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September 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 812 mailing-list posts in September -- the most ever for the project in a single month. No doubt this number can be attributed to the latest release and recent publicity, but new developers are coming on board and progress is accelerating. Naturally, the main highlight this month is the release of 0.5.4; many other developments and discussions took place though. Read on for the summaries... Contents
1. Syllable 0.5.4 releasedIt had been a long five months since 0.5.3, with a great deal of development taking place, and finally the new version was available. Project lead Kristian Van Der Vliet (Vanders) made the announcement towards the end of the month on September 26th, but being the most significant news this issue it deserves to be mentioned first. Vanders' mail: The long awaited Syllable 0.5.4 is now available! This release includes a completely new Desktop and Registrar server which adds important functionality to Syllable. The comprehensive changelog was pasted beneath; it can be found here. Meanwhile, screenshots of the desktop work in this release can be found at Syllable's website -- the first six (those mentioning the Dock) all illustrate the changes. Among general cheering and celebration for the release, a few questions were raised, and Vanders put together a post explaining some of the changes (and, er, South American geography):
With the release arriving just before this newsletter was written, there wasn't much time for discussion. Nonetheless, from comments on OSNews and the website's forum, those who'd given it a spin seemed happy with the desktop work -- and were looking forward to more. 2. IRC channel activityInternet Relay Chat (IRC) is a simple and speedy system for instant online communication, similar to Web-based chat-rooms but with more versatility and no browser overhead. Syllable's channel is #syllable on irc.freenode.net and had been fairly quiet for a while, as William Hoggarth noted: The Syllable IRC channel is hardly used. Partly because it is not mentioned anywhere on the site. However it is suprising the number of new people who turn up looking for help. Perhaps it might be a good idea to put a link for it on the website. It would be good if there were people on hand to help when Syllable next gets OSNews'ed or Slashdotted. Spike Burch hadn't seen many core developers in the channel, and Vanders said he'd try to spend more time there. Website maintainer Brent P Newhall added some info on the front page hoping to generate more activity; by the end of the month it was busier than before. 3. GeForce driver updatesTaking a break from his work on the new Syllable desktop, prolific coder Arno Klenke announced a bunch of updates for the GeForce video card driver: I have done some updates on the geforcefx driver. Basically I have imported the code for the older geforce chips from the X11 driver. This might speed up the rendering a little bit because the geforcefx driver uses a dma command buffer and not mmio registers. If the driver works on the older geforce cards then the "nvidia" driver will disappear and I will take the code for riva 128/tnt cards from it and put it into a seperate "riva" driver. So all in all the changes are: Vanders and Henrik Isaksson tried it out and were very chuffed with the results, as was LiveCD creator BurningShadow: Today I got home with a GeForce2 MX/400, installed your driver, shut down my PC, inserted the card, and booted. See, this is one of the things I love about Syllable. It took my less that one minute to download/install the driver, but with Windows it took more than 10 minutes, before it finally worked. This is exactly what makes Windows so "user friendly", and why people will start using Syllable, in a few years from now. 4. Musings on menu barsA long, but interesting, discussion on the merits of having fixed menu bars. Spike Burch suggested that Syllable adopt the designed used by Mac OS and others; appserver hacker Henrik Isaksson chipped in with "I would say it's illogical. If everything else moves with the window, why should the menubar be different?" Anthony Jacques added his thoughts: FWIW Atari / DRI used to use this in GEM too. Personally though I agree that its inconsistent. When you change the focus from one app to another, the menubar changes, right? Thats surely got to be confusing if the menu bar is not viewed by the user as linked to the window that has focus. The concept works if you only use one app at once, but then you might as well have a fullscreen window too (which is basically what GEM did). Jarret R agreed, saying "Apps should only use the space I give them, not take over other parts of my screen." Shortly after, Brent P Newhall joined in the debate: I've gotten used to it on MacOS. I can see both sides of the arguments, and wouldn't mind a fixed menubar. Chris Dennett gave a thumbs-up to the fixed menu bar concept, explaining that he was familiar with it from the Amiga's Workbench desktop, while Ross Schulman pointed out that such a design made the menu 'infinitely tall' and thus easier to