Vanders and Rick yesterday officially presented Syllable, an operating system forked from AtheOS. Version 0.4.0 is available. The system is almost identical to AtheOS, therefore all software available at Kamidake should work, with the addition of the new Desktop replacement.
Syllable 0.4.0 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I’ve lurked on the Atheos list for a long time, and was somewhat dismayed at the lack of progress, and the lack of interest in the project by Kurt. I am glad to see that someone has picked up the ball and decided to run with it.
I look forward to many years of watching Syllable grow, and I wish you the best of luck in developing it to it’s full potential.
BTW, has anyone heard from Kurt on what he thinks of the news? Between this and Cosmoe, I figure his head must have exploded at some point. Or, maybe he just doesn’t care at all. Oh well.
If Kurt didn’t want his OS forked, he shouldn’t have shared the code. He should take it for what it is – a huge friggin compliment.
I agree.
I consider myself to a be a good online friend of Kurt’s, and I have respected him and help him spreading the word of AtheOS. I like Kurt.
Thing is, that he takes it a bit personal about the forks, while he should accept the fact that he released his work under the GPL and created a large userbase of more than 1200 users who wanted more and more and more. With success, great responsibilities emerge.
In this instance, he behaves like a kid who wants all the toys for himself but he also wants to share them but only under his own rules. Well, time to grow up and accept the results of his decisions regarding the licensing.
And yes, I still like Kurt a lot.
So he did comment on the forks? What is his viewpoint?
He did not comment lately, but it is known that he is against any forks and everytime there was such a discussion in the mailing list in the past, he was appearing mildly pissed off…
>>He did not comment lately, but it is known that he is against any forks and everytime there was such a discussion in the mailing list in the past, he was appearing mildly pissed off…<<
If forks piss him pff, he shouldn’t use the GPL for his software.
PS: My name’s on he main page. Now I’m famous.
If you want autographs, send 1000000€ to ….. *g*
>PS: My name’s on he main page. Now I’m famous.
>If you want autographs, send 1000000€ to ….. *g*
This is the thrid time I made the front page of osnews for my work
. I am just so happy that you all like my work 
and I plan to continue making the desktop better and better 
.
I was trying to take a look at the screenshoots but aren’t at the Syllable website. Thera are only broken links. If Syllabe guys looks this: Do you can fix it?.
If you have seen AtheOS, you have seen Syllable. There are many screenshots on the Kamidake.org web site, and on osnews, on the article where we reviewed atheos. Make a search.
But I do agree that Rick and Vanders should not have these broken images there.. Not a good marketing practice.. 😉
I don’t see Kurt’s name anywhere on the Syllable site. IMHO, this is a big mistake. Syllable owes its entire existence to Kurt, almost every line of code was typed directly by him. I think he deserves more than a single link to atheos.cx in the About page. He should be given credit all over the about page, and I think that there should be a sentence or two by the site’s copyright notice explaining that Syllable is a fork of AtheOS by Kurt Skauen. Even if he is not entirely happy with the fork, you should still give credit where credit is due.
Spy has a point.
I agree with Spy point.
Not to be the Devil’s Advocate, but it is assumed that Syllable will take a different direction now than Atheos would have. Anything more than a brief mention would seem excessive to me.
Perhaps if he was respectfully credited it would be different. I once came up with a new simple way to program for a certain OS, and made the first three demos from a gpl’d install script interpreter, and tried hard to get people to help me finish it for the good of all, as I am not a bona-fide programmer. Instead a very skilled programmer re-wrote it from scratch, and nobody credits me with so much as the idea for it to this very day. Now if someone with my lack of skills is still bitter, imagine how bitter the highly skilled people that actually wrote AtheOS, SEAL, etc. feel when people just put their own new name and new copyright on their work and think that’s enough of an improvement that they don’t have to credit the originators. It’s bullshit.
Wow “credit” calm down. I(probably the rest of the Syllable group) give a whole lot of credit to Kurt. However, we haven’t heard very much from him in 9(count them 9) months. The last we heard from him(about two or three months ago) he said that he was starting to work on AtheOS again. Meanwhile it has been two or three months later and still no Kurt. AtheOS is too good of an Operating System to be thrown out for a year at a time and their is still so much to do and we are already 9 months behind. I for one think we(as a group) gave Kurt more than enough time. I think Kurt is one hell of a programmer, but you can’t create a project, gpl it, and leave it for a long period of time without someone(group) forking it. That is the bottom line.
