Submitted by A new video is available at the re-designed SkyOS website, showing the proof-of-concept work on a Media Station application for SkyOS. This proof-of-concept shows the first steps of what will hopefully become a full, specialized application (or possibly complete version) of SkyOS in the not-too-distant future. Additionally, a number of other new features can be seen in this video.
As most people know I’m not much of a fan of SkyOS’ business practices and I’ve often said that IMHO I think they need to either ‘put up’ (with a downloadable beta so those of us not blessed enough to be on the beta team can see their OS in action before expecting us to spend our hard earned cash) or ‘shut up.’
I’m now taking that back! : D
This video was smooth looking and made my mouth water. The fact that Robert says The video is a .swf with low quality. Increasing the quality lead to dramatic frame drops for the embedded video. only increases my admiration. I want in!
–bornagainpenguin
Err…if Kelly Rush reads this, could you advise me as to whether or not I could use a prepaid VISA card to buy a beta? I know from the site that you handle the business matters but am unable to find an email address on site. Paypal is not an option for me (for various reasons, including the fact that it is evil).
Edited 2006-01-17 17:49
given that it’s in vmware….
Nice idea, this media center station.
Maybee, it’ll allow SkyOS to become a viable commercial product much sooner than anticipated.
I guess that many people would be interested in a light, fast, rock solid and not bloated OS to put in a media center….
Go go go SkyOS !
IMHO, I think SkyOS with a fresh new gui, it could look much more pro than that and convience a lot more people to get into the beta thing or buy the final product.
You are free to do gui proposals in the forum. Also keep in mind that the gui is themeable.
I agree. I don’t expect any major GUI stuff for the first major release though. Hopefully for the second they’ll bring in some good and proven UI designers to create something more polished.
Besides that it’s possible to create your own themes.
Porting a theme from another platform is possible. There are quite a few good themes to choose elements from to create a reasonably polished GUI (in terms of eye candy or lack of it).
The way the system works is a different matter, and most likely one to be solved after the first major version.
(I’d like a nextsteppish theme… oh yeah.. squared corners… uhhhmmm!)
I haven’t seen them, but I think even with a good theme there is a lot of polishing to do.
Well, there is a lot to fix in regard to drawing the windows. And perhaps there is some thing to polish up in regard to placement of some widgets.
Read earlier today on the SkyOS forum that the windows were a bit different in the right side compared with left side, and that the black dots in the close/maximize-restore/minimize buttons were placed slightly off center. But that are small things to fix up later :p
I have to say the everything seems to run very smooth and the whole projcts looks very promising. Hope they get a wide userbase.I would install it without doubts, i need a system to code/surf/office, two of them are available, the third will be as soon i have time to learn TeX, if its ported.
And they should offer free beta testing for students
.
Well, we offer free beta testing for developers, so it is a start. Also, if you are a student developer….I guess you could get the beta at no cost.
great to hear, email should be in the box
.
Won´t think about what Mr. Jobs said when he got such questions while OSX was in development…
greetings
I’m a studnet developer and have been looking at SkyOS for quite some time but haven’t had the money to get a beta account and am wondering if I could hit you up on that ‘beta at no cost’ offer
Hello. I am a student (Computer Engineering/A.S in Comp Sci) developer (Mostly C++/Qt/Python). I have been watching SkyOS for quite awhile now. I would be interested in getting my hands on a beta copy of SkyOS.
Please email me if you get this brandon_at_kinmantech.org
Thank you so very much by the way, very generous of you.
You can apply in the forums, accessible via the following link:
http://www.skyos.org/board/viewforum.php?f=49
Having a tex-distribution on Skyos would be really nice…
I guess porting MikTeX would be too much work. That’s too bad…it kicks ass.
I watched the video thinking that SkyOS is shaping up to be a excellent choice to replace Windows unlike Linux. I feel that before linux becomes desktop viable SkyOS will be their first. Amazing OS.
