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December 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 267 mailing-list posts in December. By far the biggest news this month was the 0.5.5 release, but progress was made with various other parts of the system and many ideas were discussed in depth. Read on for the details... Contents
1. Syllable 0.5.5 released!Following hot on the heels of 0.5.4, project lead Kristian Van Der Vliet announced the latest release -- more evolutionary this time rather than revolutionary. His post to the list: Syllable 0.5.5 is now available! This release includes new and updated drivers and a large number of long overdue kernel enhancements. He added the full changelog, which can be found on the main website here. Some users reported a few problems with booting (eventually narrowed down via logs and debug kernels to one of the kernel changes), but on the whole it proved to be another solid release. Users experiencing problems can run the 0.5.4 kernel without any nasty side-effects. Additionally, a problem with corruption of the initial ISO uploads was later corrected by Vanders. 2. ABrowse 0.4 alphaABrowse, Syllable's KHTML-based web browser, had been in desperate need of updating; although it was just about usable for basic tasks, the ageing KHTML version and abundance of bugs meant that many had been using Links2 as an alternative. Fortunately, then, the ever-busy Arno Klenke had been grafting hard on updating the crusty codebase and bringing ABrowse back up to scratch: here is the first alpha version of ABrowse 0.4. It has the same features as the current old ABrowse release but is based on a newer version of the khtml rendering engine. Please note that this is an alpha version and so please post all bugs and problems you can find! Shortly after, Arno explained that he'd been using the KHTML engine of Konqueror Embedded. Several developers cheered the latest work, finding the rendering, stability and GUI improvements to be top-notch. Vanders posted: I'd like to thank Arno for once again pulling a rabbit out of his hat and giving us such a wonderful peice of code. The core developers have been lucky enough to have tested Arno's new ABrowse for a little while know and it has been a delight; those of you who are already using this release will have seen how much faster it is already! A few remaining glitches were pointed out. With web browsers being a crucial component of desktop operating systems, this work helps to bring Syllable in line with other open source OSes. 3. PowerPC port?A side-thread from the main discussion of 0.5.5's release. Markus asked about the possibility of a PPC port (eg for Apple Macs), to which Terry Glass replied: I've been looking through IBM's PowerPC pdfs, some OpenFirmware docs, and NetBSD source for the macppc port. I've got a fruity little G3 here I'd like to see booting Syllable some day, but I've never gotten close to the hardware on macppc. If anyone else is interested, I can slap up a page containing any notes, links, etc that I think might be useful for a future port. James Whitwell offered to help where possible; this prompted Terry to explain the situation with bootloaders on Apple machines. From here, the discussion moved on to a technical look at OpenFirmware, with a few developers taking note of the work done in Haiku (open source BeOS clone). Currently, most of the developers are concentrating on x86 PC hardware so a PowerPC port could be a while off. An intriguing prospect nonetheless... 4. Quick updatesA bunch of minor updates and goodies. William Hoggarth announced version 0.5 of Mandy, his fractal generator program: Not a very exciting release just added support for localisation and made use of the new colour selector control. If you want to check it out it has an entry on the kamidake site. A small webpage for Mandy can be found here. Meanwhile, Michael Stolovitzsky noted that he's now the editor of dmoz.org's Syllable section: I'm very busy as of lately, and can't really find the time for anything productive. LXR is down, unfortunately; but the good news is that I am now an editor for Syllable category on DMOZ. If there are important websites that I missed, please comment! Lastly, Marlon Paulse posted a patch for the user-interface side of Syllable: I've created a patch that allows the TabView to display a popup menu when the user right-clicks on a tab: Appserver coder Henrik Isaksson was pleased with the work, and discussed a few implementation details with Marlon. 5. Software patentsBurningShadow wondered how the thorny issue of software patents could affect Syllable development. While not an issue limited solely to Syllable, it could still impact progress later on. Bram Van Dam replied: That I do not know. But I can however say that European software patents will be quite different from American ones. The EU patent office, unlike the American one, actually reads the patent-requests. Vanders also responded with his viewpoint on the situation: If you mean the new EU shanigans then "Not much". If you mean in general then they already are because we distribute Syllable in countries with laws governing software patents and other such silly rubbish. We can't use the Apple patented bytecode interpreter in freetype2, we have to build ffmpeg without support for quite a few codecs, we'll never be able to ship a DVD playback plugin that can play encrypted DVD's etc. (The DVD thing is not really a patent issue but they are all IP issues) 6. Patches and updates galoreAdditions and fixes aplenty in December. Towards the end of the month, Henrik Isaksson announced his latest work on GUI components: From the change log: The following day, Arno Klenke posted another stack of updates and code touching various areas of the system -- the kernel, video drivers and media subsystem: Ok, here are my updates: Vanders and Jake Hamby were chuffed with the work, and went over some of the details. 7. Package managementDuring some general chit-chat on new programs required for Syllable, the subject of package management came up. Right now, one of Syllable's strengths is ease of software installation -- in most cases, just drop the app in a directory and it's ready to run. There's still room for improvement, though, and Brent P Newhall outlined his ideals in a package management system: Here's what I envision, without specifying elegant intricacies: An "Application Manager" app is bundled with Syllable. The AppManager contacts Kamidake and uses it to generate a list of application categories. The user can browse these categories (or search, of course) for applications, which are listed in all sorts of useful sortable ways. Knut gave his own take on the issue, also delving into the topic of general file management: I'd also suggest an implementation of "bundles" like on MacOS X, but allowing these to contain install/uninstall scripts if they need to install some dock plugin or request user input. This script would be run automatically by the filemanager when a user dragged a bundle to the Applications folder. And the same when anything was attempted to move out of it. From here, the thread moved on to overall GUI principles, the way computer newcomers approach file management, and comparisons with popular Linux package manager front-ends (such as Synaptic on Debian and Ubuntu). 8. Firefox port musingsAaron Burton pointed out that Robert Szeleney, chief coder of SkyOS, had managed to port Firefox to his commercial hobbyist OS in a short space of time. Robert was planning to make a document available that detailed the process; Aaron wondered if it'd help the Syllable project too. Vanders suggested that such a port perhaps wouldn't be the mammoth task initially envisaged, prompting this from Jonas Sundstrom: 30 pages of build instructions does not seem like a simple port to me. Michael Stolovitzsky explained that he too had looked into a port earlier: I'm not a real C++ programmer, but I looked into the code, and to the surrounding framework around Mozilla. To my estimate, it's going to be a little complicated, considering their own threads libraries, messaging system, XPCOM and the rest of stuff that needs to be ported before the rendering engine. With the recent ABrowse updates, having a Firefox port is no longer such a necessity, although it'd still be superb to have for the project. 9. SYL-CON date setIdeas for SYL-CON, a meetup of Syllable developers and users, had been popping up for several months (see earlier newsletters for more info). Brent P Newhall set a date: I hereby announce that the first ever SYL-CON will be held February 19th through 20th, 2005 near Heathrow Airport in England. Please make your reservations at a hotel near Heathrow. At the time of writing (7th of January), six people had given this date a thumbs-up on the website's poll. If you can make it -- and the more the merrier -- please do get in touch with one of the Syllable team and add yourself to the total on the website! Edited by Michael Saunders. If you have any other Syllable-related news, just drop me a line. |