With the growing “mobile, mobile, mobile!” craze, many groups have been working strenuously to develop slimmer, easier to use mobile operating systems and applications. At the forefront of these innovating developments are various Linux branches, Android quite possibly one of the most popular and most hoped to come preinstalled on netbooks. In the humble shadows, however, a new mobile OS is emerging and just may have the viability to cover some hefty ground in the market. Meet “Xenon,” the new mobile OS.The project is still in the early alpha stages, but the developers and other supporters certainly have high hopes about its outcome. They have a vision of seeing Xenon come preinstalled on a wide selection of “future hardware,” which I interpret to mean netbooks (of course), MIDs, PDAs, and perhaps even some phones if it comes to that.
The way Xenon is built is that the base system, a slimmed version of Linux, boots into a browser that loads a local website serving as the operating system. A simple but well-designed graphical menu displays links to submenus containing varied applications from office apps to games. Currently three pre-alpha menus are available to see online, though their only functions are navigation through the menus as none of the applications are yet functional in these previews of the system.
The system is being designed for “casual users,” and will initially have all of the features common to netbook-oriented systems already. It will later implement features honed towards graphic designers and gamers while still maintaining the ease of use for casual and non-adept users.
The hardware requirements haven’t been released as of yet, but a browser-based system has got to run on strikingly low-profiled hardware. As it is, the developers say that the current build is designed perfectly for ARM-based hardware and current netbook models.
There’s plenty of talk, but still no downloadable images or CDs for order and only the three pre-alpha menus to go on, so it very well could all fall through. Despite the natural feeling I have to be skeptical about the project, the outlook of the developers and other supporters along with my gut instinct tell me otherwise. I foresee Xenon to evolve into a viable and much desired mobile operating system, and I look forward to what it can bring to the computer and Internet industry as a whole.
As impatient as I am to fiddle with this and other projects in the works, I’m no programmer (unless you count HyperCard— good days with Hypercard), and therefore I can’t help it any. The project is looking for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL programmers to contribute, so if you’re experienced in one or more of those areas and would like to help the work along, you ought to email the project leader.
I was excited until I read that it was yet another system based on Linux.
Don’t get me wrong, and maybe it is just me, but a new and novel operating system has to be a little more than new clothes for the emperor.
Best of the luck nevertheless.
Nothing wrong with it using Linux if all you are referring to is the kernel itself – I too wallow in tears when I see yet another GNU/Linux distribution that embraces all the badly broken ideas of the past simply to get something quickly to market. What also frustrates me is the continuos creation of new distributions that add nothing over the others.
HAL is a major battery sucking parasite – yet instead of developers going in and finishing off DeviceKit to fully replace all of HAL; we have yet another distribution. Instead of making more of the Linux kernel tickless and improve suspend/resume, we have yet another distribution being made.
If Linux and all the associated components were at the peak of perfection and the only things needed were tweaks – then sure, rock your socks off with another distribution. The reality is that these components are far from perfection and thus resources should be spent on improving the fundamentals of the system instead of assuming that the problems can be nailed down to the distributors (which is what creating another distribution is saying – all the problems that exist with Linux sit with distributors rather than the fundamentals of the system).
People do what they like. They have absolutely no obligation to work to make your vision come true.
Do you seriously beleive that all the people making distributions have the skills or manpower or motivation to improve the kernel?
Pull you head out of your bum – I never demanded anything; they can do what ever the hell they want; they can sit on a cactus whilst singing ‘Yankee doodle dandy’ if they so wish. Not every criticism of a given decision by another person means that the individual demands that they do something different – any more than me criticising the American government is demanding that the American people make me the Tsar of the USA!
Nah I would say his complaint is valid … more people shouldn’t have such ambiguously lofty visions for computing and focus on the little things — heck only by focusing on the little things does one really get an understand of the bigger things … just look at all the open source leaders out there, they are successful because they’ve focused on a particular needed and necessary detail. But take a look at this website: wow, all sorts of buzz words going off — I’m sorry, but I’m a bit skeptic when I see rotating menu items and something about “the cloud”. It claims to be revolutionary, but sounds exactly like Ulteo, going as far as to be based on Linux. We’ll see I guess …
But the original point is that it’s sad to see yet another gust of hot air when what’s needed is more grunt work to the existing ecosystem … people need to just get over themselves if they want to contribute, but hey at least this kind of thing as mentioned in the article seems like a start.
