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Meet Webster

Jul 24, 16:08

	More creative destruction. Another long-time milestone has been reached. It has always been our plan to factor out the web rendering engine of ABrowse into a library with a native Syllable View widget on top, so it can be embedded into more applications than just a web browser. Kristian did just that: building on Arno's WebCore port, he updated that and then stepped up the modularisation by creating the WebView class. He rewrote the browser on top of that and named it Webster. The first alpha version is available in our applications downloads. The latest Syllable 0.6.6 development build is required to run it, as several bugs in the system were fixed for the new browser. The source code is available on our development site.

SylCon Development Builds

Jul 24, 16:06

	We slept through a storm on the ship. We docked alongside a clipper a bit too hastily; another clipper, the Hollandia, crashed into us. Nothing new, shippers from Holland have always sucked. We saw a Black-headed Gull die; we saw a Great Crested Grebe feed a fish to her young. Nothing else is important, is it? Oh, there's another cycle of destruction and creation. We demonstrated a new development build of Syllable Server that we created just before the conference. While we were sailing in Friesland, Kristian produced a new development build of Syllable Desktop in England. Both are now published here.

Zorro Strikes Again

Jul 14, 19:45

	Unfortunately, we had to replace our Spanish web site. We extended our content management system to create a fully integrated new one, so it is now an official branch of our main web site. Lucas Murad created the old site and will be editing the new one. We took the opportunity to also overhaul our Dutch site and pull it into the content management system. Bas de Lange is the editor. The sites currently still show the original English content. The editors will be translating it over time.

Immer Mehr BeGeistert

Jul 14, 19:40

	As last time, we have been invited again to the BeGeistert BeOS meeting, the 019 edition. It will be held from 10 to 12 October in the same venue in Düsseldorf in Germany. Bas will be there to represent Syllable again.

SylCon is Nigh

Jul 11, 1:10

	The Syllable Conference 2008 will start in a week. We will be holding presentations and workshops around the upcoming Syllable Desktop 0.6.6 and Syllable Server 0.3. There will be a workshop showing how to set up a complete network with Server and Desktop machines and how, if you know one, you know the other. We will also try to install Syllable on an Asus EeePC.

Syllable Server Development Build

Jun 7, 2:11

	We released a development build of Syllable Server. This version has a number of updated components, including the kernel, and several fixes. Most importantly, a lot of server functionality was added. Included is a REBOL software stack with a web server and a web programming framework. Support and start scripts are integrated for a number of standard servers, such as CUPS, OpenSSH, BIND, Apache, RSync, SaMBa and VSFTP. However, the configurations of these new modules are not complete yet.

Two To Tango

May 3, 22:20

	Ruwen Boehm ported the VLC and MPlayer multimedia players to Syllable Desktop. The behaviour of both is still a bit rough, but watching DVDs on Syllable is possible now. Some of the needed parts were ported by Rui Caridade, Andrew Kennan and Kaj de Vos. Newly ported components include FAAD2, FLAC, FontConfig, LibA52, LibCDDB, LibDVDNav, LibDVDRead, LibID3Tag, LibMAD and LibMPEG2. These packages don't have to be installed separately, as the libraries are included in VLC and MPlayer. Packages for both are in our resources downloads. They need to be started from the command line, until someone writes native Syllable graphical control interfaces for them.

Syllable Desktop Running on Asus Eee PC!

Apr 14, 22:12

	Michael Saunders got Syllable Desktop to run on his new Asus Eee PC - a machine for which it is uniquely suited. There is some work to do to support all hardware, but most functionality already works. Michael reports that video, audio, touchpad, USB and battery monitor all work. Widescreen video and network don't and there may be reliability problems with USB storage devices. As installing Syllable from a USB device doesn't work yet, Michael used an inventive method for installation. It can be done by imaging your Eee drive with the dd utility (from Linux), installing Syllable on it through QEmu and then dd'ing the image back to the real drive. Note that the drive number needs to be adjusted in the GrUB boot file. We are looking into distributing Syllable especially for the Eee PC in this form.

Ruling the Waves: SylCon 2008

Apr 10, 17:30

	Bas has announced the Syllable Conference 2008. Like last year's successful conference, it will be held in the Netherlands on the Frisian sailing vessel the Stêd Sleat (the former racing ship of the city of Sloten). There is limited space available. Make sure you don't miss the atmosphere, the adventure, the comradery, the Syllable presentations, the talks, the plans and the announcements in this break-through year for Syllable. Read the full announcement at the forum and enlist with Bas de Lange.

Mr Bean Strikes Again

Mar 27, 16:05

	Rohan reports that an otherwise unknown contributor going under the name Bean has rewritten the AFS filesystem driver for GrUB 2. The original driver was for GrUB 1 and was derived from the full AFS driver. This meant that the copyright could not be reassigned to the FSF, so the GrUB project didn't want to integrate the code. The new driver is much smaller and looks like it will be integrated into GrUB, so we will have a new boot loader and maintenance will become much easier. Before that happens, though, we may have to do more porting work on GrUB 2 to integrate it in our build process and installer. Here is a separate test CD that is capable of booting an existing Syllable installation on disk.

Squeak Ported to Syllable Desktop

Mar 21, 17:30

	Kelly Wilson has ported Squeak to Syllable. Squeak is a multimedia environment based on the Smalltalk programming language. There are no video and sound drivers yet that interface between Squeak and Syllable, so the Squeak graphical environment is not available yet. However, headless Squeak programs that don't need a graphical user interface run, and the screenshot shows a web site in ABrowse, produced by the Seaside web application framework.

Peep at FOSDEM

Mar 7, 20:42

	Here is a photo of the Syllable stand at FOSDEM last week, by Jesús Corrius.

Rhope Dataflow Language

Feb 23, 21:45

	Michael Pavone has created a new programming language: Rhope. It's a very interesting language that is based on dataflow and also uses transactional concepts to make parallel programming easy. Rhope is an interpreter that is available for Syllable, OS X and Windows. Mike mentions that it was for a large part developed on Syllable and that its web site runs on Syllable Desktop, on a web server and web framework programmed in Rhope itself. Rhope currently has preliminary support for programming graphical user interfaces on Syllable and Windows.

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