“… excellent choice to replace Windows unlike Linux. I feel that before linux becomes desktop viable”
Please keep the subjective flamebait to yourself. I don’t see why people have to compulsively stab at Linux every chance they get.
If you don’t think Linux is desktop viable that’s your opinion, and in order to keep from turning that opinion into flamebait you’re going to have to clearly state that it’s your opinion. Otherwise you’re presenting it as if it were fact, and that would be the very seed for a flamewar. Show some curteousy for those of us who like Linux.
After all, I don’t take cheap shots at other operating systems. I extend the same attitude to people who like other OS’s that I expect for myself.
most skyos threads are usually full of linux people bashing skyos, so i guess it is nice to get some back
“most skyos threads are usually full of linux people bashing skyos”
I’m not one of them, I assure you of that. I can understand where you’re comming from though, it happens to all of us, the best thing people like us can do is try not to be part of the problem. I don’t blame you though.
Anybody want to hazzard a guess when 5.0 will be out?
It’s amazing how much more a video does for a GUI than screenshots. It really helps convey the experience in a much better fashion. After reading about SkyOS and looking at screenshots, I’ve always been like “meh”, but this video has sparked my interest.
I had an account with them some gosh…five years ago?
Maybe more I think it was more, and when the recession hit I lost my bank account due to lack of usage. Because of this I ripped up my bank book and cut my debit card. Guess what? PayPal requires the numbers of my card as a anti-fraud device so I can’t even get into my old account to cancel it…
Does anyone know if I can open a new account while the old one exists? Or can you ask Robert if he’ll take VISA?
That said allow me to once again congratulate the SkyOS guys on making the OS look good–the only question is whendoes Robert add support for TV cards? And when if he does can he please make closed captions a priority? I’m Deaf (hard of hearing) so having working closed captions would be a big thing for me!
–bornagainpenguin
I’m getting more and more impressed with skyos. this video was pretty decent. Great idea, and in my opinion could lead sky os into the realms of XP Media Centre Edition. (which is a good thing)
Linux is always touted as THE windows alternative (on pc platform), but I’m seriously thinking that SKYOS might actually be a better bet (for non geeky programmers I mean)
The window borders are too thick though. I guess I just prefer the borderless look of the new iTunes and Safari to big, thick, chunky, useless boarders on the left and right sides.
It’s ok, I didn’t find it to be as aw-inspiring as others have. What did that video show that was so useful? The search was interesting, especially how it used the meta-data to find it, but I think that is being done in just about every other OS right now, yes? The media center was ok, although I’m not sure being able to play more than one video with a smooth framerate is very useful (except maybe for bragging rights).
BTW, I hate the word ‘bloated’ in a computer applications context. People who use it don’t even use it correctly. Just stop it.
Looks relatively interesting, but am convinced it will go no where other than the 0.1% niche it has.
There is more to gaining success other than looking nifty.
How much of the UNIX filesystem paradigm does SkyOS use? I notice they aren’t using drive names, they’re using a system apparently rooted at /, like UNIX, but /boot is clearly a different idea altogether, and some (apparently) system files have extensions…
Along the same lines, they’ve got BASH and GNU binutils; how POSIX-compliant is SkyOS (or how compliant can it be?)
Is there an option to anchor the expanding taskbar?
Am I confused, or is there a sort of media-handling system that globally handles media playback (such that you only have to upgrade, say, the Ogg Vorbis library once and all programs that use the media player will use the new Vorbis codec? Or was that BeOS? Or RiscOS? Or something I just made up?
How much of a performance penalty is incurred with those freeform windows?
(Wow, OSNews just switched to blue!)
Edited 2006-01-17 23:12
There is /boot in FreeBSD and it has always been there, I have not used SkyOS but would presume /boot would have boot.conf and other boot related files in /boot like FreeBSD.
GRUB uses /boot/grub to keep it’s files. Of course you can use another directory, but the default one is mostly used.