If Kurt really does not want Atheos to be forked,
then he needs to re-enter the scenes OR
pass on the responsibility and work to someone
who will keep atheos alive and well..
He needs to say what he really wants to do with
his atheos project, otherwise forking will occur
if people wants it or needs it.
But I do agree that Rick and Vanders should not have these broken images there.. Not a good marketing practice.. 😉
Syllable announced early. Website not finished. Pkgmanager broken, Glibc broken, no time for screenshots. Fixing. Busy. Will do screenshots later.
O.K, so now I’m in work and have a little time spare, I can stop using sentance fragments
He should be given credit all over the about page, and I think that there should be a sentence or two by the site’s copyright notice explaining that Syllable is a fork of AtheOS by Kurt Skauen. Even if he is not entirely happy with the fork, you should still give credit where credit is due.
How much credit is “enough”? It seems that if you don’t slap links and references to AtheOS all over the website and README’s, it is not enough. If you do slap links and references everywhere, then you are associating yourself directly to another project. How would Kurt feel about Syllable apparently associating itself with AtheOS like that?
As it stands, I have tried to be very clear that Syllable is a fork of AtheOS. The directory and library names still contain the name “atheos” in them. Most applications still declare themselves to be for “AtheOS”. I link to atheos.cx in several places on the site. I have not changes the Copyright notices on any of the files (Which you cant do anyway!).
I was trying to take a look at the screenshoots but aren’t at the Syllable website. Thera are only broken links. If Syllabe guys looks this: Do you can fix it?.
I plan too, yes. I’ve had a lot of email and comments telling me that the screenshots are broken. I have to keep pointing out that the website isn’t finished yet, and that the entire Syllable team have been very busy actually getting Syllable 0.4.0 released. We still have some work to be done to the CVS Repository etc. before we are finished with Syllable 0.4.0. Once we have it all done, I promise I will finish the website and put some screenshots in place!
I should have been more clear. I wasn’t criticising a fork, I just meant that bitterness could be avoided if people were fairly and proportionately credited. In my case I did not have the necessary skills to carry out my vision, and the people that *had* the skills ignored my pleas for assistance and opted instead to re-define my project in such a way that it no longer resembled my original project, YET TOOK IT’S PLACE ANYWAY. That’s my whole point, don’t take someone’s hours of sweat and then use it to invalidate his own intent, and then even get cagey about crediting him with his own effort. I’m not saying anyone did this already, I’m just saying nobody should if they’re planning on it. I just don’t believe he’d be bitter about forks if those forks weren’t somehow contrary to his original motivating ideals when it’s his own effort that made the forks possible in the first place. I could be wrong. But if someone tries really hard to do something and invites people to help complete it, and then instead they take his work and do their own thing with it, that might be allowable under GPL but that doesn’t make it ethical. Now that I think of it, is there some certain reason why your contribution has to have it’s own name instead of being a furtherance of AtheOS? If this guy put his product under GPL to help develop it, and instead people are using GPL as an excuse to swipe the code and pretend their OS is an unrelated project instead of helping develop AtheOS, then this really is bullshit. You’ll understand when someone renames your own fork and pretends it’s theirs instead of contributing to your own project.
I have to say, I am quite impressed with this first sort-of release of syllable.
It nearly works
after adding the Launcher fix.
Can’t get this network card I have at work here to seemingly work though despite it being supported, but I am pretty certain that is through my own oversight.
Had a few problems with pkgmanager -a on emacs though, wasn’t creating the autolnk’s properly.
Still trying to get CVS download to work, but I don’t give up easily.
All in all, quite impressive. Lots to do yet though. Especially on performance which I find quite sluggish, but we have the source, so lets fix it!
Now that I think of it, is there some certain reason why your contribution has to have it’s own name instead of being a furtherance of AtheOS? If this guy put his product under GPL to help develop it…
There is a very very good reason: Kurt wont accept code changes for any of the major parts of the code base, such as the kernel or the GUI. Which sort of makes it pretty difficult for us as “third party” developers to keep AtheOS itself up to date. The development model is pretty odd, and unless you have spent some time on the AtheOS mailing lists, I can’t blame you for not being able to understand quite how Kurt works.
…and instead people are using GPL as an excuse to swipe the code and pretend their OS is an unrelated project instead of helping develop AtheOS, then this really is bullshit.
We’re not trying to pretend that Syllable is something new. It has been, and will continue to be, clearly stated that Syllable is a fork of AtheOS. We’re not trying to rip anyone off.
You’ll understand when someone renames your own fork and pretends it’s theirs instead of contributing to your own project.
