OSNews

... could you please stop posting interesting news when I just wanted to go to bed? I need some sleep so badly... Hmm, only runs on DOS? Where the hell did I put my DOS disks? Oh dear. Maybe I can delete the GUI from Win2k and install Qube instead?

> I need some sleep so badly... nani-nani-lalala... /me is singing a greek song for Spark, a song used to put babies into sleep. >Hmm, only runs on DOS? It runs on my Win98 as well just fine. Just double click the executable. I don't know about WinNT/2k compatibility though. The Linux version should be out soon. This first version is indented for DOS though, but if you run on WinME or you don't have DOS, you can always try the FreeDOS package as linked from the article, which also supports Qube.

Great, the more I read, the more does it interest me. The best of all was when I read "GNU LIBRARY GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE" (although it is LESSER now, but who cares). I think that this text is there for a reason, right? Don't tell me you just wanted to fool your readers and Qube is proprietory instead. Thank you for singing. There is something that makes me sad... everytime there is a new interesting OS or even an interesting desktop (like Qt/Embedded or this Qube), it's for embedded devices. Why is desktop always secondary target? It makes me sad because the desktop is where the "life" of computing is. Embedded devices are, where the money is though... Really really sad. Fortunatly, freetime operating systems like AtheOS can still concentrate on the desktop.

>I think that this text (LGPL) is there for a reason, right? I don't know. Only the first screenshot is mine, the second was sent to me from Michal. I don't think that Qube is open source though.

But it would be very weird to show an open source license, if the system isn't open sourced. And I found this on their page: "This application is released as the Open Source for everyone who uses console operating systems without desktop environment." From reading the info provided there it looks as if they would want to make money with customizations for companys and similar. That would be a nice idea IMO. They also have another product (GamePort) and I'm sure others will follow. So it might be a good idea to use Qube mainly for advertising purposes. I suspect that this kind of OS (free (as in speech and in beer), nice GUI, simple to use and installable on top of every other OS) could become very popular, if the quality isn't too poor. And there is no better advertising, than a successfull free software product. Look at Qt, I'm sure they wouldn't be as successfull as they are without free Qt used by the free KDE. Popularity is the key to success and a popular free product is the key to popularity.

The version of Qube I downloaded for DOS includes a license that you can also view through the Qube UI. And the name of that license is "Qube Binary License", I did not find anything for LGPL in the package.

This is another one of those products which I can't make heads or tails of. Maybe I just don't get around enough,.. dunno. It looks like an OS from the one screenshot I saw, but then there's something about it running on DOS? A DOS program? Then something else about it being for embedded systems? And then something else about a console operating system but it's got a GUI -- not a console window.(?) Or wait, maybe they mean it has something to do with game consoles like the playstation? I'm a smart guy, but I don't get all the tech-speak. I wish companies would just say in plain english what their products are. I still haven't figured out the the Amiga DE is...

Ok, in plain english: Qube is a program (a semi-OS to be more specific) that runs on top of command line OSes. For example, Windows 3.1 and Win95 were what Qube is: A graphical environment on top of the existing OS (DOS). Now, because this environment is pretty portable (remember, it looks and behaves like an OS of its own, but in reality it works with the help of the host OS) it can run on top of Linux or FreeBSD, on QNX or other OSes that are text-based. So, while Qube can run under all these OSes, the company prefers to make business in the embedded market because there are no many such offerings there (there is mostly QT/Embedded in this market area and QNX Photon). For the desktop, Qube is, technically, something between X and QT in the way it operates and interacts with the host OS. Capito?

Qube was released under OpenSource terms. It's based on the same OpenSource license as Java(tm) from Sun-Microsystems. It's free for all, but companies must pay for porting to their OSes, if they are interesting in. We are working on projects with embedded systems companies. Sources for Qube will be released but not their native engine codes. API sources will be released to everybody. It's a protection of the company to protect from people who would like to make clones. Much people like to change "image background" and talks about the new system at the world. I was released SEAL as the desktop environment for FreeDOS under GPL 2 years ago. This system has in this time many clones such as BadSeal, StarSeal, SEAL 2.0, etc...and many peoples want to use SEAL for their own desktop enviroments. They change desktop background and icons and talks about the new system "based" on SEAL. But it's not based on, it's the same one. This is the reason, why we released Qube as the OpenSource, but there is no way to recode the low-level engine of Qube and to talk about another system. All peoples who would like to support this environment need to make applications and don't think about to change desktop background and call it by other name. Anyway, it's OpenSource simple to Java(tm) license terms.

