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July 2004 NewsletterSyllable is an in-development open source operating system for the home and small office user. The Syllable Development Newsletters are condensed reports on the past month's activity -- highlighting progress made and other project updates. For previous months, please see the links on the left of this page. Red text below denotes direct quotes from developers. There were 331 mailing-list posts in July. It was a fairly busy month, with lots of discussion about GUI principles and great news on the driver front. There were plenty of other updates too. Outside of the OS itself, work began on an overhaul of the website's look and feel. Read on for more... Contents
1. New 3DFX driverJan L Hauffa announced a new video driver, adding to Syllable's growing support for common graphics chips. It's designed for Voodoo 3, 4 and 5 cards, and can be downloaded from Jan's website. His mailing list post explained it all: I just finished porting the "tdfx" framebuffer driver to Syllable. It works fine with my Voodoo 3 3000 PCI, but I'd like to hear some test reports before I call it 1.0 :) It should support Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo 3 and Voodoo 4/5 cards with full acceleration and overlays. Voodoo 1/2 and older are not supported, because their achitecture is too different. Lead developer Kristian Van Der Vliet (Vanders) and Kaj de Vos gave a big thumbs-up to Jan's work, particularly for his extra additions to the Builder packaging system (Subversion 1.0.2 and its dependencies, including Berkeley DB, libNeon and Apache Portable Runtime). 2. Major ATerm updatesDamien Danneels released a new version of ATerm, Syllable's terminal program used for command-line software. The widespread changes improve ATerm's versatility and ease-of-use, and were listed in Damien's post: - a popup menu offers "copy", "paste", "about" and "settings" actions. Rick Caudill added some extra patches (set desktop and full-screen), while Damien and Vanders discussed various programming and design issues. With ATerm being one of Syllable's most-used tools, these updates are great to see. 3. Spatial navigationGNOME, one of Linux's most popular desktop environments, recently made the switch from navigational file browsing to spatial. In a nutshell, 'spatial' means that a file manager opens each folder in its own subwindow; this aims to provide an easier desktop for newcomers, by making folders look like 'real' objects. Of course, such a drastic change instigated massive debates and flamewars around the Net, and various articles have been written about it. Kaj de Vos pointed at this OSNews piece, and others chipped in with their views. Brent P Newhall mused: "I think that _all_ windows should remember their last position, not just folder/navigation windows", to which Bram Van Dam replied: "In the end you're still navigating through your directory tree. But instead of simply navigating through the tree you're also navigating the massive clutter of windows." Clearly a difficult and subjective issue, with personal preference coming into play. Brent elaborated on his pro-spatial viewpoint: His [the article author's] point is that novice users don't have lots of folders, and thus don't get 14 windows open. Also, novice users are confused by the tree heirarchy, but are less confused by windows popping up for each folder. Also, one implementation of this allows you to CTRL-Double-Click (or whatever) to close the previous window as you open the new one. So, if you're drilling down through many folders, you simply hold down the CTRL key and only one folder window will be open at any given time. And Bram replied: I simply don't agree with his views. It isn't at all complicated for even the most novice user to understand that one folder is in another folder. At least none of the novice users I have ever encountered (and I've taught handicapped people how to use trackballs as well as 85 year olds how to use a computer .. ). The debate started to peter out, but Vanders came in with some intriguing thoughts on database filesystems and possible ideas for the future. He argued that spatial navigation only solves the basic problems -- and bigger issues come from the way files are organised, sorted and searched in the first place: The real solution is to abstract the entire filesystem so that the user doesn't need to bother with files, folders and hierachies *at all*. Database filesystems such as BeFS, AFS and WinFS hold the key to this. Rather than grouping "files" into "directories" by loose relationships E.g. all music goes in ~/My Music, all pictures in ~/My Pictures, angry letters to the local newspaper in ~/Documents/Letters/Daily Reporter/ etc. you can instead provide a database like "view" onto all of the files across the entire filesystem, and then provide tools that allow the user to group, filter and modify those views. Want to see all music files ripped in the last week? Then just create a view for all files of type "audio/*" newer than one week ago. It doesn't matter where those files are on the filesystem; they user *doesn't need to know*. 4. New Dock alpha releaseArno Klenke, currently working on Syllable's desktop and file manager, announced a new test release (alpha 4) of his Dock. This replaces Syllable's old Launcher -- removing the semi-BeOS-esque launch list and replacing it with a familiar taskbar-like design and nifty file browser, as can be seen here. In his message, Arno detailed the changes: *An optional single-click interface 5. FileExpander v0.7Having found some time to work on Syllable, Ruslan Nickolaev was pleased to announce version 0.7 of FileExpander, his tool for managing compressed archives. Screenshots can be found here, and the list of changes include: - gcc3, Syllable 0.5.3 etc Chris Dennett and Arno Klenke were impressed, and gave Ruslan some suggestions for improving it. 6. Website redesign statusBrent P Newhall continued working on the new website, explaining his changes in detail and looking for suggestions. Syllable's old site, while colourful and compacting a lot into a small space, often seemed a little too garish and cluttered. Brent's redesign aims to simplify navigation and make life more pleasant for Syllable users. Maritimus, BurningShadow, xsdg, Vanders and others replied with some suggestions, and Brent started linking his designs with the dynamic aspects of the site. Problems with downloading Syllable were raised; xsdg posted his thoughts: Downloading Syllable _is_ confusing, and it cannot stay that way. From www.syllable.org, the user should be downloading Syllable in some form (or trudging their way through the Sourceforge mirror selection pages) in no more than two clicks -- as I mentioned in my response to Maritimus, click "Download," click a media type (such as "Syllable LiveCD"), and you should be on your way. 7. ColourWheel progressHenrik Isaksson posted an update on his colour-selector dialog, which will be used in Syllable applications for choosing colours in a friendly fashion. Check out the screenshot here. The changes weren't major, but Henrik outlined his plans before it's complete: - Add some spacing to the layout. 