Walking Through SkyOS 5.0 Beta 311
Hexydes writes "TechIMO has published the first preview of the next-generation SkyOS platform. The article includes a first-look at what users can expect in the next version of SkyOS, a review of how development has progressed from previous versions, and many screenshots." SkyOS is a free operating system for x86 systems; it looks very polished for being "mainly (99.9%) a one man project."
hobby os (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:hobby os (Score:3, Interesting)
For x86?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there a 64bit solution in development, or is this yet another project to keep our old hardware useful?
Re:It looks like a good project and all... (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, the reason this thing is good is because it looks good. I think the menu has icons that are a bit large and all, but otherwise it looks very nice. There are other Linux distros that look very nice as well, but they are difficult to install for someone that hasn't used Linux before. Of course, it would be best to install an OS without a 50 page manual. So, therefore we eliminate quite a few of the best linux distros. The Linux distros that are super easy to isntall generally end up running KDE or Gnome by default, which are slow. If SkyOS is what it is, then the GUI will be faster and more intuitive.
I look forward to seeing how it all works out, and if I can find my 3GB hdd somewhere, I will install it and play with it - though it'll be hard to beat the speed of my fluxbox, but this one sure looks a hell of a lot better.
Oh, and unlike some of the "out-of-the-box" linux distros...this one is completely free.
I have two problems (Score:5, Interesting)
1) It's not free-as-in-speech. I take a dimmer view of projects that aren't open and have already taken a firm stand that they will *never* be open. Coupling this with some allegations of *possible* GPL violations (which were covered in the last SkyOS story), and it just gives me a bad feeling
2) I just don't see anything here to get excited about. Kudos to the author for doing this all on his own, that's great... but without something new and exciting to offer, it's just a toy project at best. I'd rather see innovative minds like this throw their weight behind projects that we do need (like better Linux games <g>).
Re:Ob. Joke (Score:2, Interesting)
Scares me everytime I hear their name
=> http://www.skynet.be/ [skynet.be]
Bad press (Score:4, Interesting)
What license is the source code under? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's at least free as in beer, but is it free as in speech? That's what I'd like to know, and is the most important question from my point of view. Is it GPL, BSD/X-Windows, or public domain? Or could it even be proprietary but gratis? I can't tell from looking the pages from the SkyOS website I was able to see at before it got totally slashdotted just like the TechIMO website.
If it's closed source and proprietary, then forget it. Such a system is of no real use.
Windows syndrome. (Score:3, Interesting)
I would be more interested in talking about the internals, not the eye candy (which is not part of the OS in any serious OS anyway).
Politics in SkyOS (Score:5, Interesting)
From the Source (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot's new co-location site is now at Andover.Net's own (pinky finger to the mouth) $1 million dedicated data center at the Exodus network facility in Waltham, Mass [...] All boxes are networked together through a Cisco 6509 with 2 MSFCs and a Cisco 3500 so we can rearrange our internal network topology just by reconfiguring the switch. Internet connectivity to/from the outside world all flows through an Arrowpoint CS-800 switch which acts as both a firewall load balancer for the front end Web servers.
The Hardware: 5 load balanced Web servers dedicated to pages; 3 load balanced Web servers dedicated to images; 1 SQL server; 1 NFS Server.
All the boxes are VA Linux Systems FullOns running Debian (except for the SQL box). Each box (except for the SQL box) has LVD SCSI with 10,000 RPM drives. And they all have 2 Intel EtherExpress 100 LAN adapters.
The company I used to work for was co-located at the Exodus network facility, and I've been in it a couple of times. It is, in a word, awesome. The security is tighter than Ft. Knox. They usually don't let you past the front "desk" unless you've got a good reason. (By "desk" I mean a tightly secured room with heavy glass, steel doors, a million cameras on you). They make you wear trackable badges when you enter the building. You're instructed to not look at Altavista's boxen (which were also located at Exodus, at least when I saw it). Of course everyone looks anyway. The drool factor on these systems cannot be measured in simple liters. The battery backup system alone is massive, and there's something like 3 redundancies for each system. All the boxes are inside steel cages, most of the cooler systems use optical data transfer... There's enough heavy-iron Cisco in the building to grill yourself up a pancake the size of Texas. (Oh, that's crisco).