If Linux and all the associated components were at the peak of perfection and the only things needed were tweaks – then sure, rock your socks off with another distribution. The reality is that these components are far from perfection and thus resources should be spent on improving the fundamentals of the system instead of assuming that the problems can be nailed down to the distributors (which is what creating another distribution is saying – all the problems that exist with Linux sit with distributors rather than the fundamentals of the system).
There are few flawed assumptions in your statement. First that distributors are seen as the point where problems are solved. That is not what distributors are for. They are integrators of collections of software, so that a (more or less) usable OS with a suitable preselection of applications gets out there. They provide choice, so that end users can pick and choose what suits them.
Second, you seem to treat people here as a generic resource that can be assigned to tasks regardless of skill sets. The question here is, can distributor A be reasigned as kernel developer A? Can somebody who is an expert in UI design be reasigned to write low level libraries? I wonder what KDE could do with GTK+ programmers… I think that the available resources are already assigned the most optimum way, based on skill set and interest.
The “Peak of Perfection.” I don’t think there will ever be software that reaches that point. Even Apple continues to improve Mac OS X, seen by many as the pinnacle of OS design. For better or worse, many FOSS projects are organic projects that grow better by weeding out sub-optimal solutions. As such, they may ship code that is sub-optimal at times. Then again, they are all traveling on the never ending road to the “Peak of Perfection”.
Sorry but I must express my disgust.
The day someone “assigns” my free time, I quit. I get enough “assignment” in my daily job, thank you.
This relates to something that amazes me every time: the pattern in which a company rolls out a platform, develops some sort of infrastructure, and then actually believe that the magic fairies in the “community” come and write the software stack, maintain it for years to come, and generally do all the dirty work that previously required paid labor. It may happen, but I wouldn’t put my money on such business plan.
But I agree with kaiwai in that stricter engineering and business practices would be required in order to deliver better products. Yet, this is the eternal dilemma: introducing management practices etc. to volunteer projects is likely doomed to fail.
In meritocracy we believe in.
This being also the reason why Red Hat has been the only real success so far (counting out SMEs). When you contribute with paid labor, you get a chance to push the technical agenda.
Edited 2009-06-15 10:41 UTC
Please, stop repeating that GNU/Linux lethany indiscriminately. We are definitely talking Linux, and GNU may or may not be involved in these developments.
Android is Linux, but definitely not GNU/Linux, and this Xenon might either include GNU software or might just not, just as it might include code from several other different sources that might go unnamed.
I don’t get it? What is it with the current fad of having operating environments consisting of a core and a browser or HTML/Javascript interface to everything?
It can’t be that HTML/Javascript are particularly optimised for application development over a basic kernel and libraries … last I remembered they were for creating web pages ..
Is it that they want to attract developers and there are many more “coders” for HTML than for low level C? I wonder how buggy “forgiving” HTML will be for application development…
I think the only reason for them to do it this way is portability. Nothing less, nothing more.
Well, and the possibility that these are people who learned how to write web pages and nothing more…
Their website is a bit ostentatious and overreaching in its goals. It doesn’t offer anything particularly unique, isn’t backed by any major players and yet sets its goals ridiculously high. I commend them for wanting to create a great os. But, I prefer a little bit humility in the projects I contribute to. Don’t try to do everything better than everyone else, just focus on meeting a specific goal of usefulness to a specific group of users.
I’m also not a fan of the do-everything-in-a-browser scheme. It might be decent for some users, but not me. I want the full unrestricted access to anything I develop for.
