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.
First things first: I was raised on Mac OS 7.5.2. That means my earliest recollections are dealing with Hypercards, not punch cards. But I liked it. The entire contents of the hard drive on that machine could fit on a modern CD-R with a few hundred megabytes to spare, but it worked, and it worked well. I liked how the computer felt like it was supposed to run a GUI. I liked how the applications were simple, yet fully functional and as powerful as they needed to be. In recent systems, it has been hard to find such characteristics in system software “simple, stable, small. Good thing the folks developing Syllable believe in those same principles” but too bad their operating system isn’t even close to being in a usable state yet.
I’m a mostly Linux user at the moment, and my choices in the UNIX world reflect the aspects I learned to love. GNOME vs. KDE? Xfce. emacs vs. vi? nano. Firefox vs. Opera? well, more Firefox. It’s so refreshing, then, to learn of a project aiming to make an operating system that includes all necessary aspects of a modern operating system while integrating a desktop environment in a small, fast package. Not just an operating system for Mac OS 7 lovers, per se, but quite a different approach to take as Vista and GNOME/KDE continue to crawl.
AtheOS, the foundation of the Syllable OS, was a project started many years ago, described in detail on the now defunct (and apparently somewhat hacked) atheos.cx. 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. Most of those things are still dreams on desktop operating systems and now that Microsoft has dropped WinFS in the near future, some will continue to be dreams. Syllable’s User’s Bible, found here, preaches these same concepts: a cool file system, no legacy code for old applications, POSIX compliance, speed, and easy development. Sounds great to me! How do I get started?
I decided to give Syllable a test of real? hardware (not a virtual machine’s virtual hardware) and downloaded the LiveCD. To make it even tougher for the little OS, I decided to test it on my laptop, a 1.7 Ghz Pentium M-powered IBM ThinkPad T41p. Given how well Ubuntu Linux runs installed on the machine, I figured that it must use some good-quality, cross-OS-compatible hardware.
Indeed, Syllable booted into a graphical login withing seconds of inserting the CD. I must complain, though, of the choice of background color during boot. White text on a blue screen? Reminiscent of a BSOD, anyone? Combined with the fact that there were just as many error messages as informational ones, the startup sequence could appear a bit scary even to a seasoned Windows user.
Regardless of any first-boot frights, the login screen presented a comfortable area to sign on, similar to the major OSes but with a personality of its own. I thought it looked a bit blurry, and soon realized a few seconds later (the time required to log in) that the monitor resolution was initially set to 640 by 480 pixels. I always run this SXGA+ at 1400×1050 (which provides approximately 4.8 times as much viewing area 640×480), and was therefore puzzled why Syllable could not detect my monitor resolution like Windows and X can — and even if it can’t, why would it it pick 640 by 480? It’s been a long time since I’ve used a monitor at this resolution (perhaps all the way back to OS 7).
No problem, I figured. The screen settings can fix that. And they did, but the system froze when I attempted to change my color depth to 32 bit. I tried this three times (requiring rebooting the system each time – thank goodness for a quick boot) with no success. I guess I can live without 4.2 billion colors for a day.
When first greeted (in 640×480) at the desktop, the view is similar to an upside-down Windows desktop: the taskbar, excuse me, the “dock” is on top, containing the Syllable menu with all of the installed applications, preferences, and actions. Fedora Core and Red Hat Linux users will notice that the icons are from the same Bluecurve set as their desktops. I happen to like the Bluecurve icons, with their matching top-left-corner perspective, but quite frankly, they made Syllable feel like a dinky Linux replacement, which it clearly is not attempting to be. Given the relatively small set of icons that Syllable requires, it shouldn’t be too unreasonable to develop their own fresh icon set.
The developers might want to modify the rest of the look-and-feel as well. Despite what the site screenshots may show, the font anti-aliasing was lacking at all resolutions; many phrases were blurry almost to the point of illegibility. The window title bars in the default theme contain buttons for close in the top left, and minimize (to the dock), fill screen, and send in front of/behind other windows at the top right. Strangely, there’s no “restore”? button to make a maximized window back to its original size — a feature necessary for efficient multi-tasking. Menu selection looks strange, as there is a bit of space to the left of each menu item but the text practically falls off the right side. Perhaps I’m being a bit critical of the superficial looks of the desktop, but considering that the desktop is integrated into the kernel, and considering the market for whom Syllable is supposed to be, the desktop look-and-feel can matter just as much as the internals.
