The July issue of the Syllable Development Newsletter is available, featuring updates and progress from Syllable, the open source desktop OS, over the past month. Highlights include a new 3DFX driver, major ATerm updates and UI principle discussions. Good progress is being made.
Syllable Development Newsletter, July 2004
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Just a strange though about how many OSs always provide a 3dfx graphics driver. 3dfx has not been making graphics cards for years and yet it is always mentioned. Just thought it interesting, wondered if anyone else did.
3dfx was such a big company and there are many cards still out there, so it definitely is a must to include a 3dfx driver. BTW: I have two Voodoo 3’s and an Voodoo 4 4500
Yeah, 3Dfx cards seem to abound. I think it’s because a lot of people tend to test OS’s like Syllable on their secondary machines, which are generally older. Older hardware means you still run into things such as 3Dfx Voodoo cards and ISA NE2000 NIC’s, so you pretty much end up supported such hardware by default.
Oddly enough though, the Voodoo driver is the 11th video driver for Syllable. We had support for GeForceFX and Radeon cards before the Voodoo, so it isn’t always as clear cut as “older hardware gets supported quicker”
I downloaded the newest live cd of Syllable. Going to see about installing tonight.
Can I install it on a secondary hd? I have a WinXP box that I want to install it on another hard drive. Can they co-exists?
Thanks
Yes, that should be no problem. Just make sure you have a boot loader which is capable of loading Syllable, or loading the Syllable boot loader (Grub). Make sure you read the Install file for instructions on how to configure Grub!
Sure, you can have both Windows and Syllable (and BeOS and linux too, if you want :-))
I advise you to put Grub on your primary hard drive master boot record (MBR).
If you prefer another boot manager, install grub on the syllable partition.
To install Syllable from the Live CD:
1. In Syllable, open a terminal window.
2. Enter the following commands:
cd /boot/Install
./do_install.rb
Last time I tried the LiveCD it crashed on me during boot. I suspect it was because of my geforce 2 go card, is that possible?
Anyway, if that was the case, have you got a gf2go driver now? OpenBeOS got one, which you could port if you haven’t got your own yet…
The last time I tried to install Syllable (0.5.3 base install), it didn’t detect my hard drive at all. All that showed up in the partition manager was two floppy drives (i assume floppy images from the install cd?), and the cd itself. I have a 120GB hard drive, so I tried messing around with my BIOS settings, as per the FAQ, but i never made any progress.
It seems to be a known issue, since it was in the FAQ, so I didn’t bother reporting it, but has any progress been made in this area?
I had the same problem. I am hoping to try the next release though.
I still use a voodoo 3 3200 16mb agp card on my primary machine. Works like a champ
Hmmm, Syllable has full 3D acceleration in 3dfx and other video drivers (“It should support Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo 3 and Voodoo 4/5 cards with full acceleration”)? SkyOS developers said they can’t implement full 3D acceleration into video drivers because video chip manufacturers don’t distributed full specifications of chip.
for newer cards maybe. 3rd party fully accelerated drivers for 3dfx cards have been around for ages. beos even has them. 3dfx was more open with the hardware I guess
I think he means the 3DFX driver has full 2D acceleration.
It seems to already have been demonstrated that porting Linux kernel drivers (sound, NIC, framebuffer[?]) is fairly simple so migrating the support Linux has should happen fairly quickly. A lot of hardware support lives outside of the kernel any more, especially USB based devices so expect ports of CUPS, SANE and gPhoto to cover a lot of ground quickly.
Linux has cracked the major part of the hardware problem, and I hope that Syllable becomes the second generation OSS OS that can conquer that Last Frontier of the “Desktop” (whatever people mean by that word)
They also released a new vmware image, and believe me, it’s impressing. They’ve made *huge* progress since the last version I tried.
The new dock is looking very good.
It’s a pity there is no qemu image…
The last time I tried to install Syllable (0.5.3 base install), it didn’t detect my hard drive at all…I have a 120GB hard drive.
Your hard drive uses 48bit LBA, which is currently disabled by default as it is considered “Experimental”. However everyone who has tried it so far have found that it works perfectly, so we will probably enable support by default soon. If you want to enable 48bit LBA you need to add:
enable_ata_lba48=true
to the kernel options. Just press “e” when the Grub screen appears, move to the second line & press “e” again. Now add that option, press [ESC] to finish editing and then press “b” to boot. During installation you can add that option to your Grub configuration, too.