Conversly, you’ll understand when you have spent over two years of your life writing thousands of lines of code for a whole bunch of different applications for an Operating System that starts to die out. There are lots of AtheOS developers who have contributed inumerable man-hours to the development of AtheOS, which is a big investment to let it slip away. That is why I have forked AtheOS to create Syllable.
It nearly works
after adding the Launcher fix.
Yeah, I’m still not sure exactly what has happened there. I have to check with Rick to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Can’t get this network card I have at work here to seemingly work though despite it being supported, but I am pretty certain that is through my own oversight.
What network card is it? Check /var/log/kernel to see if the driver has detected your card correctly. Email the section of the log + your network details to the list; someone will probably have an answer
Had a few problems with pkgmanager -a on emacs though, wasn’t creating the autolnk’s properly.
Yeah, we’re aware of this one. I’ll get a fix in place for that, too.
We may well have enough fixes to do a simple 0.4.0a release in a couple of days. It will give us a chance to test the upgrade system, I guess
I have sent a message of to the distribution lists, I will see what comes back.
So any luck yet in building up the development teams? From the activity on the mailings lists there is some serious activity going on, but most of it discussion rather than coding at the moment it seems. I am sure that will change soon.
So any luck yet in building up the development teams?
I’ve decided not to go with a rigid development-team system. As long as there are lead developers, then its probably best just to let people work on whichever peice of code they would like to at the time, and then send the patches via. the lead developers.
From the activity on the mailings lists there is some serious activity going on, but most of it discussion rather than coding at the moment it seems. I am sure that will change soon.
You have to have discussion before you can start work
People have had loads of ideas sitting idle for years, now they have the chance to thrash them out. Eventually we’ll get some coherent ideas out of the discussion, and then we can draw up some plans. All in good time 
True, lots of discussion needed before we start moving on it. To be honest, I am sure a lot of interested parties are like me, just getting their system prepared and blowing away the AtheOS cobwebs.
Personally, although as I have mentioned I can’t get CVS to download, I have been looking at the widget sets. Actually looks pretty easy to give them a revamp, make them look a little sharper/stronger.
Also having a look at the Freetype system, but found it hard following the code on the CVS web interface. It can’t just be me that thinks the fonts just dont seem to render right. Maybe the auto-hinter is not enabled, or the fact its an older version of freetype. I guess I am a little spoiled trying to compare to BeOS/Qnx which seems to have perfect rendering.
Still no luck on the mailing lists, haven’t received a message in almost two hours, hope nothings wrong with it.
I think my bolding went a little awry there, sorry.
as I have mentioned I can’t get CVS to download
Yeah, what error are you getting? As it happens, I’ll be re-synching the build fixes into CVS tonight, along with a few other fixes, so if there are any problems I’ll be able to fix them then.
Not sure where your email to the list has got to.
I don’t think its an error, its just me getting familiar with Syllable. The network interface is detected properly and creates an eth0 interface, but I need to tell it to fetch an address via DHCP, or enter static IP information, had a look around in all the usual places (for Linux) but I can’t seem to find the config file. I just know I am looking in the wrong place.
Not sure whats happening with my access to the mailing list though, not recieving anythinf of it, including the e-mail I sent. Nothing wrong here, must be something on the mailing list. I will keep an eye on it.
“Conversly, you’ll understand when you have spent over two years of your life writing thousands of lines of code for a whole bunch of different applications for an Operating System that starts to die out.”
So that’s what’s going on. Thanks for the clarification. Obviously bitterness can work both ways. That really would be frustrating, contributing to another’s goal, and then being expected to cease just because the originator did. Hmmm.
Just out of curiousity, do you intend for this OS to be internet-ready for browsing in the forseeable future? Will it eventually be a workable alternative to Linux?
The network interface is detected properly and creates an eth0 interface, but I need to tell it to fetch an address via DHCP, or enter static IP information, had a look around in all the usual places (for Linux) but I can’t seem to find the config file. I just know I am looking in the wrong place.
Ahhh, yes it is currently non-obvious
O.K, well I’m afraid DHCP doesn’t work yet, so you’ll have to enter your IP, Netmask & Gateway manually. You need to edit the file /system/user_init.sh The lines you need to edit should be fairly clear.
So that’s what’s going on. Thanks for the clarification. Obviously bitterness can work both ways. That really would be frustrating, contributing to another’s goal, and then being expected to cease just because the originator did. Hmmm.