Eugenia, Great site. Check out this OS. It looks promising and will eventually be standalone. Perhaps you could do an interview with somebody from Rocklyte. http://www.rocklyte.com/athene/

Yes, I know the RockLyte guys (especially Paul Manias). I used to be a beta tester for Athene some months ago.

Michal, thanks for the explanation! I think I can live with that, although free software is very important for me. But I can get your reasoning. What I think would be nice though, that would be a special license agreement, that Qube (or anything else that uses this license) WILL become free software (as in LGPL or BSD), if the company (Interactive Studio) might ever go out of business or is sold to someone else (unless this someone signs the same contract). What do you think? Trolltech already did it when Qt wasn't GPL, so people don't have to be scared of the future of their work if the base (Qt, or Qube in your case) might ever be sold to anyone else. And the current situation with BeOS shows, that this might really be important. For something else, I just tried to install FreeDOS but it seemed to be impossible. All I got is a deleted Fat partition that wasn't deleted before. Whatever... almost everything didn't work with fdisk.exe, format.exe and sys.exe. I just forgot how crappy DOS is, so I guess I will wait for Qube to run on Linux or Win2k.

You can run FreeDOS under the Bochs emulator under Win2k or even BeOS...

Bochs emulator was ported to Qube 5 months ago. We didn't attached it to demo version, but I think about to make this. It's a funny : Qube can be run under certain OS and can this OS through Bochs emulation as well . Sure, it's not only FreeDOS, that can be run trough Bochs for Qube, but we haven't an image of Linux kernel in .img file. I seem to make this for the future of the Qube. What do you think about ?

Here is the link to BadSeal 0.54 http://www.badseal.cjb.net/" http://www.badseal.cjb.net/</A&...

I'm really impressed. This seems to me like a perfect way to turn an old PC into a mini workstation or internet browser. If there's support for common network cards, (RealTek 8139's and NE2000's would do me) and a half decent browser then I think I could really use this to bring life back to a couple of old DOS boxes I have lying around. They don't have the CPU power or HD space to get a usable Linux system runnning on them, so using Qube would be a real alternative to just using plain DOS. My only worry about Qube is the legality of using the BeOS icons.

I think with Be's current situation, illegitimate use of icons is darn near their LAST problem....

This looks quite beautiful. Can't wait to see it ported to FreeBSD. This may sound a dumb question, but could Qube one day be used as a replacement for the clunking behemoth that is X?

> "This may sound a dumb question, but could Qube one day be used as a replacement for the clunking behemoth that is X?" I don't think that this is a dumb question. It could indeed be very interesting, cause if I get it correctly, Qube is even more portable than X. In other words, X supports almost every Unix system (it's not pretty on Win, BeOS or Mac OS), but Qube could run on any system and especially on systems without a native GUI like Linux, FreeBSD, GNU/Hurd, Darwin, NewOS, whatever... Sounds pretty pretty damn interestingl to me. I might try to run Qube in FreeDOS in Bochs in Win2k later this weekend... BTW: Are there plans to change the interface? While I like some elements of it, I don't really like this "mixed together" look.

Eugenia, I capisce now. Thanks for taking the time to explain it to me. This looks very cool. The screenshots make the Qube desktop look like some kind of delicate mix os BeOS, OSX, and Java Swing. If the InteractiveStudio website sold an install cd with a NewOS/linux/*BSD/etc. kernel + Qube, and made it an easy install like BeOS or Mandrake linux, I'd buy that CD. If it involved first installing a "standard" Linux/*BSD distro first, and then removing, adding, compiling, and configuring stuff (to get Qube up and running); it would likely be too complicated for a country bumpkin like myself. ...Amazing that Michal did the whole darn thing all by himself...! Za!

I played with this for about 4 seconds (really) before I had to go to sleep, but it seems very nice. I'm going to look at it some more in a second.... but first, great article Eugenia! And second... in windows couldn't you edit your system.ini (i think that's the file) and tell it to use Qube as you shell instead of Explorer.exe? I thi I'll try that....

I would love to see it on FreeBSD too! It would be great it Qube replaced X one day.... Qube seems very nice, however it doesn't seem to have DHCP support (or am I doing something wrong) or many apps.... but it's still very nice....

