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February 2005 Newsletter

Syllable 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 170 mailing-list posts in January. By far the biggest highlight was the Syl-Con user and developer meetup, which went very smoothly, but other notable topics include the GCC and Glibc updates. Summaries and snippets coming up...

Contents



1. Syl-Con a success!

Held at an airport hotel in London, the inaugural Syl-Con was a smashing success. Seven users and developers turned up: Krystian Van Der Vliet (project lead, England), Kaj de Vos (Netherlands), BurningShadow (Denmark), Brent P Newhall (USA), Michael Saunders (England), Jan Hauffa (Germany) and Damien Danneels (France). Only one person couldn't make it -- Will H with a nasty bout of the flu -- so it was a decent turnout for the very first meetup of its kind.

Kaj, Flemming (BurningShadow) and Mike met up on Friday evening for a few drinks; Syl-Con itself began on Saturday morning. At this rather swish hotel, conference rooms clocked in at a pricey £600/day -- so we stayed around the bar area, and, helpfully, this remained quiet and spacious all day, with comfy sofas and food to hand. It turned out to be ideal. A few folks brought along laptops to demonstrate new code, illustrate problems/suggestions, and just try out new ideas.

There wasn't a formal structure -- various aspects of the project were chewed over as they came up. Kaj brought along a smart little WiFi box which took power from the USB port and connected via Ethernet (ie needing no drivers), although we didn't log into the hotel's pay-only network, while Damien showed some intriguing GUI ideas he'd drawn out on paper, including a new approach to program launching and feedback. One of the biggest highlights of the day was Vanders' demo of his new Whisper code -- a complete rewrite of the Syllable email client, already looking quite snazzy at this early stage.

All manner of topics were discussed: the project's history and future, gaps in the software line-up, the approach taken by other similar OSes, and much more. Plenty of food and drink was near to hand. On the Saturday evening, a few who were still present went out for a pub meal and drinks courtesy of Vanders' wife. It all worked out perfectly in the end -- hopefully the first of many Syl-Cons to come.

Here's another report, along with some photos from the Saturday.



2. Glibc 2.3.3 RC 1 and GCC 3.4.3

Early in the month, Vanders announced his progress with Glibc and GCC, the GNU C library and compiler used in Syllable. The current version of Glibc in use is rather dated; this update should improve compatibility when porting recent software, whilst fixing bugs and improving performance along the way. His post to the list:

Glibc 2.3.3 RC 1 is now available as both a binary package and in source form:

Binary: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/syllable/glibc-2.3.3-rc1.bin.1.zip?download
Source: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/syllable/glibc-2.3.3-rc1.src.zip?download

Glibc 2.3.2 RC 1 can be installed on Syllable 0.5.5 and runs alongside the existing Glibc 2.1.2 libraries. There is no need to modify environment variables or other runtime variables to use Glibc 2.3.3 as there was with Glibc 2.3.3 Beta 3. If you download the binary package you can simply run the install.sh to install Glibc 2.3.3 on your system.

[ ... ]

Along with Glibc 2.3.3 RC 1, I have also released Gcc 3.4.3. The binary package is available from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/syllable/gcc-3.4.3.bin.1.zip?download The Builder recipe is available from CVS.

Gcc 3.4.3 is built on top of Glibc 2.3.3, so you will have to install Glibc 2.3.2 RC 1 before you can use Gcc 3.4.3.

There are some minor changes in the build environment with Gcc 3.4.3:

o _GNU_SOURCE is now only defined with g++. It was previously defined for all C and C++ code via. features.h
o The -static flag now works as expected and links againts libc.a and libgcc.a instead of attempting to link againts libgcc_s.a (Which doesn't exist)
o Using gcc to link C++ code no longer works. g++ should be used instead.
o The -march Gcc option is deprecated and will generate a warning from Gcc. You can use -mcpu or -mtune instead.

Note that these releases are currently intended for developers only. Users may choose to install Glibc 2.3.3 themselves; this will not break anything, but there is little benefit in doing so. Syllable 0.5.6 will include the Glibc 2.3.3 libraries.

