
The first development release of Syllable Server
is available. It provides a text mode Linux environment, but also contains a preliminary graphical environment built on the framebuffer device, with DirectFB and SDL on top. The planned graphical environment from Syllable Desktop is not included yet. The installation procedure is short, but is still manual - and resembles the installation procedure for the old
AtheOS. Included are tools such as a graphical web browser, a file manager and an editor. One thing Syllable Server is designed for is to function as a light-weight virtualisation platform for running other operating systems (or multiple instances of itself). The QEmu virtualisor/emulator is included, and the KQEmu Accelerator kernel module is integrated into the system. There's a
screenshot of Syllable Server running on Syllable Desktop,
installation and usage instructions, a
torrent (preferred), and an
installation package [.tar.7z].
Member since:
2005-10-13
I think the main issue is hardware support, it's going to be a while before Syllable can realistically provide all the drivers that Linux does. This way if the Syllable kernel doesn't support your hardware they can point you to the linux version as an alternative.
The other possible issue I can see is scalability. The linux kernel is designed to scale up to hundreds of processors, and I'm sure Syllable isn't. In fact, that might even be a good choice for a desktop system since I'm sure there are some design tradeoffs involved. I'm not sure anyone with hardware like that would really want to run Syllable anyway, but perhaps that's what they're aiming for?