Maybe there is a place for a local web-based OS like this, although I tried the pre-alpha menus and wasn’t impressed. I was hoping for something perhaps visually unimpressive, but demonstrating a really extensible and lightweight tool-kit that applications could hook into and use (so it’d be easy to develop something like Google Docs hosted locally and accessible from a central launcher). Instead, the demos are simply rotating images to act as buttons. Not only is this probably low-priority this early in development, but surely constantly rotating menus violate all sorts of usability guidelines by presenting you with a moving target (especially nasty on a mobile device) and meaning there’s no way to remember where to click to drill down the menus?
I’ll admit I could be wrong, but 90% of the code seems to be nothing more than JS eyecandy…
mm sounds exactly like palms webos. yawn
*fiddles with menu demos*
yeah, that is what I want. Widgets that move around and are never in the same spot… Is this for real?
I think that’s code for “We haven’t read anything on the subject of Human/Computer Interaction.”
Seriously, the website has no content. How anyone can describe it as “a new mobile OS [that] just may have the viability to cover some hefty ground in the market. Meet “Xenon,” the new mobile OS.” is beyond me. It clearly isn’t a mobile OS: it’s a “WebOS”. It clearly isn’t viable: there is nothing there.
Guys, I’m all for talking up your project (Hell we do it enough with Syllable, which is brilliant by the way. See?) but your claims have to at least have some basis in reality or you just look like kooks.
Seriously, the website has no content.
I finally took a look myself, too. The website is clear, nice-looking and gives slight promise. Then I read the actual content..So, Xenon is a local website with some fancy javascript, and they call that an OS? Wow. The menus..the devs clearly have no idea about basic UI development. It wastes huge amount of screen real-estate, a rotating menu is just bothersome on a small screen, and it lacks any keyboard control. You need a mouse to use it. Nice work.
Oh well, as long as they enjoy coding. I have absolutely nothing against people trying out things and learning by doing, but maybe they should have set some simpler goal? It’s obvious they don’t know anything about actually developing an OS, including useable API 3rd party developers can hook into, or basic UI development.
LOL
We are really getting desperate if this should be the hope for future…
Edited 2009-06-14 00:17 UTC
I’m sure I will get flamed for this comment but I still would really love to see a Linux based Mono powered mobile OS which uses Moonlight (with an OpenGL backend) as it’s application framework with a complement of API’s for additional things like GPS, etc.
I am a mobility developer for all the big platforms and I really think Linux the core itself is great, but even Android IMO misses the mark in many of their decisions and user experience.
Also Mono is proven to perform quite a lot faster than Google’s virtual machine.
Today the iPhone I believe has over 100 apps powered via Mono.
I can already anticipate the anti-Microsoft comments coming
It would be a match made in heaven however if people could leave their hate behind them and realize that mobility is the new-age PC market of the 1990’s. They all go obsolete in 6-12 months and they all cost $1000.
Except this time around, the game is wide-open, instead of a monopoly. Except its a multi-headed enemy.
User experience is priority #1.
Developer support is priority #2.
Tackle those (which this would) and your on your way. A first class device.
Fire away!
The obviously you deliberately ignore the discourse around mono in favour of spouting ill-informed crap. There are but a small minority who dislike mono based on technical grounds and there are even less who dislike it purely because Microsoft created it. What people like me and many others voice concern is the fact that the whole .NET Framework from top to bottom is patent riddled.
If the patents were just on the basis of protection from patent trolls – then I could understand but when Microsoft were approached to join the open innovation network as to assure that .NET implementations by third parties aren’t going to be extorted with demands of royalty payments – they refused to join. For those who use RAND regarding the ECMA submission – RAND means nothing; they can still demand royalty payments on the patented components; it does not make you immune to Microsoft coming cup in hand 5 years time demanding payments from you after you have based your whole business model on mono – even just the parts submitted to ECMA.
Microsoft had the chance to be open, sign a memorandum of understanding with an established open source organisation outlining that patents were only defensive and will not be used against third parties. They failed to do that – and thus it is Microsoft who have made themselves the pariah of the computing world – not people like me.
Maybe if you spent some time researching the issues instead of ranting on about things you don’t have the slightest clue about – then you wouldn’t receive strongly worded responses to your post. A post riddled with so much ignorance it makes my head hurt just reading it.