hit with the mouse. Bill Sanders had been lurking in the shadows, creeping out to stir his thoughts into the discussion: I think this is one of those things where there won't be a general agreement. I've been wondering how Syllable will handle this, as a team/project. The debate continued; David Feugey pondered about RISC OS style context menus, and Vanders summed up his beliefs as the thead came to a close: Syllable will not have a fixed menu bar. 5. ColdFish Dock pluginTerry Glass announced a plugin for ColdFish, Syllable's music player, allowing it to be controlled from the new Dock panel: Well I think I've managed to squash any glaring bugs in my latest project, so I'm pleased to announce Coldfish Dock Plugin 1.0 beta1. BurningShadow was pleased with the work, and made a few proposals for improving it. 6. New Flash demoMichael Saunders created a Flash demonstration of Syllable in action (including the new Dock), allowing newcomers to see the desktop in use without having to install the whole OS: After testing the, er, test one, I've made a proper Flash demo of Syllable in action. As opposed to the old one, this includes the new Dock, shows various apps running, has no funky soundtrack (size constraints) and is only 1 meg. See here: Spike Burch wasn't too happy with the frame-rate, asking if it could be improved -- and Michael responded: Not without making the file 10 megs instead of 1, or making it last only a few seconds :-) That's the tradeoff, and really it should be seen as a moving slideshow of Syllable in action rather than a representation of its performance. 7. Sourcery, Tmpfs, UnzipA few news snippets. Newly married Rick Caudill, despite spending time with his job and wife, was still managing to put aside the odd hour here and there to work on his Sourcery IDE. Early in the month he posted: It has definitely been a while. Sorry to all, but I am wrapped up in a lot these days, but I am still here and Sourcery is still cracking along. So anyway the wedding went great :) I married the most wonderful person in the whole world :) Lana and I are creating a website and it should be up in a matter of a couple weeks. I will keep you all posted :) Rick was then quiet as a mouse for the rest of the month, but just before September was over he posted another update: I know I should be studying for my exams, but I am so tired of studying so I decided to upload a new screenshot of Sourcery for you all to enjoy. You can view it here: In a separate thread, Daniel Gryniewicz provided some brief info on his latest Tmpfs work: I have just uploaded tmpfs 1.5 to my website. Lastly, Ruslan Nickolaev gave a quick update on his recent efforts: I have not so much time for Syllable developing now and my work isn't so great now. 8. Website workBrent P Newhall, who assembled the new website (see last month's newsletter), detailed his plans for his own Syllable documentation site: Here are my plans for SUB (and this goes out to _everyone_): 9. GUI improvementsSyllable's new desktop brought about a change from Krystal icons to their Bluecurve equivalents, as used in Red Hat Linux and Fedora Core. Spike Burch updated some of Syllable's most popular software to reflect the changes: ABROWSE WITH BLUECURVE ICONS HAS ARRIVED! Meanwhile, Michael Saunders continued his work on the Beish decorator -- this gives Syllable windows a BeOS-esque appearance. Ugh, I have a terrible cold. So might as well hack around with the Beish decorator! This is nearly finished now; a couple of glitches need tidying up and some old code should be removed but I've been using it regularly without problems. Here's how it looks currently: 10. Developer interactionFollowing a scuffle in the website forums, Spike Burch left the mailing list. The nature of the battle (see towards the end here) lead to some discussion. Michael Stolovitzsky posted a lengthy series of thoughts, trimmed here for brevity: Why do we want Syllable? Why do *I* want Syllable to succeed? I don't care if it helps some guy from Peru not pay Windows license fees. I'm not deluding myself about a quest for instant liberation of the poor world from evil despotism of Gates. What I want is an operating system that will serve *my* needs, and I need it so desperately that I am willing to contribute my time and skill in any area I possibly can. Just as Michael was heading into Steve Ballmer mode, various other sub-threads appeared. Several developers expressed their views on some of the subjects raised, and Vanders replied: Syllable is in a bit of an odd position. We need to strike a balance between developers and users. In that last few months we've leant towards these hypothetical users would want. Lets bare in mind that the places we have been pushing Syllable (E.g. OSNews, Slashdot) are really geek-oriented. We're really trying to pick up developers; the last round of articles seems to have achieved that. At the same time we have to focus our long-term goals on what the non-developer users would want. That's the whole point of Syllable after all. Michael then elaborated on his ideas for package management, developer tools and the project's future. 