Last time I tried the LiveCD it crashed on me during boot. I suspect it was because of my geforce 2 go card, is that possible?
It is is more likely because of a bug in the ATA driver. Syllable 0.5.4 will fix these bugs. Your GeForce2 Go should be fully supported by Syllable.
Syllable has full 3D acceleration in 3dfx and other video drivers
That means 2D acceleration, not 3D. Syllable currently does not support any 3D accelerated drivers.
Here’s a special treat for those reading the comments: proper BeOS-like titlebars! They’re not finished yet (lots to clean up, and the widths need to be correct and dynamic) but it’s a taste of things to come. Who knows, maybe even in Syllable 0.5.4…
http://msa.section.me.uk/syllable/beish-testing.gif
SWEET! That looks awesome
I need to load up syllable later and mess with it some. I tried out the ive CD but it never would boot up right 
“I tried out the ive CD but it never would boot up right”
Yeah, the CD-ROM driver can be a bit picky, but fortunately Vanders has been working on a new one. It should be in Syllable 0.5.4, so if you still have no luck with it, just hold out for that release
Your hard drive uses 48bit LBA, which is currently disabled by default as it is considered “Experimental”. However everyone who has tried it so far have found that it works perfectly, so we will probably enable support by default soon. If you want to enable 48bit LBA you need to add:
enable_ata_lba48=true
Thanks, worked perfectly.
Thanks for the info. I tried it out on 3 different machines all with different cd drives and it never did work. Can’t wait for 0.5.4 so I can finally test it out
Yeah, hope it goes well — and even if you do have any problems then, just post on the mailing list. The folks on there are very friendly. 0.5.4 will be a pretty significant release, with that updated CD driver and… the Dock! It’s Syllable’s new panel and file browser, and is looking very slick indeed (also very nice to use).
http://msa.section.me.uk/syllable/dock-in-action.gif
The syllable UI is getting better with each release – I saw a screenshot that finally corrected the scrollbar buttons being larger than the scrollbar – yay
The dock is nice, but definately needs refinements – for example, the Menu needs something to distinguish itself from opened applications.
The biggest pleasure to use has to be the file manager, but that too needs some refinements as it doesn’t remember window positions for me.
All in all Syllable is making outstanding progress with each release.
Hi,
I installed Syllable on my computer. It boots up and sits happily at 1024×768. I could make it higher, but for now it will do.
I have a network card that the Syllable sees, but not sure if its using it right or maybe it is not supported.
I have a “RealTek RTL8139/810x Family Fast Ethernet NIC.”
From the Terminal I did this:
$ dhcpc -d eth0
It basically timed out when trying to send a packet to get an IP address request.
Did I miss anything?
Thanks!
Did you install it from the official install CD, or the LiveCD?
If you used the official install CD, you will need to update dpcpc.
If you used the LiveCD, that is already updated and something else must be the problem.
I installed off the LiveCD2.
I got it from here:
http://burningshadow.dk/syllable/news.display.php?id=4
Can I mount ntfs under syllable so I can download packages? I want to port a game I made. Or do I need to get all the goodies I want and burn them to a CD and then mount the cd?
I tried gcc, but I must need a package, I’ll look into that one.
“I tried gcc, but I must need a package, I’ll look into that one.”
Get the “Developer’s Delight” package — that should include everything you need for writing/porting apps! It’s here:
http://www.syllable.org/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownloa…
Can I mount ntfs under syllable ?
Not yet, AFAIK.
The easiest way is to create a FAT partition on your hard drive and to use it to exchange data between OSes.
It basically timed out when trying to send a packet to get an IP address request.
If you installed from the LiveCD and DHCP is not working then I’m worried, as I thought we had all the last of the DHCP bugs worked out. Can you try it again and email me ([email protected]) copies of the files /var/log/kernel and /var/log/dhcpc please? Might be a good idea to gzip them first though! Thanks
don’t forget the plug & play option in the bios needs to be turned off for some network cards to work under Syllable
Hi all,
Ah hah, after turning off plug-n-play in BIOS the network is working!
I am typing this from ABrowse.
Thanks for all the help!