The Syllable team has just released Syllable 0.6.2. Highlights: “A new audio framework for the media server, with new and improved audio drivers and support for multichannel and digital audio; a new look, with new fonts, icons and wallpapers; a huge number of translated applications for non-English users; upgrades to important system components and a switch to GCC 4.1.1, which has yielded noticable performance improvements, and much more.”
I hope this one works better with my nVidia card.
Disabling PCI isn’t much fun when all you want is to show your friends how fast aBrowse is – or how fancy Coldfish actually is
I’m writing this from within Syllable 0.6.2. I’ve downloaded the Live CD and it worked quite painless. Internet browsing seems a little slow, but it’s bearable.
The OS looks better than previsious versions, but still needs some polish. The window decorations look a little too old school for my taste, but thank god, you can change them (Beish looks ok).
Although they claim to support NTFS filesystems, my NTFS partition is not visible from within Syllable.
Abrowse (which uses Gecko, I think) still has some bugs, but it displays most pages as you would expect.
Whisper (the mail client) connects quite slow to the POP server, but otherwise seems to work. It’s still quite primitive and needs the same polish as the rest of the applications.
I’m not sure but I think all the GUI widgets could use some tinkering.
I have no ideea how to test the new audio framework. I’ve tried to play a MP3 file but it says it is an unknown filetype, and the Media Player doesn’t seem to work.
That’s all for now. Hope it helps
Edit: Back to Windows. Whisper just crashed the OS and I had to reboot.
Edited 2006-11-09 11:19
I’m glad to hear Syllable works for you. Hopefully this will be of some help to you:
my NTFS partition is not visible from within Syllable
Syllable will not automatically mount any other partitions for you. If you open the Disks icon on your desktop, right-click in the window and then select “Mount” you will see a list of available devices and partitions. You can mount your Windows partition from here.
Abrowse (which uses Gecko, I think)
ABrowse actually uses a port of KHTML as it’s rendering engine.
I have no ideea how to test the new audio framework. I’ve tried to play a MP3 file but it says it is an unknown filetype, and the Media Player doesn’t seem to work.
Double-click on the Preferences icon on your desktop, then open the Media preferences. There is a “Default audio output” drop-down list at the bottom of the window. If your audio device is supported, select it from this list and then click “Apply”. ColdFish and Media Player should both now work.
Is there a link to your recently linux format magazine interview?
I’ve managed to mount one of my NTFS partitions, but the other didn’t seem to work – it mounted, but it didn’t open.
On the other hand, the Media Preferences didn’t open – I kept on clicking the icon, but nothing happened.
It would be a good idea to start a thread on the syllable.org forums, and we can help you (& you can help us) to diagnose the problem(s).
It seems that one of the most important features of this release was left out of the osnews announcement: Working SMP support!
Edited 2006-11-09 11:49
What is the status of printing in Syllable?
CUPS, GutenPrint and ESP Ghostscript all work on Syllable, and printing to USB, parallel and network (UNIX, Windows SMB and others) printers is supported. Some integration work has already been done E.g. a print queue manager and Printer configuration tool has been written. However we have not completed the work to integrate printing into Syllable, so none of this is yet part of the Syllable base installation (Other than the USB and parallel printer drivers).
I will be doing more work to integrate printing into Syllable between now and the next release, and I am hoping that printing will be a part of the base installation from Syllable 0.6.3. In the mean time we will be making an optional package available, which will contain the current components.
I just ran the Live CD from within Qemu and had a couple of issues. First, in order to boot the iso you must use option ‘No Disk DMA’…no problem, it booted at least. The second issue is that I tried to change the default screen resolution, 640×480 (Which is entirely too low), to 1024×768, which seemed to work ok at first. It asked if I wanted to keep the setting, but as soon as I said yes, it hung the OS. Is there some trick to this?
really?? sweet!
im checking osnews on my treo so I haven’t read much yet.. but that’s good news! ill download this release today and see how well it runs on my dual pentium pro tower! (dual 200mhz, 1MB L2 cache)
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 95; PalmSource; Blazer 3.0) 16;160×160
It would be cool to have your experience posted here
Btw, VMWare image is available at http://www.cilinder.be/syllable
I will. dumb question, will Syllable run ok in 32mb of ram? Thats all my ppro currently has, iv ebeen piecing it together over the last few months. Just got the second CPU and voltage regulator last week. If it wont run in that, I’ll go ahead and buy the RAM im watching on ebay.
i have used syllable in probably 8 months…
32MB wont be enough. You might be able to boot the installation CD, but the installed system will probably run out of memory before you get to the desktop. The bear minimum I’ve seen is 48MB, which in practice usually means 64MB installed in the hardware. If you’re going to upgrade though, go for at least 128MB; 256MB if you can.
oh ok. I’m watching an auction on ebay thatll let me max out its ram to 512mb.
I would have upped the ram earlier on but this system uses weird ram… 168pin ECC EDO…
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 95; PalmSource; Blazer 3.0) 16;160×160
The last time I tried to install Syllable, the PS2 mouse wouldn’t work. Someone on the forum said this was due to problems with SiS chipsets. Has this been corrected?
Probably. We have an entirely new PS2 driver in this release. The only way to find out would be to try it!
do you have ppp support yet unfortunately we’re still on the dirt road (dialup)of the information superhighway here in rural PA,last version I tried was broadband only,probably be another 50 yrs before it comes here,Just saw a piece on PBS the other day about how the US is the most poorly connected country in the world.
There is a seperate PPP package available, but it has not been heavily tested and does not yet support dialup connections. So I’m afraid that isn’t much help to you.