Jake Hamby noted that the -mcpu flag was deprecated (rather than -march).



3. Updates and plans

Continuing on the road to making Syllable his primary OS by 2006, Vanders posted some plans. He hoped to add proper app icons for various desktop utilities, and:

o Make the Mixer remember volume settings and possible allow the user to hide mixer channels they don't require.
o Move AEdit from /system/bin to /Application like every other application (With a symlink from /system/bin)
o Move Syllable Manager from /system/bin to /Application/Preferences & rename something to E.g. "System Manager", again symlinked from /system/bin
o Henrik, with your O.K I'd like to rename Albert something more obvious, possibly just "Calculator"

Looking further ahead, Vanders aimed to overhaul user management throughout Syllable, and provide an appropriate set of file icons and menu items for the desktop. Meanwhile, Jake Hamby -- having done much kernel work in recent months -- outlined his own goals, with a focus on POSIX, UNIX03, and standards compliance in general. This will make it easier to port programs, and helps with the upcoming binary compatibility freeze in the 0.6 series. Jake explained that he'd look into Glibc and GCC, together with pseudo-terminal (pty) handling and timezones. Later on he posted:

* One big concern I have is that the amount of CPU time that is being consumed by daemon threads is far too much. The biggest culprits are media_server_flush, ata kernel threads, and dbterm. cpumon reports as much as 10% CPU usage on a 3.0GHz P4 system just idling! It should be less than 1%.

* The kernel now (as of Build 0006 in CVS) has a microsecond-accurate get_real_time() capability which translates into usec-accurate gettimeofday() from either version of glibc. Great for benchmarking. It uses no additional resources and works by adding the fraction of the PIT timer that has elapsed since the last interrupt to the current time counter. Now, esp. after we take care of the time-wasting daemon threads), we'll be able to take lmbench results before and after experimenting with different optimizations.

* The kernel now builds w/o errors on GCC 3.4.3. Rather than switching immediately to C++ for the kernel, which would be more confusing than helpful to us, I propose that we start building the kernel with "-std=gnu99", which is C99 + GNU extensions, and is the flag used for building glibc.

In a separate post, Jake wrote a detailed argument for porting the popular GTK+ toolkit (as used in GNOME, The GIMP etc.), explaining the benefits of fast application ports. This brought up a lot of discussion: the general belief was that GTK+, while helpful in the short term, would distract developers from Syllable's own libraries, and could complicate and slow down the OS too. It'd run the risk of turning Syllable into Yet Another Linux Distro -- at least on the outside. Vanders' view:

Danger! Danger Jake Hamby! Flamage expected!

In all seriousness, I would prefer that you didn't port GTK+. At least, not just yet. While it would be a useful addition to Syllable at some point in the future, if nothing more just as an aid to porting additional code as you outline, I don't think it would be helpful at this point in Syllables development. "Shooting the baby [libsyllable] in the head." is one phrase I've used to describe porting GTK+ or Qt, in the past.

Lastly, in another fabulously thorough and helpful post, Jake discussed the pros and cons of C99, a recent standard for the C language. Later on:

I'm about 90% completed with my C99 typesafe conversion of the kernel sources, and the code now compiles with few warnings (and the remaining ones I know how to fix), and IMHO is a lot easier to read.

He posted a link to his current kernel, then discussed some errors and technicalities with Daniel Gryniewicz. Jake also pondered using BSD code in Syllable; Mark Williamson noted some license issues and Vanders gave a thumbs-up.



4. Camera 2.0

The mailing list wasn't behaving well this month -- some posts dropped and delayed -- so Rick Caudill announced his latest work on Camera via the website. Version 2.0 of his screenshotting utility was now available:

Camera 2.0 is out(0.1 was lost anyway). Go to (http://kamidake.other-space.com/display_entry.php?id=262) to download the source.