Yes, now you can probably understand why Syllable exists
Just out of curiousity, do you intend for this OS to be internet-ready for browsing in the forseeable future? Will it eventually be a workable alternative to Linux?
Syllable, and AtheOS before it, already have a port of the Khtml rendering engine and a web browser called ABrowse. The rendering engine is a little out of date these days, and I hope that someone will take on the task of updating ABrowse. I have written an email client, called Whisper, and there is a Jabber client available from Kamidake* , although I have never tried it. If you don’t mind a command line, you can use the usual IRC, mICQ, ncftp etc.
The only bogons at the moment are a) Lack of DHCP support, which will hopefully be sorted soonish and b) No PPP either. Again, hopefully someone will do something about that, too. Admitedly, it is possible to use Syllable on the internet if you’re dedicated enough. If not, we’re trying to make it easier!
Hey, about the configuring of atheos on your network. Im not quite sure who it was with (possibly rick) in an irc channel and we both had the exact same problem configuring it properly. in atheos ifconfig is not done right, somehow and even with supported hardware and router/etc whatever and configuring it every possible way we were unable to get past our router’s web based configuration tools. There is just something off about ifconfig and someone on the list sent me a new ifconfig to compile (which I lost upgrading my new system). You may want to check that out, find out who wrote it, test it out, and add it to Syllable.
Well, got a bit further now, I can telnet into one of the servers here, still no joy getting past the firewall (Which I know I can get through). Its quite difficult diagnosing without ping/netstat/tracert et al.
And ifconfig –help lists options to pass but when you pass them they just don’t work, gives an error (i.e. pass -g for gateway and it says unrecognised option)
So frustrating, because my net card at home is not compatible so I need to try and get it all working here.
Yeah, I had pointed out that ifconfig behaved badly to Kurt, many moons ago. It is possible, however, so try the following. I’ll assume the following configuration:
Interface is eth0
IP is 192.168.0.10
Netmask is 255.255.255.0
Gateway is 192.168.0.1
Do the following:
ifconfig -i eth0 192.168.0.10 255.255.255.0
route add -i eth0 -g 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.10 255.255.255.0
We do need to fix both ifconfig & route. Ideally we want a proper graphical configuration tool, rather than editing the startup script.
Yes, the above works, cvs starts checking out successfully, going to leave it running tonight.
The correct lines are:
ifconfig eth0 ip sn
route add -i eth0 gw ip sn
Then works a treat, no dns set up though, is that done elsewhere? IP of sourceforge for CVS is 216.126.171.202.
Going to download that and have a play tomorrow at some code.
How easy is it to say change the build for atheoslib.so and recompile and replace the running one, is this scripted?
Going to see if I can get my card at home to work, I have access to two, one of which is a via-rhine and the other a DEC 21041 based card. The only problem is my cable modem router uses DHCP, but I may be able to fool it.
“Yes, now you can probably understand why Syllable exists
”
Yes, and thank you for your patience explaining.
If and when there is an end-user oriented minimal distro that can simply boot and run, connect to a dial-up ISP with a rudimentary browser, and has some sort of notepad and file manager, I will become it’s biggest fan and look for ways to contribute. Then again, I feel the same way about Linux, and don’t foresee such a distro from them anytime soon. Expecting to use Linux for common everyday tasks is generally accepted as proof that you’re too stupid to use it, ya know 😉 I really hope Syllable’s philosophy will be different.
Edit /etc/resolv.conf (Hey, Unix! O.K, we use Glibc, which sort of inflicts the /etc/ stuff on us
) to set the IP addresses of your DNS server(s).
If and when there is an end-user oriented minimal distro that can simply boot and run, connect to a dial-up ISP with a rudimentary browser, and has some sort of notepad and file manager, I will become it’s biggest fan and look for ways to contribute.
Cool
Looking at your list, we’re already half way there! Syllable boots (And quick too!), comes with a pretty good, lightweight browser, includes AEdit, which is a nice (I’m biased again) little editor, and comes with LBrowser, which is a step towards a file manager. I guess all that we’re missing is dial-up (PPP) support!
Expecting to use Linux for common everyday tasks is generally accepted as proof that you’re too stupid to use it, ya know 😉 I really hope Syllable’s philosophy will be different.
Yup. I don’t see why Open Source can’t be made for the end user. Its about time someone actually started to care about them! Syllable is aimed right into the desktop; we’re not planning to spread ourselves thin by trying to do all sorts of different things
I should have pointed this out earlier as well, but for general discussion, you might want to check out http://www.0reality.com , where the AtheOS & Syllable web-forums now live (Thanks Joe!)