We suggest using VMWare Player (Windows/Linux) or VMWare Fusion (MacOS) to run the Live CD or install the beta. Install SkyOS to your harddisk or run the Live CD natively on your own risk!
To run SkyOS in VMWare just:
- create a new virtual machine and point it to the ISO image you downloaded
- give it at least 2GB of RAM
- use a virtual IDE harddisk (we don’t suggest using a physical partition in order to prevent possible data loss)
- optionally Install SkyOS from the running Live CD to get all available applications and utilities
SkyOS was quite prominent on OSNews between 2003-2008 – it was coded virtually entirely by Austrian Robert Szeleney in his free time. It achieved a relatively usable state on the desktop – especially considering it was a one man project – but it did suffer from what I call the ‘ooh shiney!’-syndrome – it was a hobby project for Szeleney, and as such, focus tended to shift around quite often, depending on whatever he wanted to work on at that time.
SkyOS originally started out as a mere bootloader, but eventually expanded into becoming an entire operating system. In the early days – up until version 4.x – SkyOS was freely available, but it wasn’t open source (I believe the 1.x versions may have been, though, I can’t recall). After that, Szeleney started charging a small fee for access to the SkyOS 5 beta, which some considered controversial. The SkyOS 5.0 release cycle started with its first alpha release in December 2003, and ended with the release of beta build 6947 in August 2008 – a final release never materialised.
The project seemed to fizzle out, but Szeleney did experiment with using third party kernels, like a BSD kernel or a Linux kernel. That was the last we heard of it – and earlier this year, the website went dark.
So, it’s quite a surprise to see that over the weekend, Szeleney has made the last beta release of SkyOS 5.0 – build 6947 – available for free. I somehow doubt we’ll see development pick up again, but it’s nice to have the latest release out in the open for everyone to play with.
Should it ever become something serious he could start thinking about a new name:
http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-loses-skydrive-trademark-case-in-eu-…
Can’t get to skyos.org anymore. Maybe it was a fluke?
Just be patient. It takes a long time to connect, but it is possible to download.
Direct link: http://www.skyos.org/downloads/beta/retail_6947.rar
user: public
serial: 4Q7W5-HTRRW-6WYHW-45KW7-XQLXL
(as written on the skyos.org frontpage)
Edited 2013-08-13 15:55 UTC
I can verify this link works, because I just finished downloading it on 8/13/2013 at 8:15pm CST. It does take awhile; I clicked on the link and then an hour later, I finally got the download prompt. Thanks for providing that Invincible Cow!
Edited 2013-08-14 01:26 UTC
could you possibly mirror it somewhere?
Link works! Thank you.
Would anyone who has been successful in accessing the ISO let us know if the sources are included? If so, this would help being extremely patient.
No sources. Full file list in ISO: http://pastebin.com/AE6pjFC6
Well, let’s see how much bandwidth it consumes, uploaded to http://0c24f36ecb279f29ad14-1f21e6e3949f54414246574a4c17e5a1.r93.cf…
I haven’t been able to get to the skyos site since the post here.
Downloaded yours in a couple of minutes!
Thanks!
Thanks.
Hoping the bandwidth has remained manageable. Let us know of the statistics say one month from now.
The gcc along with the headers and documentation/help are there so one could think of developing applications.
It is unfortunate that this free release did not include the corresponding source – and is not providing any hope of long life. Given this status, this has remained a play-toy.
I downloaded your file quickly and thought I would save you some bandwidth by seeding it through bittorrent.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:24838DF2D7A1795A3625BD6451C6838C5F8BAB6E&dn=skyos_ 6947.rar&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a8 0%2fannounce
The torrent file is here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3906923/skyos_6947.torrent
Edited 2013-08-16 17:21 UTC
Thanks for hosting that. I downloaded it and installed it on an old Dell D800 laptop. It didn’t support my wired or wireless cards. It did properly detect the nVidia 5200 GPU but I couldn’t get it to switch from VESA to the native nVidia driver. SkyOS seemed very much like just another Linux distro minus good hardware driver support so I quickly wiped the partition and installed the latest release of Haiku and was quite pleased that it properly recognized all my hardware and booting in an amazing amount of time….less than 12 seconds on a Pentium-M class laptop. Now if the Haiku devs would just port an office productivity suite….
From what I gather from the earlier articles about SkyOS, it initially had its own kernel and later on its personality was grafted onto a Linux kernel. The hope was that hardware support would be a lot easier.
I will still play with it – one of these days. Without sources or an innovative kernel, the hitch to play is much less.
I like Haiku and what`s holding me back from using it whenever I`m outside the office (which is and will remain firmly Windows) is the lack of an office productivity suite. I am really hoping for something fresh – not just an emulation of Microsoft Office with all its complexity and idiotic user interface.
Who the hell cares? Release the source or gtfo, it’s 20 frikkin 13.
Seriously? The most important OSes out there today are Windows, Mac OS, iOS, and Android (through in Windows Phone and BB10). NONE are fully open source.
Does anything running on real hardware is ever fully open source?
I’m close and it’s not painful.
If I were to ditch the nVidia binary drivers, install Lightspark (requires PulseAudio) instead of Adobe Flash, and uninstall oDesk Team, the only closed-source component on the desktop I use for day-to-day life would be my BIOS.
(I also have Opera, Skype, and some games where the engines haven’t been opened up (eg. Arx Libertatis) or re-implemented (eg. OpenTTD, Stepmania), but I use those so rarely these days that I don’t count them. Opera will be gone as soon as enough people migrate to 15.0 that I don’t need to test my creations against Presto anymore and Skype will be gone as soon as I figure out why my m0n0wall config hates WebRTC.)
Yes, seriously. And no, not in a “open source is DA BEST!!” sort of way.