New features:
1. Screenshots are named in the same way screenshots are named when using . This will be for consistency.
2. Delaying of screenshots is now possible. Means that you can have it set up to delay screenshots. This comes in handy when wanting to switch applications before taking the screenshot.
3. The file is save with the os::MimeType to "image/png" so that the new AView will be able to launch it. There are some problems still with the filebrowser being able to load the right mimetype, so this ensures that it will load it as the right mimetype all the time.

What doesn't work yet
1. Global shortcuts :( This is because Syllable does not support them yet.



5. Antiword port

One of the many OS features discussed at Syl-Con was file format handling, particularly of Microsoft Office documents. Mike Saunders recalled Antiword and put together a quick port:

This is something I thought about at Syl-Con. Antiword is a GPLed MS Word .doc file reader, converting such files to plain text, PDF or PostScript. It was a pretty easy port; some paths are hard-coded in and the install process isn't standard, but otherwise a Builder recipe will be doable.

Anyhoo, with this tool, Word files can be read on Syllable (at a basic level). It'll hopefully be useful for some folks. Here's a screenshot:

http://msa.section.me.uk/syllable/antiword.gif

Nothing spectacular, but it shows a .doc in OpenOfffice.org being rendered in Syllable -- the basic formatting is intact. Package URL:

http://msa.section.me.uk/syllable/packages/antiword-0.36.1.bin.1.zip

Usual process: extract in /usr, run 'pkgmanager -a' to install, and then call 'antiword [filename.doc]' to display the text to stdout.

Markus pointed to a similar tool for OpenOffice.org docs, while Brent looked into it for his planned Clio word-processor and document translation system.



6. Login screen revamp

When booted, Syllable presents the user with its login screen -- ie a box in which the user types his/her name and password. Brent P Newhall looked into a new design:

Vanders suggested that the login screen needs to be changed. I've attached a proposed screenshot (which is NOT a pixel-exact representation of my final design), since it's only 30 KB.

I envision that the list of usernames -- as well as the entire login screen -- would expand vertically as there are more entries, until there are (say) eight entries, at which point the list will just scroll. So, when Syllable is first installed and there's only "root" and "guest", the list of usernames will only be two rows tall. If two users are added, when you next log in the list will be four rows tall (and the login window will be taller appropriately). If there are twenty users, the list will be eight rows tall and will scroll. But this shows the rough layout. Thoughts?

Several developers and users chipped in with their views on login screens from other OSes, and also the possibility of autologins (for single-user machines). Many thought that icons for users would be a good idea too.



7. Fun and games

Quite clearly, the hectic pace of Syl-Con, coupled with endless travel, had addled Brent's mind; his write-up of the event was, er, curious...

NEWS RELEASE: SYL-CON A Major Success

This past weekend, many of the primary people behind Syllable gathered for SYL-CON 1, the first Syllable convention, in London, England. Syllable Project Manager and Head Cheese, Kristian Van Der Vliet, appeared in front of a crowd of thousands of Syllable devotees. Bedecked in his trademark black turtleneck, Van Der Vliet reminisced about Syllable's past and described his vision of its future.

"I remember when we were just seven guys huddled around a table at a hotel bar," Van Der Vliet said, laughing uncomfortably. The thousands of Syllable developers roared their approval.

Van Der Vliet then outlined his plans for Syllable's future.

"The key principle for the next year will be diversity," he announced. "I mean, c'mon," he said, "We're all a bunch of young white guys. We need to support a wide range of ethnicities. I plan to start by posting a Diversity and Equality Policy to the wiki."

He then unveiled his secret plans to sabotage the SkyOS project, destroy Microsoft's credibility, and make Syllable the #1 operating system in the world.

"Because that's been my goal all along," he explained.

He then thrust a fist in the air and yelled, "Ya hya chouhada," which was mimicked by the crowd before they poured out onto the streets of London.

Oh, and Kaj de Vos is porting a wireless router.

For more of the best fake Syllable news on the planet, go to: http://www.other-space.com/shn/


Edited by Michael Saunders. If you have any other Syllable-related news, just drop me a line.