After a very long development process, the Syllable team has finally released Syllable 0.6.6. This release comes with some significant improvements, most user-visible of which probably the new Syllable web browser, Webster, which uses the WebKit rendering engine.
Apart from the new web browser, Syllable 0.6.6 focusses on improvements in POSIX support, running virtual machines in Qemu, and better installation and upgrade experiences. Obviously, it also comes with a massive list of bugfixes and patches. Looking at the changelog, there are a few interesting notes: for instance, experimental support for installing Syllable off USB media, a new mouse preferences panel, and a newer version of SDL.
“This has been the longest, most difficult release we have ever overseen, and I’d like to say a huge, massive thank you to Kaj and Anthony for their help and support, to every single person who has contributed to making this release happen, and of course to everyone in the community to continuing to support Syllable even when things have been very quiet,” Vanders, lead developers of Syllable, said in the announcement.
You can get this new release via the download page.
I know we’ve got some Syllable devs around here, so this is primarily a question for them. Has any thought gone into accessibility for Syllable, either now or in the future? I’ve got to ask, seeing as how I’m an os enthusiast but severely limited on what oses I can actually look at by lack of speech output and a screen reading application in most of them. I’m stuck with Windows, *NIX, and OS X and to be honest I’m getting kinda bored.
Accessibility was something we highlighted when we developed the roadmap quite some time ago. It is not part of the short or medium term plans right now, but it will be addressed before Syllable 1.0 is released.
However Syllable does have a screen-zoom application, and some work on alternative inputs may be done for the next release.
Not that either of those will help me, but I’m glad to here that accessibility is at least in the plans.
If you’d like to post on the Syllable forums or the syllable-developer mailing list I’d love to hear some detailed information on what sort of accessibility requirements you have. It would be helpful for us to know what people actually require when we come to implement it.
So I load up the vmware image with qemu on my Fedora 10 box. What is the root password? I looked on the wiki…nothing.
Username is “root”, password is “root”.
Edit: Actually you’re dead right. It is documented in the install.txt, but that is obviously not much help for those of you who are using the VMWare image! We’ll make sure to update the README and the Welcome document to include this information.
Edited 2009-05-15 18:15 UTC
The widgets reminds me a little bit on BeOS. I always encourage the development of software regardless its license type.
I tried looking around the Syllable website, but couldn’t seem to find a list of supported hardware… It would be quite useful, so i can assemble the most compatible machine i can from the mountain of parts i have here…
We gave up trying to maintain a HCL because users would fail to report what did and did not work. The best way to know if it Syllable works is to try it. If it doesn’t, please let us know.
Perhaps you could build some kind of automatic hardware reporting utility. Something that automatically contacts yourselves with the hardware that works so you’re not relying on users to manually contact you.
Obviously you’d need to get users permission before submitting the data, but at least, being an automated process, you make it easy for even the laziest of geeks.
I think that the syllable desktop must be ported on L4 or even GenodeOS to reuse drivers). But this is a suggestion and I do not have any code to put where my mouth is. But more interesting would be to port the HW base to Hurd and Syllable on top of Hurd, this way both can be happy.
lol. hurd development makes syllable development look fast and furious