8. Musings on uniquenessDuring a week in Pittsburg, Brent P Newhall had been helping a friend film an independent movie. This got him thinking about the need for innovation in the film world and how it parallels the open source community, and what unique strengths Syllable has over over OSes. Brent asked the list: Every independent film is a unique entity, and it thrives to a great degree on its uniqueness. Rarely do you see an independent film that's just a tired rehash of something you've sen a hundred times. They *can't* be, because their audience consists of those tired of the same old thing. Independent films need to be unusual and special. The same applies to open source software. If people want the same old thing, they'll use Windows. Those who are willing to try Syllable are those who are at least willing (hopefully, eager) to try something unique and fresh. So, I asked myself this question: What makes Syllable unique? How do we *want* Syllable to be unique? BurningShadow explained that as a Dane, he became interested in Syllable because the original code (AtheOS) was written by a fellow Scandinavian, Kurt Skauen. He also pointed out the OS' compactness, stability and plug-and-play facilities. Chris Dennet felt that no OS appealed to the intermediate user -- with Windows accommodating novices and Linux satisfying coders and professionals: An operating system long ago that accomodated the intermediate user was Workbench / AmigaOS from the Amiga. It was easy to use (fully GUI based), but gave you all the power you would expect, without being dumbed down anywhere. We should aim to hit this standard. I can still use Workbench today as if it was an extention of my own body, even though it has been pushed to the back for a great number of years. Mike Saunders stressed the performance benefits. With speed being a critical issue for many people, Syllable could acquire users and developers because it boots and runs so fast: Users are constantly upgrading their machines in the quest for better speed and performance, but the software is just bloating itself to match. When I buy a 3 GHz machine, I want it to FEEL like a 3 GHz machine! When it's running WinXP or GNOME and feels more sluggish than my old 7 MHz Amiga, there's something wrong -- badly wrong. Syllable can make fast machines FEEL fast again, much in the same way that BeOS did. It doesn't have to run on an old 386 or anything; just offer tangible performance improvements over the other desktop OSes. And right now it's doing that, even in its mid-development stage. As project manager, Vanders detailed his thoughts on the features that give Syllable potential and what he hopes to be its strengths in the future: We're the only Open Source OS which has been designed to end to be a good desktop Operating System, and that makes us pretty unique. Other OS's are either clones or not end to end designs. Being an end to end design and having control over the entire system gives us a great advantage because everything can be designed to fit together snugly. We can minimize dependencies, redundency and indirection by designing components to work together, and because we have control over all of those components we can redesign them too if we think it will work better some other way. [ ... ] The way we handle device detection and device drivers is pretty unique. I've never had the pleasure of a true "Zero Config" system like Syllable before. AmigaOS came close but you still had to fiddle with .device files too often, and things like FastMem in the early days and Picasso96/CyberGFX/AHI in the later years complicated matters. [ ... ] I think that once we have a few more pieces in place, such as the Dock and Registrar, and libnet, and bigger applications like Gecko are up and running on Syllable, we'll have a lot more to talk about. 9. Fun and gamesHaving discovered Sourcery, an IDE (integrated development environment) for Syllable developers, Brent P Newhall banged his fist on the desk and announced that he'd write no more code until it was fully released. Joey Reid reacted quickly, writing up a thorough report on this world-stopping news: SYLLABLE DEVELOPMENT HALTED IN ANTICIPATION OF "SOURCERY" The industry was shocked today to find out that core Syllable developers have been refusing to write any more code until "Sourcery", a new IDE by Rick Caudill, is released. "CTRL-x u, ESC-b, CTRL-x CTRL-s, ALT-tab, make, ALT-tab. I just can't take any more of these finger gymnastics", commented syllable developer Brent Newhall. "I'm developing carpal-tunnel syndrome. How can I be expected to think up new anime-based names for websites when I can't take my mind off of the pain in my wrists?" Apparently no code for syllable has been written in approximately three months, with the exception of the tireless Arno Klenke. "Sure we're concerned", quipped Syllable leader Kristian Vander Vliet from his hidden underwater lair somewhere in the North Atlantic. "But Arno's been holding up under the circumstances, and seems to have sprouted a second head, so it would appear there are more good things to come." Caudill has been furiously working in an effort to get the IDE finished in time. Syllable developers are understandably anxious, knowing that Caudill is to be married this summer. "We're afraid we're going to lose him to _her_" quoted Henrik Isaksson. "Can't a hobby OS be jealous?" Caudill has been shrugging off suggestions that his impending marriage will affect his syllable development time. "I am and will be dedicated first and foremost to the Syllable community. That is when I'm not planning an entire wedding by myself. Or in Canada. Or, oh, what's that dear?..." Klenke could not be reached for comment at this time, but was recently seen stocking up on hair gel. Edited by Michael Saunders. If you have any other Syllable-related news, just drop me a line. |