Thanks, Eugenia I just wish you ask more detailed questions. I couldn't find any info on their web page. And I gave away all my door stops during last move - can't try it . Here is my short list : - how many workspaces it supports (I've got spoiled by BeOS and X11)? - how about context menu on the right click? - how well it reacts on 3 finger salut ? - fonts ? And it's just end user questions , nothing about development yet. Well, 4Mb will work quite well in small systems. Just port it to StongARM and DragonBall so we can load it to iPaq and Palm. It will be great in future Internet Appliances - IA is The Next Big Thing. You know it probably damn too well.

I installed OS/2 Warp 3 on a nice Dell 486/66 laptop I acquired for $25 because Windows would blow on the installed 8MB. Now I have to try this!

Dude! That's a great idea! I had/have a 486 laptop, except it's missing some memory and it's harddrive... but it could run Qube I bet.... windows ran so slow on that thing.... ' I wish I didn't take the harddrive and memory out, but I bet I could find a new hardrive and memory for cheap... hmm....

> I just wish you ask more detailed questions. > - how many workspaces it supports (I've got spoiled by BeOS and X11)? I think it only had one the way I saw it. > - how about context menu on the right click? The first screenshot shows the context menu very clear. This is why I put it there. > - fonts ? There is only one font, probably "hand-made" with hex numbers in the C source. Do not expect TTF support.

Will there be any support for current X applications? That would certainly make the transition to it from X much easier. -Elijah

It includes a set of Adobe typefaces which are freely redistributable. These (or similar) are in most Linux distributions too. I presume it uses them, I'm not about to run DOS on this hardware though, not until Plex86 is working well enough to do so safely.

It's said to be "Open Source" but it has an extremely proprietary license It's said to be "Multiplatform" but the author admits it runs only on DOS (yes, Windows 98 is DOS too) It's said to be a "Net/graphics" system, but the networking implementation is extremely primitive and it has no accelerated 2D, let alone GL Is this like the "open" "portable" Windows NT which ended up being a closed system that only runs on Intel processors?

From the offical site: "It can be easy ported to most operating systems at the request of your company. If your company would like to use this enviroment under another operating system, it can contact Interactive Studio at qube@interactivestudio.sk and discuss the cooperative process of porting Qube." So, it can be ported to other OSes (linux, BSD, whatever), it just hasn't been yet... I think they should port it to FreeBSD and Linux, it would be nice to see an alternitive to X on thoese OSes....

It supports more fonts. Not in C code. Fonts are external *.fnt files in Qube. We have about 20 fonts supported for Qube in many sizes. We can support TTF fonts as well, but TTF take a lot of space in memory, that's why we didn't do that. SEAL, what was the desktop environment made by me 2 years ago uses TTF as default. You receives with Qube 12 fonts in current version. You can receive them more if you ask us for. You can change default fonts for buttons and window captions to other fonts by changing ini files of Qube.

Perfomance is great (for something using unaccelerated VESA driver). Though - no big app to see the multitasking under heavy load, no *BSD port, no sources, no i18n (the cyrillic filenames from my harddrive were silently ignored by filesystem browser ). The chosen license is authors personal business, so if there were FreeBSD (even binary-only) port with an X-server app (to run X-version of netscape, acrobat reader, GV, etc. in Qube window, even with some loss of perfomance), and, especially a nice terminal-emulator + sane internationalisation support I would definately use it (anyway my X desktop is nothing more than a heap of x-terms and some netscape and acrobat reader windows, and seems like Qube could handle these with less hunger for memory than X does). To Michal - extremely good for a one-person project, and "prodolzaj tak ze, brat ".

Hello, These days will be released Qube SDK that's released under terms of GPL license. I will contact Eugenia too to give a comment on the site if she is interested in. SDK contains DJGPP compiler, IDE ( Rhide ), executables for transfering COFF files to Qube executables, API source, few examples. Documentation project is very poor, but shows how to continue. Documetation is in header files. This SDK is Work In Project not full version. We are working on and hope you help us too. That's why SDK was released under GPL. We will make few changes on our site and Wube SDK-WIP will be released.

so.. how much like the new AmigaDE os will this be? and vice versa... will be interesting to compare... and bring on the sparcstation 5 port for solaris!!

On my Cyrix 586/120 with DR DOS 7.03, Qube seems very comfortable. Also, I've been DOS-surfing with Arachne. Arachne already runs native to DOS, so maybe Michael Polak (home.arachne.cz) might be persuaded to crank out a version that would give Qube a browser to go with that slick dialer. The same goes for Opera, but that would probably be a stretch. I noticed that when Qube boots up it loads a familiar DOS extender. Does Qube use 32-bit protected mode much?