Windows and Mac OS X are incredibly well established and current.
Releasing a five year old closed source version of SkyOS will allow people to install it and say, “Huh. That’s neat.” and then do NOTHING with it.
As excited as I was to see news about SkyOS today, what’s the point of this? I could have had pretty much the same experience by watching a YouTube video of SkyOS. :/
The point of the source is for others to learn off of and possibly continue its development. I don’t see it so much as an ideological thing. Its up to the author though, but still, there isn’t much value in this beyond “hey that’s cool” without the source
While, I agree the parent was pretty juvenile, The most important operating system list would have to include a Gnu/linux distribution. Probably Red Hat Enterprise Linux,SUSE, Debian or Ubuntu. Are they 100% open source? well it depends on you’re definition of “source code” and your definition of “operating system”.
Edit: Its also worth considering that no one would have considered Nextstep/openstep to be an important Operating system in the early to mid 90’s. I doubt that Sky will rise from the ashes, but its important to consider when looking at operating systems. I think a lot of BeOS, also inspired a lot of stuff that made its way into Other operating systems. Which, retroactively makes it kind of important.
Edited 2013-08-12 16:34 UTC
Maybe we should be qualifying “relevance”:
There could be commercial relevance – of which SkyOS never was and BeOS had a bit in its time.
There could be genealogic relevance – of which BeOS has quite a lot. For example, isn’t Bonjour (OS X) a replication of the ease of querying the Be File System?
From what I remember, SkyOS was constantly in beta because of its never ending experimentation with concepts from other operating system. Hence, genealogic relevance of SkyOS would be extremely limited.
[sarcasm] Absolutely – Linux and BSD servers are almost unheard of and you almost never find Linux or BSD being used in devices routers etc and absolutely no one uses Linux on Desktops etc
Yep open-source is totally irreverent.[/sarcasm]
Oh Jesus, internetters. Obviously, I meant consumer OSes. Linux is still largely irrelevant to the average Joe, because it just doesn’t exist “user-facing” in many places. Embedded sure, but this is a for-desktop OS.
Edited 2013-08-12 19:26 UTC
But arguably, in the world of closed source operating systems, there isn’t much room for new players. The existing players in this space have been grandfathered in for many years – and even Android arguably has gained the traction it has *because* it is largely open source.
In my opinion, SkyOS has failed primarily because it is closed source at this point. At least if it was FOSS, it would have had a chance at continuation. And given the way SkyOS fell off the face of the earth, I can’t really justify putting any time and effort into a non-FOSS hobby OS at this point.
The OP is right – it’s 2013, the only hobby OSes that are gaining traction now are FOSS.
Open source, yeah, but the Android GUI is sky-rocketing towards simplicity, what Gnome/KDE are not. An operating system, like its name sound, is to operate a computer. If the average Joe cannot operate a computer under Gnome/KDE but can a tablet under Android, don’t look at the underlying OS, but the user interface.
How many times had you to configure drivers, printers and sound input/output under Android ? Sounds silly ? Install a barebone command line Linux OS on a tablet, ask some people to start X and install package under sudo. Sudo ? Whatcha talkin bout Willis ?
Like you said, Linux desktop will never succeed since it’s already -20% cooler than Windows and Mac OS X desktop experience. Until this issue is solved (ElementaryOS Luna ?) there’s no hope, deal with it. And open source won’t change much about this.
Kochise
Voting me down is NOT what I call an elaborated response. I can understand you have no arguments against a pragmatic ascertainment of the current state of computer science in general, Linux in particular. It is just coward. Either improve the Linux desktop experience (after all, Linux’s sources are open) or pass by…
Kochise
So what? Those aren’t hobby OS’s and SkyOs is not going to be one of the most important OS’s out there anytime soon or ever.
What we have now is a toy that you can install and say “oh that’s cute” and then move on to any other OS that is actually useful.
Actually, we don’t even have a toy since the site is not even up.
There’s really no good reason to make your hobby OS closed-source in 2013. If it was OSS at least it could go somewhere and see some development.
All you will gain from being a closed-source hobby OS is a one-way ticket to IrrelevantVille.
Right, because open source will change that.
LOL.
Back in the days SkyOS was still active, it was like SkyOS vs Syllable. Closed vs open source. And last time I checked, Syllable is still up and running. Just saying.
Change what? Will it make SkyOS an important OS? Certainly not.
Will it make it possible for it to actually go *somewhere* and see some active development? Quite likely and maybe.
Will it prevent SkyOS from being irrelevant?
Maybe, maybe not.
I never said it would make SkyOS a contender.
Edited 2013-08-13 09:46 UTC
That is ridiculous, Linux is arguably the backbone of the internet and it is fully open source.
It seems that the OS News site has bombed again, can anyone re-host the ISO, or provide a working download link for it?
Really want to try this out, I wanted to do the beta, but about a month in to researching it, the project seemed to just drop off of all radar and fizzle away.
I have not heard the SkyOS name in YEARS, remember paying to be in the beta, will have to keep an eye on the site to see if it comes back up to get a taste again
One is a play thing (and an old one at that) and the other is potentially useful (no matter how small that chance is that somebody tries to develop it further). There’s an important difference.
Has anyone managed to download this?
Could anyone provide a mirror?
Ah, Thom, you’ve killed SkyOS!
Pity though, I once even paid for it (well, not exactly, I provided Estonian translation near the end) and would really like to rekindle our relationship. SkyOS was nice, too bad he wasn’t willing to opensource it.
Edited 2013-08-13 12:05 UTC
Let me sum up the SkyOS story for ya.
YAWN.
SkyOS could have had a better time if they could incorporate the Darwin source release.I still wait for a proper PureDarwin release.
hurry up and click.