Application-wise, Syllable is highly disappointing, Included is what seems to be buggy, feature-incomplete versions of the contents of the Windows Accessories folder. The Whisper e-mail client is one of the few programs that seems decent (which probably explains why it is one of the only applications on the Syllable desktop with a 1.0 version number, albeit an alpha); it’s got that simple-but-efficient philosophy working well for it, with a Thunderbird-like layout with a much lesser footprint.
The rest of the applications all suffer from that lack of functionality. AEdit looks very similar to GNOME’s gedit, but doesn’t have all the nice touches that can be necessary when editing code or just typing some notes. I’ve never played a game like Inci before, which involves moving connected dots with the mouse such that no connections overlap, but it gets exceedingly infuriating after a short amount of time; of course, I wouldn’t blame that on the developers. The file manager is seriously lacking in capabilities. The file system structure itself is just standard UNIX for the most part, but trying to browse it graphically is unsatisfying: no tree view, no location bar, not even cut/copy/paste commands in sight. I love Thunar, the new file manager for the upcoming Xfce 4.4 desktop, in its simplicity and extendability; I was expecting something similar for the simple Syllable desktop. Instead, there’s just a folder browsing window with a back/forward/up/home toolbar. Not acceptable.
I was also highly surprised to see a complete lack of sample media on the CD. The LiveCD is supposed to highlight the capabilities of the operating system, and there’s not a single audio file or photograph to be found on the disc. There’s no floppy drive here, my network wasn’t detected, and my hard drive partitions aren’t listed — so without further hacking, I don’t have any access to my own media, either.
Many of the applications still have their AtheOS naming: AEdit, ABrowse, Albert, etc. With the name Syllable, they should come up with something kute and korny like KDE’s Konqueror and Kontact, but with a literary theme. I can see it now: Paragraph Spreadsheet! Homophone VoIP! I’m not sure they’d go for it.
After half a dozen crashes, I was through. It’s disappointing, really, how an operating system suitable for day-to-day use in the twenty-first century requires worldwide teams of developers, decades of work, and millions of dollars in marketing (for some). An operating system is a complicated project, though, and I can’t deny that Syllable has made more than a dent in progress. They’ve made a fully (mostly, if you count boot) graphical desktop with a small set of applications (more available here) in a system that can even run on a modern laptop. Performance-wise, Syllable is stupendous, even on a LiveCD (a medium which is normally slower (Ubuntu Dapper’s LiveCD is painful on most machines). If only it could stay up and running at something other than 640 by 480.
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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)
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
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.)
niether of those has a native interface, while Whisper, at least, does.
Firefox would probably be VERY welcome though – trying to maintain khtml seems like a nightmare.
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.
Have you thought about setting up a .torrent file for distributing the LiveCD?
>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.
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.
Why not just make the download a bit torrent ? That way you can lessen your traffic.
“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
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.
Ditto for Opera 9.01 on FreeBSD.
Yup, the GUI needs some love. When you use it, you notice the little things the reviewer did.
What are the core differences between AtheOS/Syllable and NewOS/Haiku? They seem to be pretty similar in design/goal. I remember reading they are both inspired and follow the concepts presented on the same book. What are the similarities? Could both projects be merged?
I don´t 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.
I´m 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.
“Haiku uses a microkernel with services running on top.”
It does not. See below.
“Syllabe uses a modular kernel but the modules run in kernel space. ”
Just like Haiku.
> 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
“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).
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?
“considering that the desktop is integrated into the kernel”
I’m sure it isn’t. Vanders ?
No, it isn’t. The desktop is “tied” to the system in the sense that there is no text-only interface, so if you don’t run the appserver and at least one application, you get nothing at all, but it isn’t “integrated into the kernel” in any other sense.
> The Haikuers have always been more focused (AFAICT) on
> their image, recruiting, website, newsletters, etc.,
> than Syllable.
Other examples: Haiku’s non-profit status. Also the recent icon contest (with the fancy ratings page). Haiku bounties. The web design contest.