Rocklyte Systems announced the latest version of its free multi-platform operating system environment, Athene 3.1. Available for Linux and Windows, Athene supports the rare ability of being able to function on competing operating systems, while also maintaining its own independent OS infrastructure (the Athenyx 2003 CDROM series). The 3.1 release of Athene continues to make significant strides in the advancement of its desktop interface.
Athene 3.1 Puts a New Face on Desktop Computing
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Looks awesome, the icons being the exception. Too bad I dont have a Windows or GNU/Linux box :/, or CD-R for that matter ^_^. Either way congrats to the Athene team looks like they’re doing a good job.
So what if I run this on Windows (or Linux). Does it completely take over and only run its own Pandora apps or does it allow the host to run its own native apps in some way? I like the look of it but there can’t be that many Athene apps yet to make up for losing the host OS apps.
Why don’t you just try it? The download is small.
the amount of eye-candy looks nice as long as the performance also holds up.
Don’t take this a trolling, but I’d like to know who this O.S. is targeted to. i.e. QNX is primarily targeted a programmers and wildly used in medical devices.
And, I’m not versed on programmer’s license fees, but don’t these look counter-effective, making it too expensive for someone who whishes to develop for Athene.
Cheers
do we really need another OS
As many as we can get.
do we really need another OS
I don’t know many people with omnipresence so I don’t think anyone’s qualified to ever answer that. However, some people of course do. Sure there are dozens upon dozens and more OSes out there, but they wouldn’t even be there if at least one person didn’t want it. Just because you or a thousand other people doesn’t need a new OS doesn’t mean someone else wouldn’t either.
It boots fast, it looks good. The themes seem flexible. The Windows theme seems to be the most polished.
I couldn’t get the mini player to play a MP3 file. I don’t know if it is supposed to or not.
Overall, it gave me some new ideas for cross-platform development and I am looking forward to seeing something more fleshed out than the demo.
Dude, I love the icons! They’re so much more fun and colorful than most icon themes. There is a Windows version of the theme:
http://www.cweb.ws/gallery/details.php?image_id=11
Those in Linux-land can find the latest version on KDElook.
Just installed it, seems nice. I liked the inovations (well, it is for me), such as the scrollable desktop, and the DML thing (even though i’m not totally sure i understood well this DML thing).
One question: when i click on “Take Screenshot” on the menu it happens nothing. Where’s the screenshot gone?
Victor.
I couldn’t get the mini player to play a MP3 file. I don’t know if it is supposed to or not.
Try going on “QikInstall” and installing the MP3 support.
Victor.
>I couldn’t get the mini player to play a MP3 file. I don’t know if it is supposed to or not.
You have to install support first.
After I installed support, it worked flawlessly.
Anyways…
The performance of Athne held up well on my system as long as I didnt have more than 4 of the demos running at the same time (though i have a few windows programs taking up my resources, also).
I’m gonna keep this installed with one use in mind:
To create a safe (and colorful) environment for my little cousins to play in when they come to visit.
I’ve been playing with the pre-release version(s) here for a while now and I can safely say, that this is a very neat project. And yes, performance is very nice. Have not seen any lag so far. The whole UI is very responsive – think of it as BeOS on steroids. It is also very consistent and everything you need to configure has so far been pushed into a single application. If Rocklyte can get some good desktop applications (spreadsheet, word processing, etc) and can maintain a low price, then their OS would change the world. And best of all: it runs on Linux
Some comments on questions thus far:
Target market: In terms of people, we’d like to attract more hackers and hobbiests for the moment, until the mainstream apps are complete and the retail version is released.
Dev Fees: The Pandora Engine is actually a separate product to Athene, so it has it’s own fee base. It is free to freeware developers though, and the commercial pricing is pretty cheap as it is.
Screenshots: ‘doh! The program reference for the screenshot DML file is pointing to the wrong place… use the File Manager to copy commands:screenshot.dml to graphics:screenshot.dml. Then it will work correctly (nb: the shot will be stored in pictures:screenshot.png after you take it).
Following the month-long poll at rocklytefiles.com, our priorities for the next few months are: HTML Browser, X11 Support, 3D Support (in that order). Most voters were from OSNews, so thanks for voting 🙂
Can I install the free version as a stand alone OS the way the Windows version of freeBe could? I do not want to share my main computer with another OS at the moment, and don’t want to install Windows on my other (empty atm) machine. Thx
Looks like the free version still requires X11.
It’s good stuff. MP3 files play well, even with 7 little demo apps all going in addition to MP3 playback. And that’s with eMule throwing quite a few interrupts in Windows (thank goodness for my Intel server adapter or my poor CPU would be dead meat). As well as 5 other apps still running in Windows.
Very symmetric CPU usage… pretty unusual. Both kernel and user loads were evenly split on my two processors.
I do like how it only takes over one screen, letting me run all my Windows apps on my other screen.
In the stress scenario, if you move one of the small demo apps around while the MP3 is playing, you get significant dropouts on MP3 playback, showing some of the same problems that the old Linux kernels had. And that QNX has always had with its UI stuff. Maybe MorphOS and AmigaOS will fix this 🙂
And to think, at 26MB for the boot window, it’s lighter than Java or .NET 🙂 And the UI seems much speedier.
Great job, Rocklyters. Keep it coming. Though I think you will impress more people with 3D… then HTML… then X11.
If a commercial OS wants to succeed on the desktop
market, it needs to offer significant advantages
over existing systems. And even with that, BeOS
failed.
What would those advantages be for Athene?
And does Athene have anything to do with AtheneOS,
the high-security OS developed for Macs?
