asking people? I'm not suggesting we start doing it. Trying to discern meaning from a poll on our website is about as useful as looking at the poll on Slashdot and discerning that CmdrTaco wants to put everyone to sea on a raft.
Sorry, I listed those in the wrong direction. The driver supports the Voodoo 3, 4 and 5 cards (Not Voodoo 1 & 2)
If you already have the binary module for your distro, you can copy it in the /lib/modules tree.
If it is the exact same version as your kernel, or compatable, and you have module versioning enabled, and your kernel contains the correct "core" modules already. Otherwise you're SOL.
And I doubt Syllabe can magically solve any driver installation problem. I still have an ancient ISA NIC, no OS autodetect it, but at least I can set it manually in Linux and Windows 98 (No, XP doesn't support it).
Same with Syllable if we're talking about ISA hardware. You'd have to configure it manually, but then it is an ISA device which by their very nature require manual configuration. PCI and USB devices are handled much better.
As for hardware detection, well in the five years I've been using Linux it's always been quite bad. Just the other day a Redhat 9 installation managed to munge the X configuration. Trying to run through First Boot with a garbled display was fun..
Bridging the gap between Linux and Windows? We're not trying to bridge the gap between Linux and Windows; we're trying to replace Linux on the desktop totally!
I think Syllabus..
Syllable
I'll not bother to reply to the rest of your post. It's very silly.
Thanks, but we already have hardware swapping and automatic configuration down and it works pretty darn well.
We support a whole bunch of video cards straight out of the box, and if your video card happens to be unsupported then Syllable will indeed fall back to a Vesa 2.0 driver.
Not really. Syllable 0.5.3 supports the following video chipsets:
- nVidia TNT/GeForce
- nVidida GeForce FX
- ATi Mach64
- ATi Radeon
- SiS 3xx
- Matrox Millenium/Gx00
- Savage IX/MX
- Trident VLB/PCI
- S3 Virge GX/DX
The next release of Syllable will also support Voodoo 1,2 & 3 cards.The older releases of AtheOS pretty much required a VESA 2.0 card for installation, but with Syllable that is not the case.
The answer then is to ensure that you do not delete anything which derives from os::Looper..
Rules like this exist in any programming enviroment; don't free() memory twice. Don't dereference an invalid pointer. Don't take a semaphore and call sleep(). Don't delete an os::Looper object.
In all fairness, it should be more robust. There isn't much reason why the appserver or kernel should panic just because you try and delete an object. The application, maybe.
Classes such as VLayoutNode and HLayoutNode are a great help. If you take a look at E.g. the main Whisper window the actual GUI creation code (In the constructor) is around 100 lines. You just nest widgets inside Views (Or derivative classes of View) and the Window and LayoutNode code will take care of most of the laying out work for you.
It could be easier, but it's certainly much easier than E.g. Win32, or even MFC (In my opinion, and I'm biased, and I havn't done very much MFC programing at all apart from one small dialog based application but that sucked enough to warn me off anything more complex with MFC!)
..so why wouldn't you start with a Linux kernel that supports just about every graphics and sound board on the planet...
Not to be too crude, but it is because the Linux driver model sucks large Dyson Spheres through capilary tubing. It has an extremely high Lovelace value. Anyway, the Linux and Syllable kernel APIs (I'm talking about the driver->kernel API, not the API's that define how a driver is managed) are very similiar, so much so that most drivers are ported from Linux in about a week or two. The SiS 900 NIC driver was ported by Michael Krugger in half a day. I ported the Ymfpci OSS driver in about a week of a few hours a day. Syllable has the advantage of being able to draw on a large driver codebase while at the same time totally avoiding what many of us see has the total sucktitude of Linux driver management in general.
Maybe gstreamer is a good support library for what you're doing, perhaps not.
Actually, ffmpeg drives almost all of the media codecs currently available.
Syllable did not spring into life from a total vacum. It was forked from AtheOS, when AtheOS was already at quite an advanced stage. Kurt wrote AtheOS for fun. I and many other developers thought AtheOS was very cool, and I created Syllable to keep it alive and keep it cool. If I were to sit down today, and AtheOS and Syllable did not exist, I would probably do exactly as you describe and start with Linux. I don't think it would be half as well designed as Syllable is.