Syllable 0.6.1 is the latest incarnation of the operating system that "will be a reliable and easy-to-use GPLed operating system for the home and small office user" as their website states. That's quite a noble cause most other alternative operating systems never claim to be able to market to non-technical audience one day. Even getting Syllable up and running is pretty easy: fully-working VMWare images and a LiveCD images are provided for free download. Apparently, Danes are the primary downloader of the Syllable LiveCD, given the primary language in which the LiveCD page is by default. 
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Thanks for reviewing Syllable. As you discovered, Syllable is not yet ready for full-time use, and that is reflected in it's version number. It is however great for developers and we always need more people writing code!
Many of the usability issues you ran into are known to us. We do have plans to fix them, but I hope you understand that we can not simply hack together a working File Browser with perfect usability...but it will be done before we release Syllable 1.0
Do you happen to know what video hardware and network card your laptop have? The information could be useful to us.
P.S: AEdit is not intended as a developers editor. Developers niceties like syntax highlighting and code-folding can be found in Sourcery, the editor that comes with sIDE (Which also includes, well, an IDE and a layout designer)
Member since:
2005-07-06
why not use TB and FF instead of the current buggy browser en mail client for syllable?
besides that, i thing the UI of syllable looks good and the short bootup time is impressive.
unfortunately i always have problems with the video card when i try to install syllable on my laptop, but this is one os i will keep watching for sure
Member since:2005-07-06
We'd love to use Firefox. All we need to do is port it. That would take about two man-months of work, which no one has right now. We need more developers, as always.
I'd love to see Thunderbird as well, but I much prefer Whisper (not simply because I wrote it). Whisper may have a few bugs, but it's still a nice email client (& the executable comes in at a whole 1010KB Large by Syllable standards but tiny compared to Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail etc.)
Member since:2006-01-18
Member since:
2006-09-07
The LiveCD really doesn't have a site of it's own, right now. It's just a redirect to the download section of SyllableNorden.
And yes, the main target for SyllableNorden is Scandinavian language users (Danish/Norwegian/Swedish), so that's why most of it is danish.
As we all know, the LiveCD targets international users, and that's why the text there is english. You can also choose english in the left-side menu.
About the lack of media files... Last months alone, I had more than 100GB traffic on the LiveCD. Adding just 5MByte of media (a bit of audio, and video), would increase that by 15%. It's not easy to get something hosted, that takes 100GB/month, The company currently hosting it is a very understanding one, but adding 15% just isn't something that is going to happen, in the near future.
Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2006-01-06
>About the lack of media files... Last months alone, I
>had more than 100GB traffic on the LiveCD. Adding just
>5MByte of media (a bit of audio, and video), would
>increase that by 15%. It's not easy to get something
>hosted, that takes 100GB/month, The company currently
>hosting it is a very understanding one, but adding 15%
>just isn't something that is going to happen, in the
>near future.
You could host the project on SourceForge, they already have TB's of traffic, you wouldn't even make a dent.
Member since:2006-09-07
BitTorrent can't replace the current way of doing it, but ofcause I could use both.
mallard: I tried that in the beginning, but I didn't have any luck. But there's another place, I'm going to try.
I really don't see the current hosting as a problem. It's stable, and it's fast enough to be usefull.
The current LiveCD can mount fat, ext2 and ntfs partitions, so people can play their own music and video.
Member since:
2005-10-22
Member since:
2005-10-20
"The descriptions of what it was to have are incredible, given that the development was done mostly by a team of one: a 64-bit journaled file system, a desktop environment integrated into the kernel, a built-in network stack, multithreading, and more."
Just a clarification, those features weren't "was to have", AtheOS actually *had* those features in a functional state (and therefore so does Syllable). Probably what you meant anyway, but I had to clear that up in case anyone got the wrong idea 
Member since:
2005-08-21
Is it only me or did the article have a couple of broken UTF-8 characters? For example, on the first page it reads
"like Windows and X can [junk] and even if it can't"
The junk that appears at least on my screen is "a" with a hat (caret), the euro sign, and an ASCII quotation mark. I guess it's supposed to be an emdash or endash. The page, on the other hand, claims to be in ISO-8859-1 (the meta tag in the page source). At other points, quotation marks are missing, but that could also be a typo, not related to this.
I'm using Firefox 1.5.0.5 on Linux, and it correctly and automatically sets the encoding to ISO-8859-1.
Member since:2006-02-27
Member since:
2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-07-12
Member since:2006-05-25
I donīt know any of them in deep but some differences I can see:
Haiku uses a microkernel with services running on top.
Syllabe uses a modular kernel but the modules run in kernel space.
Iīm not sure but I think Syllabe uses a more modern C++ (or at least they use namespaces) while Haiku has all the classes with the prefix "B", just like Qt uses "Q".
Haiku tries to replicate BEOS in all his aspects.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-07-06
> What are the similarities? Could both projects be merged?
A merge would be *very* unlikely.
For one thing, Syllable is a fork of Atheos, and it's GPL. Haiku is MIT-licensed. Syllable can't currently be relicensed because they don't have copyright on all the pieces (the original author of Atheos (Kurt Skauen) does, mostly I think). The Haiku folks are ardently sticking to the MIT.
Also, from what I can tell, the Syllable folks aren't crazy about making their OS into a BeOS clone. In fact, they've probably been asked about that so many times that my guess is they could easily be annoyed by the request.
Another difference between the two camps is that the Syllable folks seem to be mostly concerned with hacking, coding, and programming. And also software development too. Contrast that with the Haiku folks, who probably have enough marketing people to challenge their website development team to a basketball game at their public relations campus. 
In the long run, I think Haiku's plan is flawed. They want their OS to be popular (including being popular with companies who might want to embed it and keep their source closed), and to be used by many, but they give it's code the least protection using the most permissive OSS license there is. That's a recipe for success for the Haiku devs, since they will likely all be hired up by the first big company that wants to use Haiku in their computers, but it's long-term failure for the community, IMO.
Now, that's not to say that Syllable doesn't have it's own problems. The Syllable folks love to code on Syllable because they're hackers -- but I don't think they have the eye for world domination that a free software OS needs to bring large numbers of devs on-board. They seem to be doing it just for fun at the moment.
Just my 2 cents.
---John
Member since:2005-07-06
"Another difference between the two camps is that the Syllable folks seem to be mostly concerned with hacking, coding, and programming. And also software development too. Contrast that with the Haiku folks, who probably have enough marketing people to challenge their website development team to a basketball game at their public relations campus. "
That's interesting... How did you get to that conclusion ? we just created a "MarCom" team like... a month ago or so, in response of a growing need, that means we basically didnt' have ANY marketing people before then (5 years now).
I can't see how we haven't been concerned with "hacking, coding, and programming", since we also started from scratch, not even having a code base (unlike Syllable, which started with AtheOS, which was already a working and full fledged OS).
Member since:2005-07-06
JB wrote:
> That's interesting... How did you get to that conclusion ?
It's just my tongue-in-cheek impression from an outsider's perspective. The Haikuers have always been more focused (AFAICT) on their image, recruiting, website, newsletters, etc., than Syllable. I never said that they aren't concerned with coding. Of course they are.
Also, as a sidenote, Haiku started with NewOS, not quite from scratch. BTW, is Haiku using OpenTracker?
Member since:
2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-07-06