In other words, not IIS with a cracked copy of MS SQL running off XP Pro on an AMD Thunderbird.
Re:Mirrors coming soon! (Score:2, Interesting)
Atheos (Score:3, Interesting)
But I think one thing that killed Atheos is the same thing that killed almost any alternative to X: inability to support any modern graphics cards at any resolution higher than VESA. Unfortunatley this information is locked up in X drivers that are so tightly integrated with internal complexities of X that it is impossible to extract and reuse it, despite the open source nature. Perhaps XDrive will help here by making the driver interface cleaner. In any case this project sounds like it has some hardware acceleration, so maybe they will escape this trap.
Personally I am not thrilled with putting widgets into the OS. My feeling is that this locks GUI design and innovation. I would prefer a design where there were powerful graphics and event handling calls, so it is easy to write a widget, but the interface is designed so that it is obvious that you can write different widgets that have not yet been invented.
Let's see how long it will last (Score:2, Interesting)
All right, other developpers may have the source code but how many of them? Five? If two of them get children and stop working on SkyOS, another one dies, another gets arrested and the last one simply switches to another project, well... SkyOS will be pinin' for the fjords. Too risky for a big project like that.
Frankly, I just don't see why some developpers, especially with an OS project like this one, release softwares for free but not the source code. Call me paranoid but I wouldn't be surprised if huge chunks of GPL'd code is ever find in SkyOS.
Re:Atheos (Score:5, Interesting)
But I think one thing that killed Atheos is the same thing that killed almost any alternative to X: inability to support any modern graphics cards at any resolution higher than VESA. Unfortunatley this information is locked up in X drivers that are so tightly integrated with internal complexities of X that it is impossible to extract and reuse it, despite the open source nature.
Syllable has drivers for the following graphics cards with full 2D acceleration, and the ones marked with an asterisk also support video overlays (Xv in XFree86)
- S3 Virge
- S3 Savage IX/MX
- Trident video (VLB & PCI)
- Matrox Millenium & Gx00 cards
- ATI Mach64*
- SiS 3xx/Xabre*
- nVidia TNT/GeForce*
- nVidia GeForceFX*
In fact the only notable omisions are the ATi Radeon, S3 Trio & Intel Extreme (i810), and I'm confident we'll have some support for those chipsets soon.Porting drivers from XFree86 is not that difficult and lack of specs is a problem, but not as bad as you might think.
Getting OT: Re:Bad press (Score:2, Interesting)
Now they are calling it software I think (what I think don't mean squat though) in most cases you are allowed to make backup/archival copies of software.
I think the ROM images were in limbo because technially software but almost considered hardware (plug in, it works. Newer games using optical media, need to read the data into memory(hardware) to use it)
On a side "not necessary to protect your software", does this mean that A) Discs don't scratch, B) Incredible error recovery so scratches don't matter, or C) The discs aren't actually used for data at all, just to prove you purchased the game and the data magically gets into the Gamecube. or I guess another option: D) They will replace the disc at a significantly lower cost than you buying the game again @ retail (i.e. just shipping and handling).
Any body got any thoughts on this?
Always good to have more options (Score:2, Interesting)
Part of that is because I'm sick of the same old discussion: "Is Linux ready for the desktop yet?" "No." "Yes." "NO!" "YES!" "Use OS X if you want a good desktop." "But Apple is as evil as MS!" etc.
The thing is, although the wide range of choices and features that Linux(as a whole) has steadily gained in are nice etc., they don't always help to advance it onto the desktop. An OS that is designed "light" and with the specific task of desktop use in mind from the beginning might be a more successful strategy than "Linux Distro X" vs. "Linux Distro Y," where both X and Y are doing a lot of the same things, and usually make stabs at trying to do everything, but neither are really good at one or two SPECIFIC things.
Of course, only time will tell whether a complementary solution is needed. Linux is already poised for dominance in a number of fields, but that doesn't make it the best choice in all of them. It may well only be "good enough" or "better than the others" until a more specialized solution comes along.