Exciting updates for the Syllable OS: an updated port of the X11 “nv” driver for Nvidia cards and an SDL port that would guarantee a good number of game ports.
Updated GeForce Driver, Preliminary SDL Port for Syllable
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There are going to be loads up updates over the next week or so as we’re currently pulling in all the outstanding patches in preperation for the 0.5.4 release. There are patches and code coming from all over the place right now.
The SDL port is just a proof of concept; it uses libcaca to render the video in ANSI on the Terminal! It isn’t going to be used for anything serious, but Michael might find the time to write a proper port at some time.
Oh and using Syllable on an nVidia card before was nice, but with the new driver it’s really nice. Smoother than a babies backside.
As Vanders says, the text-based SDL port is more of a demo than anything else — it’s too difficult to see what’s going on in most apps. (That said, the Game Boy emulator rocks because GBs are low-res anyway!).
This is news because it shows that SDL does compile and run cleanly on Syllable, albeit without all the bells and whistles. David and I have been looking into the feasibility of native graphics; this could be a while off though (so much other stuff to do).
This’ll be a very busy month for Syllable, and at the start of October all the details will be in the newsletter:
http://msa.section.me.uk/sdn/
Missing in the news is Terry Glass’ new coldfish dock plugin that lets you control coldfish (the mp3 player) from the dock. Quite nice stuff.
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are you a developer? interested in helping out a rather young operating system project? then check out http://www.syllable.org
Oh and also missing is the news of a new file picker, integrated version of the dock, and new libsyllable with the dock/filemanager shared code.
What’s the ETA for OpenGL on Syllable?
Is Mesa and/or DRI eventually going to be used?
iirc, there already is a Mesa port.
Are there any changes to dhcp/networking setup coming down the line? When I tried Syllable 0.5.3 I couldn’t make networking happen and although I liked a lot of things about Syllable, the lack of network was a show-stopper for me.
> iirc, there already is a Mesa port.
I don’t see it on Kamidake…
Also, neither Atheos nor Syllable is mentioned on the Mesa site (under “Platforms and Drivers”).
Though, I see that the mesa site mentions, new as of version 6.1:
“- updated BeOS support (Philippe Houdoin)”
Should work out of the box. At least, on my home dhcp-LAN I didn’t have to tell it to do anything special.
The work on syllable is pretty impressive. Keep up the good work guys! If a proper SDL port gets completed, I’ll definitely start coding some little games I’ve been meaning to write for a while now.
The Mesa port is here: http://kamidake.other-space.com/display_entry.php?id=265
DHCP should just work. Did you try the LiveCD, or did you install Syllable? Did Syllable detect your network card(s)? There have been some bug fixes to the DHCP client since 0.5.3 as well, so it seems to be working for everyone now.
> DHCP should just work
That’s what I thought
I used what I thought should be a well supported card (intel) and it seemed to be recognised, but dhcp didn’t work, and any attempts to enter settings by hand through that GUI app just locked it up.
> Did you try the LiveCD, or did you install Syllable?
I was using LiveCD. I wasn’t game to install to HD once I found networking was unlikely to work for me.
>There have been some bug fixes to the DHCP client since 0.5.3
Great, I’ll try again once the next version is out.
DHCP just doesn’t work automatically on the LiveCD because of the way the startup scripts try to start the DHCP client. If you had installed Syllable it would almost certainly have worked fine. It was reported by a few people on the forums, and running the DHCP client manually worked fine.
LiveCD’s arn’t “official” releases but I’ll ask BurningShadow to try and fix the problem for any future CD’s he releases. In the mean time you might want to reconsider installing Syllable on your machine..
> The Mesa port is here: http://kamidake.other-space.com/display_entry.php?id=265
Whoops. Thanks for the link.
>LiveCD’s arn’t “official” releases but I’ll ask BurningShadow
>to try and fix the problem for any future CD’s he releases. In
>the mean time you might want to reconsider installing Syllable
>on your machine..
I’ll fix that.
I have been trying to “bluecurveize” some more applications and get the new icons checked into cvs in time for the next release. Hopefully it works, and we get a more consistant appearance.
I just finished this and uploaded it.
Screenshot:
http://www.cuodan.net/~spike/Syllable/ABrowse-BC.png
Binary:
http://www.cuodan.net/~spike/abrowse-bluecurve.tar.gz
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Are you a developer looking to help develop an alternative open source desktop? Then check out http://www.syllable.org