Like many others, I was a long-time lurker on the atheos mailing list. I was happy to see it get forked, because it seemed to mean that some real progress would get made. In many ways that seems to have happened, and in others… Not so much. Note: This is the 3rd entry to our Alternative OS Contest which runs through 14th July!
The project makes it insanely easy to get the VMware image: its one of the standard distribution types for the project. I appreciated the effort that they went through to make it easy to try Syllable.
The pros of using the VMware image include not actually having to install anything. The system just comes right up. In theory you shouldn’t have hardware issues either, since the system uses the VMware normalized hardware interface. On the downside, it’s somewhat slower than it would be on real hardware.
What I Liked
The boot was pretty fast. I like all the kernel messages and initial programs spilling to the console: it gives me some idea what’s actually going on.
The GUI appears fully skinnable, and the default skin for my install was Photon, a QNX Photon-like appearance. I personally find this skin very agreeable. The rounded rectangle highlighting of selected items was also a nice touch. The GUI mostly seems to have a clean look to it, and uses attractive icons that seem to go well together.
Everything you need to use is available right from the desktop – which is good for newbies, even though I wouldn’t prefer that layout full-time. You don’t have to hunt for stuff.
The preferences menu is nicely laid out, and gives quick access to all the settings you need. The individual configuration applets still need some sprucing up, but they all seem straightforward enough.
The terminal is very friendly, has a good default color scheme, and supports everything I would expect in a modern console (like command history, command editing, backbuffer, etc.).
What I Didn’t Like
The interface feels clunky. I wish I could be less vague, but it’s just how it feels to me. In addition, the version I tested seems to have serious redraw problems that likely contributed to this feeling. While windows didn’t leave bits and pieces of themselves all over, windows that were under another window and were then raised did not refresh themselves. That left the interface in a strange state. Moving the mouse over the affected areas caused it to be redrawn correctly. In other cases, a brand new window (like the shutdown, restart, etc. windows) didn’t draw itself correctly in the first place.
The redraw problems may be related to the driver for VMware, since I noticed that sometimes minimizing the window and bringing it back up would cause a correct redraw to occur. I also suspect this to be the case since I experienced mouse issues, where I would click on some button, but nothing would happen. Several clicks later, it would work fine again for a while.
Networking didn’t work for me on boot. This was fine because I received an error message that I would have to reset networking. I quickly located the network preferences, but changing the settings there made no difference. I finally ended up rebooting the system in order to get networking to come up. If this is the intended functionality, a message informing the user to that effect would be appropriate.
That brings up another point: the quit window didn’t work. I tried rebooting using that interface several times, but nothing happened. I finally opened a terminal and typed reboot into that, which worked perfectly.
Bundled Apps
The basic package comes with a few basic apps, mostly what you’d expect: a browser, an editor, an image viewer, a calculator, even an e-mail client, and a chat program.
The editor, AEdit, seems to be a nice program. I was somewhat confused by the lack of Alt+XXX accelerators, but it does respond to the typical Ctrl+S type shortcuts. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get into the menu system without a mouse, but I don’t know if this was a conscious design decision, or just something that hasn’t been done yet. Other than that, I thought it was a useful program.
The e-mail client, Whisper, never did work for me. In fact, it locked up as soon as I tried to configure it. I didn’t investigate this very deeply, since my opinion is that the client should just work. Although, in its defense, it does claim to be alpha software.
The built-in browser, ABrowse, was functional but insanely slow. It also appears to have redraw problems. It’s better than nothing, but the project would do well to just port Firefox.
The chat client is a Jabber-based IM. It ran, but since I don’t have any Jabber accounts I didn’t try to connect and see if it functions. I did try to change some settings to see if it had problems similar to Whisper, but it worked just fine.
The distro also comes with a very nice calculator, called Albert. I appreciate that since, as a programmer, I often am annoyed when I want to do a moderately complex calculation, but can’t find any program in some OS to do it. You shouldn’t have to hunt for useful tools like that.
Conclusion
The OS has some promise, but it needs to apply some serious spit and polish to its general user interface if it wants to attract more users.
I keep trying to decide why I might use Syllable over, say, OpenBSD or Ubuntu… And I can’t think of any compelling reasons. The website lists five things that might be of interest to some people:
- Lack of legacy code
- Modern, queryable filesystem
- POSIX-compliance
- Fast boot
- Clean API
Of those five, the filesystem was perhaps the most compelling to me, but with projects like Beagle, it has become less so. The vast majority of their work, though, seems to be reinventing the wheel. At the moment, while I wish the Syllable team the best and I think it has real potential, I don’t find Syllable as exciting or interesting as I had hoped to.
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I always wanted to try it myself but I think you did it for me 😉 I didn’t expect much from it because it’s under developement but still, it looks cool.
But there’s one thing that annoyed me: it uses Gnome’s icons. I know it’s stupid and very understandable because there are better things to do than making icons but it confused me alot
What do I have to do to get listed on your list of alternative operating systems? Granted nobody but me probably uses it.
http://www.losethos.com
I’m buying a Pentium-D in a couple weeks and hope to get 64-bit code running and support 2 processors. Right now, it runs on a limited range of hardware, unfortunately.
Just because it exists doesn’t mean we track it. There are literally hundreds of operating systems out there, our site doesn’t report on all of them, just ones we feel our readers will be interested in learning more about.
Please try to keep your comments on topic. This is not a forum for grousing about OSNews. That’s what the Meta Blog is for.
