Syllable 0.5.1 is now available. Syllable 0.5.1 fixes some of the bugs users encountered in Syllable 0.5.0, and also adds yet more functionality with an experimental USB Mass Storage driver and Ogg Vorbis audio plugin. Read on for the upgrade details.
Syllable 0.5.1 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I’ll be ordering my CD today
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Well, it’ll be one step closer if I can get it to install!
0.5 installation stalled on my Dell desktop, and on another home-made computer. So I’ve yet to play with it.
If 0.5.1 doesn’t work, could you post your specs & any errors you got to the Syllable-developer mailing list and we can see if we can fix any problems.
Can’t wait to try it out!
I understand you need a FAT partition to install Syllable; what kind of FAT do you need to make under cfdisk? Does the partition need be primary? I am going to give it a try.
You don’t need a FAT partition if you’re installing from the CD, which is of course the preferred method.
Provided you have an ATAPI (IDE) CD-ROM drive you can download & burn an ISO which you can boot from and install Syllable without having to use a FAT partition. What you do need is a partition to create an AFS filesystem on which to hold Syllable itself. Syllable can use either a Primary or an Extended partition.
Have any wireless pcmcia drivers been written/ported? Maybe prism or orinoco? I would love to run this OS & play!
Thanks,
G
Sadly not. At the moment Syllable does not even support PCMCIA (CardBus) at all, and a PCMCIA bus manager would first have to be written. Once that was in place then in theory porting any PCMCIA device drivers from E.g. Linux would not be too hard. It’s writing the PCMCIA bus manager first that would be the most work.
the installation quit when i get the blue screen (after grub)
TLy, is this the same problem as yours?
my pc:
celeron 500
128 mb
hd 10 gb maxtor
cd rom 40x asus
tnt2 ultra m64
mattia, could you post this to the Syllable Developer mailing list or the forums at http://syllable.sourceforge.net? Can you also include some information about the crash; does Syllable stop booting? What messages are displayed when this happens?
I’ll probably post my specs to the developer list when I get some time. Here they are:
Box 1:
Athlon XP 2400+
256MB DDR RAM 333mhz variety
40GB hdd, 56GB hdd on mobo IDE controller
80GB hdd on ATA100 Maxtor controller
SBLive! Value
GeForce2MX
IDE DVD-ROM
Box 2:
P4 1.7ghz
256MB PC600 RAM
10GB hdd
40x CDRW
SBLive (original revision)
Radeon 9000 AGP
The installer won’t finish loading on either. I have also had no success running Syllable on my PowerBook G4’s install of VPC6.0. I have only been able to run an old version of Syllable in VMWare on Box 2. I’ll download 0.5.1 and test it out and submit any errors I get.
mattia:
Yep that sounds about right. I had just finished creating the AFS partition, it froze somewhere in the next few steps. I think I did get a debug dump though.
I do have vmware now (didn’t have it before) so if I try again I can take a screen shot.
Just a quick question if any Syllable coders are reading:
Why did you choose glibc as the C library? It’s huge, bloated and slow — not ideal for a quick, lightweight OS like Syllable. I would’ve thought something like NetBSD’s libc would be far more appropriate.
Anyway, keep up the good work! Looking forward to trying this out when I have a spare moment.
M
Good question. Glibc is not sacred to us, we evaluated a number of alternatives. Maybe we’ll reconsider, but for better or for worse, Glibc is the standard. Not using it would cost us some compatibility and some features like internationalization. How bad that would be remains to be seen.
Kaj
Congrats to all involved with the progress of Syllable. Unfortunately I can’t try it out as my Intel 810 video is not supported. Has that changed in the new version?
David
Sadly the i810/815 is not supported yet. It is planned but we need someone to write the driver. Various other graphics adapters still need drivers and there isn’t the developers to write them at the moment.
Know how to develop drivers, Syllable needs you. Developers of all types are needed. Thank you
Installation went without a hitch, although I do blame myself for not RTFM and had to retry a couple times to get it right. I installed it on vmware 4.0 Workstation, 400 MB disk image, not sure of the exact specs that the VM emulates might be a mirror of my real PC.
One thing I want to point out during installation:
At the part where the text editor pops up to edit the menu.lst, if I go up to the Application menu and select quit, it would freeze. But if I click the first button on the far upper right corner, the window is place behind all others and the terminal with the instructions is brought forward. Then if I select the text editor behind the terminal and move it into view, I can select Application->Quit and installation would resume properly.
I’m still waiting for it to boot up, was kinda slow. Network initialization was real slow, most likely because I did not enable a network device in my VM. Right now I’m looking at a teal background and a cursor, nothing else. It’s staying like this for about 10 minutes now. Icons on my vmware app show no sign of disk activity, which it did before though. Mouse cursor still works, I can move it around.
Isn’t making the OS more efficient more important than Linux compatibility, or am I wrong? Anyway there’s plenty of time to reconsider
TLy, I’m glad to hear you have Syllable installed. In order to speed it up, add the following kernel paramters to the end of the “kernel” line in Grubs menu.lst file:
ata0=nodma ata1=nodma
This disables DMA transfers for disk I/O, which actually speeds up Syllable on VMware. James Hayhurst has also ported a VMWare video driver, which he posted to the mailing list recently. If you search the archives you should be able to find it quite easily.
Onto another subject, we chose Glibc because that is what AtheOS originally used. While we could in theory change to a different libc, I didn’t see much advantage in doing so. Glibc is portable and by using it we will not need to maintain our own libc within Syllable. I also do not believe it is “slow”; I have never seen any performance comparisons between various libcs, but I doubt any claims against the perfomance of Glibc. Bear in mind that most libc functions are really quite a thin wrapper around kernel functions, so there isn’t much scope for any libc to introduce a performance hit. Indeed I understand that Glibc has some of the best IEEE math routines available.
My understanding is that Glibc is bloated, but not slow. The reason for other C libraries to exist is to be cleaner and smaller, usually for embedded use. Actually, some space preservation in other libraries is gained by NOT optimizing for speed.
I like clean, but Syllable being a desktop OS, we should not just optimize for space.
Kaj