Syllable, AtheOS Archive

NewsForge reviews Syllable, and concludes: "Overall, I was pleased with Syllable's speed and ease of use. Most of its drawbacks come from it not being finished yet. The glitches were minor and the lack of features in its applications come from them not being finished yet. I feel kind of guilty complaining that a browser that's on version 0.4 isn't full-featured enough, but for now, these issues prevent Syllable from being useful as a full-time desktop OS."

The Realtek 8169 network card driver has been ported to the Syllable desktop operating system from Linux. This is the first Gigabit network driver for Syllable. A beta release is available and the driver will be included in the next release of Syllable.

Syllable now has support for reading and writing NTFS partitions and drives. The Wiki page states that the driver came from the Linux world, the Linux 2.4.23 NTFS driver. The driver was ported in 8 hours, and testing is much appreciated.

After Arno Klenke already ported GCC 4.0 to the Syllable desktop operating system some time ago, the Syllable team has now integrated the port and updated it to version 4.1.1. Many other ports, like BinUtils, are also being updated to the latest versions. Work is now underway to update Syllable itself to compile it with GCC 4. Please note that if you compile programs with GCC 4.1.1, any users of your binary will need to have GCC 4.1.1 installed as well - or wait for Syllable 0.6.2.

The Syllable desktop operating system project announced that they have started selling professional-quality CDs through a Syllable shop at online print-on-demand publisher Lulu. Additionally, these CDs will be available at Syllable's booth on open-source conference FOSDEM. In other news, Syllable's software site Kamidake and documentation site, Syllable User's Bible, both got an overhaul. And lastly, the Syllable VMWare player has been updated to include Syllable's developer's tools.

Syllable will have a booth at FOSDEM 2006. Kaj de Vos writes: "Today seems as good a day as any to announce that Syllable will have a booth at FOSDEM, the renowned open-source conference in Brussels, Belgium, that will be held in the weekend of 25 and 26 February this year."

The Syllable team has released an update to their latest 0.6.0 release-- Syllable 0.6.0a. This release will fix the most pressing bugs found in the 0.6.0 release, which can be found in the changelog. If you have already installed 0.6.0, you can use the upgrade package. Downloads are here.

Syllable 0.6.0 has been released. This version includes stronger support for CD drives graphics cards and improved stability in the native file system, among many other improvements.

After a long gap, the latest edition of the Syllable Development Newsletter is now available. This covers progress in the last eight months, including the 0.5.7 release, Whisper updates, SDL and games ports, along with much more.

"I have started to port the linux ACPI subsystem because ACPI is becoming more important now and slowly replaces subsystems like the pci routing table, multi-processor table and apm. The Linux ACPI code is based on the os independent intel reference implementation and so the port has been very easy (and fast to do) so far. Currently the ACPI busmanager contains the basic acpi code (about 90% of the code)."

Syllable 0.5.7 has been released. You can read the changelog here, and the download locations are here. "The biggest change in this release: everything has been recompiled against the new libc, and we have broken binary compatability through the removal of all the old libgui/libatheos/libsyllable versions. There are also some new drivers, new GUI classes, new bug fixes, and no doubt, new bugs."

This is a small update to Syllable 0.5.6 which fixes a number of important bugs related to Glibc 2.3.4.