When you write an OS from scratch (well, close enough, based on a years-old incarnation of AtheOS), one of the problems is limited hardware compatibility. You shouldn’t experience these problems in a VMWare image if they are DISTRIBUTING a VMWAre image, but I had better luck with AtheOS back in 1999/2000, so I know Syllable is capable of better.
I’m sorry your experience wasn’t as positive, but the project itself is still extremely interesting, and it’s one of the few viable alternatives out there today besides the four big OSes.
First of all, thanks for taking the time to review Syllable.
Now, just to make it clear, the VMWare image is semi-official, as is the LiveCD. The only official distributions of Syllable are the downloadable ISO image or the Premium CD we sell via. Lulu. Over the years various people have produced various pre-packaged versions of Syllable for VMWare and VirtualPC.
The drawing issues experienced are bugs in the VMWare video driver, which we hope are all now fixed in CVS so future releases of Syllable should work much better on VMWare. The issue with rebooting to change network settings is also a known bug; in fact, you’ve finally shamed me into going off and fixing it as soon as I’ve written this. The crash bug in Whisper was resolved and I’ve since released a new version of Whisper & the fix for the crash is in CVS; again, this will all be available in the next release so Whisper should just work.
The GUI in Syllable is “sort of” 95% finished, but we havn’t settled on a final design yet, so you may find that certain things are quirky or incomplete. These sort of things will be done before Syllable 1.0 is released, but right now we’re really in the “Make it work correctly” stage of development[1]. We do of course need more developers, but then who doesn’t?
[1]: My three stages of software development: #1 Make it work. #2 Make it work correctly. #3 Make it better.
Shame: the #1 motivator of today’s savvy coder.
I’m the original author of the VMware video driver! I based i off of the XFree86 driver which was publicly available. The last time I touched it, I thought it was working properly. But it’s been a number of years and I think the driver interface has changed? Anyways, I’m working for the man now aka Billy G so I can’t really touch GPL code. Good to see that Syllable is still progressing =)
While I think virtualization can have some merits for some uses, one of which is playing around with different OSes minus the need to actually install, it’s a horrible way to get an accurate feel for the quality of the OS itself. I’ve often seen folk have to spend a good deal of time fighting with quirks in the software (like vmware), instead of really getting to use the operating system itself.
That’s probably true to some extent. However, I use vmware all the time, and I’m well aware of it’s effects on hosted software.
Syllable has some great potential, but it’s all rough edges and unfinished symphonies at the moment.
The web site directs you to http://www.lulu.com/syllable to buy the Premium CD to support the project and get more stuff that the downloadable CD. But they are still selling the old version. I’ve been ready to buy since it was released, but it’s still not available.
On syllable, the redraw issue is a serious problem, at least in vmware
The program menu arranging itself by the metadata on the file is cool and makes it very easy to rearrange. but there’s two problems
1. if you open the file browser and right click on an app the file browser tells you the app has
System
->Internet
as an attribute, but if you want to add your own program or mess with the current layout the attribute is actually os::Internet, not system
2. unless i missed something (possible considering the quality of the documentation) you can only nest metadata 1 deep so you can’t say have folders within folders in the appmenu
On syllable, the redraw issue is a serious problem, at least in vmware
Not only when running syllable.For example on FC5 the yumex gui front-end to yum is a heavy redrawer once in a while. 🙁
“This is the 3rd entry to our Alternative OS Contest”
I’m confused as to what you mean by this. I assume you mean the third submission you received; because I cannot recal ever seeing the First, which maybe will be posted later. Or did I somehow miss the first one?
Could you not mark contest entries clearly in the Featured list, or add a menu item to the page so we can easily get back to any of the previous articles when we please? This would be greatly appreciated, as it’s good to compare and contrast these OSes
It’s not the third we received, it’s one of MANY we’ve received, and third of SEVERAL that we will publish, including yours.
We have featured two others thus far, you can find them here: http://www.osnews.com/search.php?search=alternative%20os%20…
That’s exactly as I thought, thanks. I’ll have to bookmark that link.
Maybe I should have. I was able to install it on a Compaq Evo without any hardware issues. I didn’t have any problems with redraw; in fact it was very snappy. The network setup did give me a couple of issues but it only took me about 10 minutes to resolve them. All in all, I thought it was a great little OS. Its main drawback, in my opinion, is lack of software. Sure it still has some rough edges but if I could run Opera, Java, and OpenOffice.org on it, I would use it in a second. Until then, I’ll keep my eye on it. It’s really quite impressive.
I cannot get it to boot on any system I have tried so far. I’ve only gotten it to work in VMWare. Even HaikuOS will boot without VMWare on at least one of my machines.
Which versions of Syllable, on what hardware? What errors did you get?
…but a little short and lacking some detail. Not as good as the first (and I have yet to read the 2nd entry, I’ll have to go back and find it).
Syllable progress does seem to be somewhat slow, on the other hand I have been waiting for “openBeOS” for many years.
When I tried Syllable on my “home-grown” pc (same one I tried out with SkyOS) that had a relatively standard MSI motherboard, 3com ethernet card, nvidia video card, it did not work. I don’t have the PC anymore so I cannot be more specific, sorry.
What additional detail would you have wanted?
I would have been more interested in what has not been implemented and why, what’s needed to get there. Also a roadmap of what is to come in addition to a high-level review of options and performance.