Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 28th Mar 2008 20:37 UTC, submitted by Kaj de Vos
An outside contributor to Syllable going under the name Bean has rewritten the AFS filesystem driver for GRUB 2. The original driver was for GRUB 1 and was derived from the full AFS driver. This meant that the copyright could not be reassigned to the FSF, so the GRUB project didn't want to integrate the code. The new driver is much smaller and looks like it will be integrated into GRUB, so Syllable will have a new boot loader and maintenance will become much easier. Before that happens, though, more porting work needs to be done on GRUB 2 to integrate it in the build process and installer. Eventually, this will lead to EFI support and support by other operating systems to boot Syllable.
Here is a separate test CD that is capable of booting an existing Syllable installation on disk.
In addition, Ruwen Boehm got the newest version of PHP to work, so for the first time since AtheOS times there is a new PHP port. A binary package for version 5.2.5 is now available for download.
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RE[2]: rewriting the OS
by StephenBeDoper on Sat 29th Mar 2008 15:18
in reply to "RE: rewriting the OS"
Member since:2005-07-06
A large part of the "middle" layers are pretty standard GNU stuff
Thank you, I've been looking for a succinct description of that factor for a while now.
It's one of the reasons why I'm still cautiously-enthusiastic about Haiku's chances (and Syllable too, of course).
Ten-fiteen years ago, Be Inc. had to license quite a few technologies - AA-capable font rendering, the blade MP3 encoder, various commercial video codecs (Indeo, Cinepak), etc.
The barriers-to-entry are a lot lower for an alt. OS project today. Rather than paying millions of dollars to license various technologies (or paying more to re-implement them), developers of an alt. OS can just make use of existing open-source stuff like Freetype, FFmpeg, LAME, etc.
Member since:
2005-07-06
You're right, it would be. Which is why we don't re-write everything!
A large part of the "middle" layers are pretty standard GNU stuff and other Open Source software such as CUPS which has been ported and integrated into Syllable. Most of the drivers are based on Linux, BSD and X.org sources.
We may be crazy, but we're not that crazy!