Syllable 0.4.4 Review
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
It’s more a status update on Syllable.
Whereas I was expecting more of a usability and limitations/strengths kind of thing, the writer just glosses over the install process, and some of the basics that can be accomplished without really “reviewing” anything.
Not a bad read, and there are some nice screenshots, but there’s not too much meet for this puppy. Perhaps it should have been entitled “Syllable Overview”?
The prospects for Syllable look very good!
I would like to see this OS grow.
I would like to see more included on the disk image. It seems to me theres a lot of extra packages that could be included, as well as the source for things like the kernel and such. Maybe i just didnt see it on there. My biggest thing with Sylablle since they forked from Atheos is theres no seperate ability to download the source packages for the kernel and appserver and such. Im sure its all in cvs, but I dont always have cvs access handy and its nice to be able to download the source and check things out. Any chance of making another ISO image of more compelte aimed at developers? Its nice to have something for the users but if you dont cater to developers there wont be as much for the user. I think that Syllable has a lot of potential and Ive been keeping my eye on it for a while now. Best of luck
*corrects you*
You can download a gzipped tarbal of the CVS from the Syllable website (I believe SF.net produces the tarball every night). Some of the additional applications are downloadable from the SF project site, as well as the Syllable-net SF project site.
You can download a tarball containing all dev tools (including a tiny little install script) here: http://valinor-productions.be/www.valinor-productions.be/devtools.t…
On a side note: I think Kristian decided to keep the size of the ISO to a minimum so people wouldn’t have to download a 650mb CD every time.
Besides, if you fork up the 7EUR you get a nice CD with a CVS snapshot and everything else
This is the first version of Syllable that I have been able to successfully boot. Previous versions would start to boot and then throw up a rolling yellow line.
I was not able to get it to install on the computer because it did not recognize the Promise ATA100 controller that had the main hard drive attached. I’ll have to remove it or try a different computer.
Syllable looks great. Except, um… “Let’s talk about the users!”?@!$%?
If you ignore the existance of OpenBeOS for one second …
It sounds to me as if Syllable is the type of ideal the zeta developers should strive for. I’m running OS X, and I kind of wish I could try the thing myself … isn’t that silly?
This OS really does look quite promising, and the only thing that disappoints me about it is how the icons looks so bleh, and some of them look like they aren’t original. I think saw some gnome footprints.
Oh well. I’m pretty sure you can replace the icons and writer window decorators and things, but these people would recieve a lot more attention I think if their desktop was prettier. It sounds like the functionality is already pretty good as is…
_What_ are you talking about? Syllable is in its infancy and requires years of work and tremedous effort to bring it to the state Zeta is today. Zeta is BeOS 6, remember. A fully working OS, with years of development behind it. 12 years to be exact.
Well yes, but they are both far enough along to the point where they have some flavor and character.
Zeta is going in one direction and Syllable is going in another.
The Syllable API and BeOS API are also similar.
Really the two OSes are fairly similar–as far as different OSes go anyway. Certainly no linux vs Windows type split.
My point is that maybe developing somethig more lean like Syllable might be a better idea for the Zeta developers. Syllable as kind of a rolemodel. I’m only talking in terms of what additional packages they include and what applications and fonts and such. I don’t mean anything about the maturity of the development effort.
What I’m really talking about is what should and should not be included in an OS. If Syllable does not have equivilents for many pieces of Zeta software … then in that particular case I would not be making a commentjudgement about inclusion.
Zeta is a commercial OS. Syllable is a GPL OS. Two different mindsets and two completely different teams, having different goals. The fact that syllable’s API might be similar to Zeta’s or BeOS’ doesn’t say anything.
Any Unix is similar to another too, but that doesn’t mean they will join forces.
I didn’t say anything about joining forces, and the commercial vs non-commercial thing is irrelevant.
ALL I am saying is that there are linuxzeta type distributions with lots of stuff
and there are Syllableeos r5 type distributions with significantly less stuff included
People were unhappy that zeta had so much stuff. I think the right amount of stuff to include is what syllable includes.
I do not know how I could make this anymore clear.
I don’t know where you got the whole joining forces thing. I was just saying they should look to syllable for inspiratio or ideas. Microsoft supposedly looks to Apple all the time for ideas. I think zeta might look at these folks.
I think thats a bug. Normal folks don’t know about how to write C strings. Might be a bug in safari, mut be a bug in OSNews. Don’t know.
Where they ‘s
or were they /’s?
Because everyone knows that forward slashes are the One True Way(TM) to write slashes
*nt*
…still in its infancy. I wonder when Syllable will make their minds up about the GUI design. They really can’t advance it without first knowing where to go, unless they’re striving for something like X-Windows, which I don’t think they are. They had a really pretty design showcased here a few months ago. It looked original enough.
And as someone else seemed to say, what is that “users” bollocks for?
This is a new OS with some guts. I just wish they wouldn’t stare themselves blind at UNIX.
While I’m probaly the first person to get down on the terribly ugly Amiga 4.0 screenshots, they make the Syllable GUI look fantastic!
From the review, I get that the Syllable “team” (how many are you?) is concentrating on the right stuff. That is, getting the GUI usabilty dialogues right and the install package right.
Am I the only one who actually like the Windows 3.1 window interface? I love the “close window” button to be fer awy from the “shrink” and “full scrren” buttons. It makes sense to me. The window sizing “corners” made sense.
The launcher looks functional in Syllable as well.
It ain’t pretty, but it ain’t UGLY either.
Vic
OOPS!
Left out my “Ogg Vorbis” part:
Is it just me, or does the words “Ogg Vorbis” make you want to puke?
As I understand, the technology is nothing more than a clone of MP3 without any copyrighting allowed, but nothing more. Nothing new.
Please change the name. Please?
Vic
“Is it just me, or does the words “Ogg Vorbis” make you want to puke?”
its just you, vic
“As I understand…”
You understand wrong. Ogg is a opensource alternative to mp3 but not a clone. Whats about it is that you dont have to pay royaltys,
anyone can bundle encoders/decoders, and has better quality. It also shaping itself as a suite of different open multimedia protocols.
imho the quality of ogg on cheap headphones is negligable. And higher end ones the difference is noticable.
yeah, that is an ugly window theme… but it aint the only one, and the colors are user definable, and the entire window edge allows you to resize it.
At least try something out before you attack it’s UI.
Anyways…
Can we get a full syllable iso up with all the apps installed? A lot of us dont have working network cards on syllable, so it would be easier to just have all the availible apps (under 350mb) installed in the beginning, rather than copy to one fat partition, install syllable on a second, manually install all the applications, etc.
Am I the only one who actually like the Windows 3.1 window interface? I love the “close window” button to be fer awy from the “shrink” and “full scrren” buttons. It makes sense to me. The window sizing “corners” made sense.
Err, but Windows 3.x never had a “close window” gadget. The closest thing it had was the window menu in the upper left corner of each window. If you regard that as a close gadget, then its placement is the same as in just about every other GUI out there, except for Windows 95 and onwards.
Can we get a full syllable iso up with all the apps installed? A lot of us dont have working network cards on syllable, so it would be easier to just have all the availible apps (under 350mb) installed in the beginning, rather than copy to one fat partition, install syllable on a second, manually install all the applications, etc.
Evan, I havn’t made such an ISO available for download because it is around 250Mb when compressed. This is a large file, and all it really does is to duplicate everything that is already available for download. You have two options though.
The first is to purchase a CD (See http://syllable.sourceforge.net) or download everything from Sourceforge in one go, and burn them all to a CD. You can then pull the CD out and get the packages you need from it, instead of rebooting.