11. NForce and SiS NIC driversMichael Krueger (yes, another Michael!) announced his latest driver work: I have completed the port of the Linux 2.6 NForce NIC driver. It is tested with the NForce2 chipset of my Shuttle Box and should also work with NForce and NForce3. It can be downloaded from http://www.invenies.de/syllable/forcedeth-0.1pre1.tar.gz which contains both source and binary form. 12. AEdit updatesJonas Jarvoll made some improvements to AEdit, Syllable's default text editor: AEdit 1.6 beta is available at www.nocrew.org/software/syllable. Please test it and give me some feedback. I want to make it as bugfree as possible before I release the offical version. Michael Saunders and Pierre Ecochard had a few suggestions, and a few days later Jonas released another update with the following changes: - Cursor position is updated when switching tab 13. Glibc progressGlibc, the GNU C Library, is an essential component in Syllable, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. Vanders had been working on updating it to a more recent release: I've just finished the first phase of my work to forward port the Glibc 2.3.2 Syllable changes to the latest CVS version of Glibc. libc.so.2 can be successfully compiled and code can be linked against it and run without crashing. I've also cleaned up a lot of the original patches I created during the port of Glibc 2.3.2; the changes for Syllable are now much cleaner and largely self-contained. 14. Early SDL portingMany open source games and apps use SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) to ease programming and allow cross-platform porting. Michael Saunders looked into the feasibility of a Syllable version, and started by building it with a text-based front-end: I've ported libcaca, a character cell-based rendering library, to Syllable. I've also made a quick and rough port of SDL using that lib, so (at a very limited level) some SDL apps can be run via the terminal. You wouldn't want to use these every day; however, it shows that SDL compiles cleanly and runs OK. Shortly after, he ported the SDL version of Doom -- screenshots here. (Note that a native version of Doom exists.) There was general chit-chat about a proper Syllable graphics front end and the work required. 15. Non-pixel-based API?Brent P Newhall started a thread considering the merits of a non-pixel-based API, ie a user interface and toolkit in which coordinates are specified as percentages rather than absolute locations. He said: Wouldn't it be nice if the Syllable API provided a way of positioning components in a way that allows everything on a window to be scaled up and down? E.g., imagine an API where you specify screen percentages instead of pixel coordiantes (10% from the left and 20% from the top instead of 100 pixels from the left and 200 pixels from the top, for example). That way, when a window is opened, it's scaled appropriately to the resolution of the screen. Obviously, some GUI elements might not be scalable, but I think those would be unusual cases. And as screen resolutions increase over time, I expect this will become more and more handy. Daniel O'Neill followed up with his own take on the matter. Although using point sizes would make it a pain for some people in the area of wanting everything smaller, for instance- I raise my resolution for more desktop area, use smaller fonts too, things like this- something like a PSF could be implemented: Pixel/Point Scaling Factor, which could be built into the API along with a point-style scaling system, such that from the preferences one could reduce scaling on increase it, effectively reducing or increasing their resolution arbitrarily. Discussion on possible ways to implement this system followed. 16. Links2 browser updateLinks2, a compact, fast and reasonably featureful web browser, has been available on Syllable for a while; Michael Stolovitzsky updated it to the latest official release and made this announcement: I patched, compiled and packaged links2.1pre15. It's a viable (in the terms of being actually useful) replacement for ABrowse. Michael Saunders proposed that Links2 become the default browser in Syllable, citing stability and performance reasons, while Michael Stolovitzsky mentioned that he was looking at the Firefox source. 17. Fun and gamesClearly, the pressures of being an open source project leader -- writing code, building releases and making decisions -- got too much for Vanders, and he flipped: Yay, the Lord did deliver a clue to a Linux developer, and the Linux developer heard the clue and said unto the Lord "Yay Lord, how would thy have me implement thy clue?" and the Lord spake thus "You're a Linux developer; just hack it up!" The developer did ponder this and did say to the Lord "Yay Lord, how should I design the User Interface for thy clue?" and the Lord replied "You're a Linux developer, just make it ugly and poorly designed" and the developer did smile and say to the Lord "Oh Lord, you are most wise and full of clue. Your clue will be done" and the developer did create DBFS: http://ozy.student.utwente.nl/projects/dbfs/ Edited by Michael Saunders. If you have any other Syllable-related news, just drop me a line. |