/ is a virtual root, your local computer.
/boot is the SkyFS partition with the SkyOS installation.
other partition go for example in /fat1, /fat2 /floppy (you could mount them in other locations as well, but this is the default)
The integrated sound system (ISS) provides a consistent API for playing media files.
The subject probably says it all 🙂
–The loon
Correct.
What was your point?
In response to an earlier post, essentially.
Answers the whole file system layout question. Unix-like, sure.
–The loon
This is a lil off topic sorry but,
Anybody see anywhere on their site, or elsewhere mentioning Sky’s POSIX compatibility? Would I find things like pthread.h and flfcn.h ?
I’ve noticed most of the things that are ported are also available on Windows (Gimp, Firefox, Thunderbird). How difficult is it to get *nix apps ported over…
Yes it is POSIX compatible, a quick google for skyos and posix gives back this article:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=185
“SkyOS support emulation layers. So it will
support POSIX as well as the Win32 API”
“it will” == (usually) “never”
Thanks
.
The POSIX compatibility in SkyOS is quite good. You should be able to ./configure and make most GNU software. (Bash, GCC, Coreutils,… can all be built without modifing a single line of code).
The filesystem structure used in SkyOS is somewhat different than the one used in *nix OSes. The / directory is completely virtual. /boot holds the partition you booted from. Other top level directories are only mount points or symlinks. Initialy I tried to avoid symlinks at all, but if you want to have a high posix compatibilty or allow easy porting of available software you just have to provide directories like /bin.
All SkyOS system files (drivers, dlls, plugins, services, essential applications, etc. ) are located in /boot/system. All native applications are in /boot/programs. Ported *nix applications are in /boot/programs/unix/bin which symlinks to /bin (respectivly /lib, /usr, /etc). This *nix directories are hidden by default, so the “normal” user only see physical partition in /. (like /boot, /windows, …).
Hope this explains a few things.
Btw,
>> Anybody see anywhere on their site, or elsewhere mentioning Sky’s POSIX compatibility?
Just added ‘Is SkyOS POSIX compatible?’ to the FAQ section on skyos.org. Thanks for the hint!
>> “it will” == (usually) “never”
Fortunately SkyOS is not such a “usual” operating system
Firefox, Gimp, Thunderbird etc. are *nix apps. They run on SkyOS as well as on Windows, because both systems are posix compliant to a certain degree.
I have been watching SkyOS for quite some time now, and it is shaping up to be one beautiful OS. Very interesting and I can’t wait for the 5.0 final release.
Sky OS really looks neat. When do they think the first full version will be out. I would really be interested in using it if it supports a lot of hardware.
somehow i am more impressed by skyOS than the livecd(!) of zeta. skyos while still being beta feels more finalized than the zeta release…what do you think?
I’ve been watching SkyOS for about 3 years now and they’ve sure come a long way. I really hope this project does well, mabye it’ll encourage all the Linux geeks to get down and serious about OS ease of use, up to now Linuxers seems to believe ease of use just = pretty visuals. A UI is much more than pretty pictures.
So Java and Flash (Other plug ins also) are not ported?
But where do I find if it’ll run on my Graphics/Sound/whatever card?
And 30 USD seems pretty good to me, well it’s not free, but give the exchange rates at the moment, thats UKP20 or lower, heck even a Linux magazine costs upewards of £6, or about the same to buy a nice printed DVD or CD set through the post.
But where do I find if it’ll run on my Graphics/Sound/whatever card?
Most common graphics cards should work in basic vesa 2 mode (also higher resolutions).
There is some basic 2d hardware acceleration for ati and nvidia.
There are only a few sound and network drivers currently available. This thread gives a short list:
http://www.skyos.org/board/viewtopic.php?t=20090
Hmm, I’ve got a Audigy 2 Sound card, wonder if that’ll work?
Also, Do external Serial Modems work for getting on the World Wide Net?
Most likely the serial modem will not work at this time.