>Can I install the free version as a stand alone OS the
>way the Windows version of freeBe could?
Only Athenyx can be installed as a true stand-alone version, and it requires its own partition for booting.
The Windows version will work fine for you of course, but it does not run stand-alone like the commercial version does.
Of all the features in there, their “Unified Data Model” is the most outstanding to me. AmigaOS 3.x had this feature, OS/2 had this feature, why hasn’t it caught on more? File format conversions and uneven support across apps are a huge nuisance on Windows and Linux. You’d think that the Unix philosophy of “many small tools” would be well served by making sure the format support is standard.
I truly hope Rocklyte does well with this. The things they’re implementing are way overdue.
What an easy install on Mandrake! Just for that you deserve kudos…It makes the Win4lin installation (also easy) seem complicated! Can’t wait for the final version!
Thanks guys!
I didn’t have any luck with google, so I might as well ask here. Anyone know if there are any ports in the works of SDL to this?
>I liked the inovations (well, it is for me), such as the scrollable desktop
As the theme name says (Workbench) it’s a feature taken from Amiga (it was there since the 80’s). On Amiga it was also a hardware feature: you could have *real* different screen resolutions and/or color dephts on as many screen sections you wanted (only limited by you RAM amount) draggin’ them around
. It’s one of the features hard to implement in its real power on AmigaOS4.0 ’cause nowadays Graphic Cards are unable to do it 
Very impressed with the Win32 version. Was very smooth and very quick. I like the scrollable desktop feature and the scalable desktop is pretty neat too.
If some good development tools start appearing on this platform I have high hopes! With such a small footprint and an XML based configuration language this also looks ideal for handheld applications!
Any chance of a Mac version?
By the way I love the workbench look, very cool!
Hello, does Rocklyte have some sort of connection with Amiga? Curious about the Amiga look.
Looks very good and kind of reminds me of AmigaDE (multiplatform and so on).
Erik
Hello, does Rocklyte have some sort of connection with Amiga? Curious about the Amiga look.
Yes, here is the abridged history: I used to own an Amiga 500 and later A1200 over the course of 10 years. In 1998 when it looked like all hope had been lost for Amiga, I started working on concepts for a new OS (not wanting to use Windows 😉 and that’s how Athene started. It wasn’t until 2000 that Rocklyte Systems was created to support it.
The Amiga-isms in Athene are things that I liked most about the Amiga and put into the design early on. The Pandora Engine was also originally built on the Games Master System (an Amiga development) and thus there are also Amiga-like features in the SDK.
Furthermore, I actually did some work for Amiga Inc in 2000 and there’s a good story behind that (or very bad, from the wider perspective of the Amiga community I guess :-). Long story though.
Anyone know if there are any ports in the works of SDL to this?
I’m more interested in a port of Allegro. I hope that someone does something there before I have to take some action and make it happen :-).
All that it needs now is a good file manager,web browser,IM,e-mail,irc,video player… etc,etc.
What is the porpouse o adding X11 support ?
“I’m more interested in a port of Allegro. I hope that someone does something there before I have to take some action and make it happen :-).”
Why would that be? SDL is a lot more capable as far as cross-platform capabilities (video playback with SMPEG, etc.) Allegro still has a lot of DOSisms with it’s behavior that make it very frustrating to do some things.
Don’t get me wrong, I use Allegro myself in one program I work on, but only because it’s someone else’s program.
Which version of Allegro, 3.x, 4.0.x, 4.1.x ?
Maybe it’s just me but when I try and download I get som “file not found” error.
I can’t expand the archive: athene_v31.tar.tar. Is this a known bug?
I’m very impressessed by what seems like it could be the beginning of something quite good. It seems very quick and responsive for the most part, but it still lacks the maturity to do much. From what I can tell, the only widgets are textboxes, buttons, sliders, checkboxes and listboxes, in addition to menus. The file manager isn’t very pretty, and reminds me of WS_FTP’s early days. This leads to a non-immersive and unintuitive computing experience, and it’s too eye-candy-intense for most people who like unintuitive, lightweight environments like minimalist window managers. So, as it stands, I don’t see this having much place for anybody.
Who knows, maybe this could have some real potential in the embeded market? Its light, fast and consumes very few resources.
Anyhoo, does anyone know of an installer that will install those icons? I tried Stardock Icon packager, but had no luck.
Q
… I was scared off by the drive volume mounting procedure. It’s still just a *nix and it shows through the geekness it requires. But I imagine they will make this stuff more user-friendly as time goes on. If they keep developing it. I will have to keep my eyes on this one. Thanks for the news item. I didn’t know about this thing at all, before.
I can’t expand the archive: athene_v31.tar.tar. Is this a known bug?
If you download the Linux version via Windows Explorer, it rather stupidly converts the extension to ‘tar.tar’ when it it’s actually ‘tar.bz2’.
Alternative operating systems are a good thing. Choice and competition drive innovation and the free market – all concepts that Microsoft appears to loathe, by the way.
As an OS X user, I do have one question. Why do so many alternative OS’s try to look as much as they can like Windows? Many Linux distros I’ve seen are barely distinguishable from Windows, in my opinion. I think the alternatives should look different and distinct. BeOS certainly had its own look, and I think that it had one of the nicest UI’s for its time.
If you download the Linux version via Windows Explorer, it rather stupidly converts the extension to ‘tar.tar’ when it it’s actually ‘tar.bz2’.
well forgive me if there is a very simple solution for getting around this. But what would it be? I downloaded the linux version using firebird and i have this problem. do i just need to download it with a different manager?