>>>>>This system has in this time many clones such as BadSeal, StarSeal, SEAL 2.0, etc...and many peoples want to use SEAL for their own desktop enviroments. They change desktop background and icons and talks about the new system "based" on SEAL. But it's not based on, it's the same one. you are wrong here Michal. Bad Seal (at least at the current version) has many many changes in the kernel and not only the apearance as was at versions 0.1 to 0.3! I done alot of work last year on Bad Seal and i can't read this without saying anything! About StarSeal, i don't know a bit... but about SEAL 2.0 i can say that ONLY A SMALL BIT from your code is been used, only a small bit (actually i proposed to the creators of SEAL 2.00 to change the name to something else, just because SEAL 2.00 doesn't have any relation with SEAL). About Qube... well being a user and a programmer of SEAL i can say that Qube is nothing more than an extended SEAL. It's very good, but SEAL 2.00 has almost all things that Qube has and some more. Bad to say that, but the worst thing that you did was to abandon us and SEAL community. Eugenia: take a look also at the SEAL stuff, it rocks. And btw, the screenshot in the interview was from my improved Bad Seal (an old version btw... the latest is better) and not michal's SEAL. Take a look at http://www.sealsystem.org/" http://www.badseal.cjb.net/" http://www.badseal.cjb.net/</a&... and take a look at the screenshots, then a look at the binary and/or at the sources (if you know a bit of C) and tell me what is good and what is bad. Michal (again): do you want the help system to be ported to Qube? I'm still waiting for that SDK... you said in one week and more than one month has passed hey, i don't have anything against Qube, but i think that isn't something special. Bad Seal is better (in some things.... t_scrollbar still sux... the next version will have this thing fixed because Julien found the -=silly=- bug) but if Michal had cooperated with us or just didn't dropped the project without saying anything (the project wasn't dropped actually, even if he tried to do that by shuting down some SEAL-related pages and saying bad things about SEAL distributions and SEAL 2.00). last but not least, i'll give you two Bad Seal 0.54 screenshots just to make you see what the hell Bad Seal is... if you have time search for michal's SEAL and see the difference (i have it somewhere in my disk if you are interested...): <center><img src="http://scorpius.spaceports.com/~dig/ss1t.gif"> <img src="http://scorpius.spaceports.com/~dig/ss4t.gif"></center> ohh, i'm talking a lot about Bad Seal. Sorry but i spend a lot of time by making it and i can't just stay without saying anything when reading bad things about it. Sorry for wasting your time and disk space .

I'm still waiting to hear back from the company on a possible Qube port to PETROS. Anyone from the either Interactive Studio or the other project (Bad Seal?) might like to contact me if they would like me to expose a COFF (i.e. Win32 style) API to our virtual graphics plane. This means that Qube or its predecessors could run fully as 32 bit code instead of relying on 32 bit DPMI emulation and the costs associated with that. P

Qube looks good and seems responsive, but can I do anything with it. Is it possible to run my windows applications in it? Are there any native applications for it? If so where can they be found. I'm using the version for win98/2000/nt. I must say it is much more attractive than the normal windows desktop. If I could find use for it, that would be great.

there aren't any programs for Qube and doesn't support Windows applications. Michal told me than in "one week", will be a SDK available, but he told me that about one month ago . I hope that Michal will release the SDK soon because i have many things that i want to port from SEAL to Qube... Kostas Michalopoulos aka Bad Sector /Nasty Bugs http://www.bsector.cjb.net/

I read something in the article about an SDK, but I can't find it anywhere. I think that if you would release an development kit for Qube popularity would grow soon, since the number of applications will come up. If there's an SDK available please mail me. Qube looks good, and it works well too (for all i can see until know) Greetings, Peter

Hey, I like this. At last a desent alternative to the (*yawn*) X-server. If somebody find a way to make the install proceedure for linux apps as simple as for windows apps (as an alternative to (*yawn*) RPM,or (*frown*) compiling source code), I would emediatly go back to linux again. Maybe there is hope for a microsoft free world (that works) after all. P.S. How can I launch windows programs in the cube? (can I)

1)Describe briefly the different between multiprogramming and multitasking in a windows enviroment? 2)Compare and contrast the Unix Operating system with an operating system of your choice(you may use Unix in any of it's variants,Soloris,HP-UX,Linux etc). What factors would you take into account when justifying an enterprise wide operating system?Justify using technical,operatinal and management considerations. From:ALlen Thanks to Whose may consern.