Ville Turjanmaa put up two new screenshots from his recently released 0.73 MenuetOS. The taskbar seems more refined now. In other OS news, the Syllable guys are reporting on the new drivers that their OS will feature in the next release, while YellowTAB posted an update about their status and what they are working on. Also, hobby OS TriangleOS has some news too.
Two New MenuetOS Screenshots; Syllable, YellowTAB Updates
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
and I am quite excited, however, what I would love to see is POSIX compliance completed along with many other openstandards so that most applications can be compiled with minimal changes and without limitations.
One only has to look at the pain Mozilla and Apache porters had to go through to get their respective projects working on BeOS.
Also, I hope that they’ve finally fixed up the PPP and TCP/IP stack, having used BeOS 5.0 Pro (which I bought when it came out) the performance was painful.
BeOS is about 85% POSIX. AtheOS is a bit more POSIX than BeOS for example.
The most needed function are dl() (already ported and can be found on BeBits) and mmap(), but on BeOS/Zeta is not an easy job to port mmap()… There are a lot of things that BeOS does differently from the grounds up (don’t forget that BeOS was developed with a book of XINU* next to the developers
, so for complete POSIX and mmap() is a quite a hard job…
>Also, I hope that they’ve finally fixed up the PPP and TCP/IP stack
Zeta uses BONE, not the old and crappy net_server. Performance is now as good as a “medium speed” Unix on networking (e.g. FreeBSD 3.x). BeOS is not a server OS, remember, it was never meant to be. It is a workstation/multimedia station, but it is not, neither is optimized as a server.
* XINU == XINU Is Not Unix (and neither is BeOS
Yes, it true that BeOS is meant to be the example of a operating system built from the ground up, however, if it were me, I would have implemented the whole UNIX 98 and POSIX. It isn’t the standard that sucks, generally it is the layers upon layers of bloat that collects as every generation gets closer and closer to compliance, the operating system vendor has to to provide backwards compatibility. If BeOS from day one was 100% POSIX and UNIX 98 compliance, it would have all the stuff required without the years of backwards compatibility bloat.
As for the PPP and TCP/IP, I was looking at it from a workstation point of view and to be fair, I was using BeOS r4, 4.5 and 5.0, surfing the internet via a modem was never has snappy as Solaris, FreeBSD or Linux. It seems it took longer for sites to resolve, transfering data was slower etc etc.
1. MenuetOS, coming along very nicely. too bad it’s x86 bound, cause it would be great for a PDA. as far as RTOS’s go, it will be a great free alternative to QNX. it will be a great embedded OS soon, but fully GPL’d in a proprietary market does make me wonder if it’ll be a real alternative.
2. syllable/atheos will be a cool desktop OS in a couple years. it always looks pretty sweet. thanks, Kurt.
3. can’t wait to buy Yellowtab. the wait is killing me.
4. TriangleOS, the Beos style title bars give it that tongue-in-cheek feel. great work, looks like a fun experiment.
Menuet is looking first rate these days. YellowTab, on the other hand-well, it’s hard to tell what exactly they are doing but it didn’t sound so good. Their statement was a little incoherent, if anyone knows what is going on there could you let us know?
heh, yeah… hopefully, they’ll sell enough copies of Zeta to get a proper PR dept. I’m still scratching my head on the press release, but after watching the Zeta video from last week, I think it’s pretty obvious who wrote it. heh.
No one in their right mind would insinuate that POSIX is crufty. After all these decades, when Win32 has ballooned to thousands upon thousands of API calls, POSIX still has about 130 calls. Wheras Win32 calls generally have upwards of a dozen parameters (if you count the ones in a structure like WNDCLASSEX), it’s rare for a POSIX API call to have more than four or five. Implementing any significant subset of Win32 is neigh impossible for an independent developer, but entirely within the scope of even hobby OSs.
syllable/atheos will be a cool desktop OS in a couple years. it always looks pretty sweet. thanks, Kurt.
I would say in a year, Syllable will be pretty stable and it will be at least up there with the contenders, but don’t quote me on that! WE still have a lot of work to do!!!!
I just had a look at the latest screenshot of MenuetOS 0.73 and all I can say is wow. First of all, I love the icons, and the minimalist approach for the desktop, too many developers become pre-occupied with filling the screen under the illusion that it makes things easier to use.
Who ever is the developer for MenuetOS, keep up the good work and stay on track 😉
I read the YellowTab report lol. Someone either wrote that drunk or translated it to english by machine.
Syllable: always good to hear steady progress. Great work.
> I read the YellowTab report lol. Someone either wrote that drunk or translated it to english by machine.
Trust me, it was even worse before I… proof read it for Bernd two days ago. 😉 ;-D
Looks like syllable is making some real progress here, let me tell you, it looks verry nice.
I wish it had support for an ATAPI cdrom drive though, and just had bootable isos, it would make it A LOT more attractive for a lot of people.
MenuetOS is also starting to look really nice (well for the screenshots anyway
, comparing the old and new screenshots. It looks verry polished and clean, good work.
Keep it up guys !
Take Care
Kevin
Is good fonts and antialiasing, and it would be a beauty….
I wish [Syllable] had support for an ATAPI cdrom drive though
Your wish is granted; the ATA driver I mention on the Syllable website is an ATA/ATAPI driver, and it does indeed work with ATAPI CD-ROM’s. It is currently known to work with audio CD’s (There is a simple CD player). Ville Kallioniemi is working on an ISO-9660 driver and we’re all working to get the ATA[PI] driver stable, bugfixed and feature complete as quickly as possible.
Syllable 0.4.4 will be bootable and instalable from CD and I intend to distribute Syllable releases as ISOs in future.
“Syllable 0.4.4 will be bootable and instalable from CD and I intend to distribute Syllable releases as ISOs in future.”
Wow, cool. I’ll definately try it out then.
Thx for the info, mr. Vanders.
Take Care
Kevin
I’m glad to see Syllable still making progress. An installable CD will be really nice. Good job to those guys.
I’m definitly eager for the YellowTab release. LOL about the release… people give crap for not saying anything, and then when they do say something they get crap for it!
nice to see some good M$ alternatives.
…will be bootable and instalable from CD and I intend to distribute Syllable releases as ISOs in future.”
This is really great news, thanks. I’ve been following AtheOS from the start and tried it/Syllable a couple of times on a friend’s Compaq. But I could never get it installed on my own machine from the floppy images.
Syllable 0.4.4 will be bootable and instalable from CD and I intend to distribute Syllable releases as ISOs in future.
Vanders, thats great news! I think this should help increase the user/devel base quite a bit. I know I’ll try it out.
Bill
I promised the developers I would be their slave when this happens. I am trying on shackles right now