Edited 2009-06-14 02:50 UTC
kaiwai,
To educate me then could you inform me what parts of the core CLR that are ECMA standards which are patent riddled as you say?
I have no problem admitting I am wrong about something but as far as I know things like Winform, ADO.NET etc are the patent riddled stuff.
All of which aren’t necessarily required.
I would be interested to hear if all of the technologies required for things like GTK# has any patented items in its way.
Also, if Microsoft wanted to kill off Mono. Why is it spending millions on actually giving the Mono project support on things like Moonlight to improve Linux compatability?
As well as releasing source code in friendly licenses. Working late at night the evening before with Mono developers to achieve compatability before the Presidents inauguration and the olympics to 100% make sure Linux/others can be compatible on the live events?
These types of things are my point of view of what occurs, but to me it seems like they are reaching out to a degree more and more (albeit not as much as they could) and we are the ones spitting back in their face. Granted they spit in ours first.
Just my opinion. Opinions can’t be wrong remember, they are simply opinions
This is why we discuss!
Take care.
Killing mono now while it’s still useful for Microsoft wouldn’t make any business sense to them. Currently, Mono gives some “legitimacy” for clr/.net stack.
Silverlight is more dangerous than Mono, though. You can rewrite Mono apps in C++/whatever, but you can’t just go around the net rewriting other people’s web apps.
If developer experience and developer support is the most important things. Java – and related technologies are the way to go. JVM is a simpler virtual machine and development support and tools are much better.
Sun’s jvm is for example faster than Mono. Google’s Dalvik (not exactly a jvm but it resebmbles it) is a more suitable VM than Mono for small devices. On the performance side, give google some months, dalvik will also be faster and faster.
There are better IDE’s (Eclipse, Netbeans, IDEA) and more developers are available for java and android. Tool support is also much better. Mono will always be the bastard child who is always ignored by the MS world (as tools will always be targeted MS .Net and Visual Studio, not mono).
Lastly i think with version 1.2, JavaFx starts being a viable competitor to Silverlight and Flash. JavaFX script is far better then dealing with xml hell (silverlight) and an archaic scripting language with expensive development platform (Action script, Flash)
This feels like one big joke.
Seriosuly? Viable? Says who? Gamer Joe, 12 years old?
Exactly what does Xenon offer, other than useless rotating menus, that other mobile OS’s do not have? Bad spelling?
Out of touch with reality much?
Uhm…
I’m sorry, but I didn’t see a lot of real content on the site. I do know it has already been done before and had already an article on OSNews. It’s called xPUD:
http://www.osnews.com/story/21278
( My guess is Thom didn’t do the editing on this Xenon-article ? )
Edited 2009-06-14 08:11 UTC
… since 2005
http://wiki.eyeos.org/History_of_eyeOS
Nice Menu-Mockup… i always wanted to play catch with my icons, especially with a crappy tiny Netbook touchpad.
I doubt this will be an success.
Nice Menu-Mockup… i always wanted to play catch with my icons, especially with a crappy tiny Netbook touchpad.
What struck me more was the amount of screen estate wasted. Netbooks and such small devices they are marketing Xenon for have already really small screens, and having a big, constrantly-moving menu and a huge Xenon-logo in the middle just will not work. They seem to have the need to include Xenon logo everywhere, even when it does nothing more than just clutters the whole thing.
Unless you throw it in a microwave, it’ll be totally inert, doing nothing, going nowhere.
1. This is an entertainment piece, right?
2. I sincerely hope they didn’t bamboozle any idiots into opening up their bank accounts to fund this stupidity!
3. Clearly these people are horribly unqualified: they don’t even know what an OS really is! At best, this qualifies as another form of desktop environment, if you stretch the definitions very hard, but in no way does this qualify as an OS.
How did this end up on the front page of OSNews again…?
It’s not a viable new OS – hell, it’s not even an OS! It’s a pipe dream of a few teenagers strung up on red bull who really don’t know what they’re talking about…