SymphonyOS 2006-05 Beta has been released. This release, based on Debian unstable, is the first with a functional hard drive installer and the first to include the OneClick software installation system providing an easy to use interface to the debian repositories. TuxMachines has already posted a review, and screenshots are available as well.
Admirable Things as default::
1) Desktop manager & One Click Software on the desktop itself, making it obvious to normal users.
2) Well thought of gadgets like yahoo news, newsforge, google search and battery monitor.
3) I think this is the first distro with nvu as default.
4) Eye candy, eye candy and even more eye candy.
I know that we can do all this on most linux systems, but here it comes as default and many users like me don’t even change the default wallpaper. Having a preconfigured easy to use system contributed a lot to Ubuntu’s popularity. Symphony developers have done a great job in achieving this. Kudos to them for such a magnificant effort.
Looking forward to a final release.
I think we need more of this instead of the usual distro-of-the-month that does the same thing as all the other distros except arranges files differently and uses a different package manager.
I’m a bit mystified on why we don’t have more people having a little bit more courage in taking the kernel, X, some GNU tools and doing something really different.
It’s 2006 and I think we’ve gotten to the point that business as usual is not doing much good for desktop linux making more progress in the market.
> I’m a bit mystified on why we don’t have more people having a little bit
> more courage in taking the kernel, X, some GNU tools and doing
> something really different.
I would even go a step further and say, come up with design principles from scratch that are appropriate for today’s needs, and then build an operating system that *just happens* to be built on top of Linux. Linux should be a solution to have a running system with lots of supported hardware quickly, but not dictate the overall philosophy of the whole system.
In pratice that means, screw compatibility with other Linuxes. Don’t call it Linux so people know that it isn’t compatible. Patch the kernel and other software whenever it doesn’t do what you want. Don’t make it compatible with every release of the vanilla kernel, so you have less trouble keeping your patches up-to-date.
PS: That would be an interesting project for me, but I think that Unix-like OSes are a dead end in general (that includes NT, which is very Unix-like from a certain viewpoint). IMHO projects like JNode and Singularity are the way to go.
It’s too much work for most people, even the more geekier sort. Unless you’re only building for yourself.
But an OpenSTEP-clone based on GnuSTEP with a Linux kernel seems like the perfect GNU/Linux distribution to me. Take Alexander Patrakovs UTF-8 version, apply some of the ideas from GoboLinux, but with GnuSTEP flavour, and off we go
EDIT #1: And combine it with Klik, so we can have appfolders
EDIT #2: Something like this -> http://klik.atekon.de/search.php?package=gnustep
Edited 2006-05-19 10:55
I’m surprised to see only 2 comments, as Symphony used to be the promised land according to many
…the article or see the pictures.
Me neither…
Server not found
Firefox can’t find the server at http://www.symphonyos.com.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=644&slide=4…
Ryan’s work is moving along well, if slowly. I wrote an article about installing Mezzo (the cool desktop that you see in all the screenies) within Ubuntu, where it just becomes another desktop option within GDM:
HOWTO: Mezzo desktop on Ubuntu
http://fak3r.com/articles/2006/01/31/howto-mezzo-desktop-on-ubuntu
Many of the ideas of how the desktop should be used are new and exciting. The fact that this live cd is so much further along is a great sign, with more developer support I know interest for this distro will go way up, but for me, just getting it installed within Ubuntu was my way of getting to use it; after that I started posting to the forum and watching the progress. All this talk about e17 and it’s endless 16.999999 cycle, but it has none of the new ideas Mezzo does (not that I don’t like e17, I do, it’s slick, but it’s still more of the same)
This looks to be a kind of Symphony-esque desktop for KDE, called Kuartet
http://kuartetdesktop.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
It’s based on Python/Superkaramba, and might be another new direction for desktop experimentation.
aaarrgghhh, i burned the iso with k3b and restarted my gateway laptop…nothing. too bad, i really like the article and screenshots.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=644&slide=4…
bittorrent download link for p2p users:
http://www.mininova.org/get/314043
It looks like
http://www.symphonyos.com
is having DNS problems…in fact, it looks like the hosting ISP, isptec.net is having DNS problems.