Robert Szeleney released version 3.9.1d of his OS, SkyOS, including a number of fixes, while he ported the first game to SkyOS, Quake I (screenshot). In the meantime, Syllable also recently got a port of Doom and Quake. In other small OS news, ReactOS has a preliminary graphics system able to run simple Windows binaries (screenshot, running inside the Bochs emulator). The team expects more and better compatibility to come when the WINE port gets finished.
SkyOS 3.9.1d Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
did they post the link to the screenshot of Quake. That must be the worst thing that I have seen in my life.
I had games on my Win 3.1 – 486 that looked better than that!
It happens, my friend, that geek OS developers are not UI designers. I learned this the hard way too.
You will have to live with it I guess, swallow the in-your-face colors and get on with it.
Check today’s Dilbert:
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2812750…
Are there any commercial software or shareware available for this OS? If not, how could it ever get to version 3.9.1d without any?
There is no standard versioning scheme in the world. What you are arguing about is just a number.
If Robert wanted to call it “version 2002” or “Amethyst Build 51”, he may as well be free to do so. Others have done so as well.
Windows has reached 5.1 and it’s still the most pathetic os out there.. how could it ever get so far?
>still the most pathetic os out there
Your opinion.
I agree with eugenia. Just because microsoft practices aggressive marketing methods (plain down nasty) doesn’t mean everything they do sucks.
For one i like Win2K.
They make crapware as well, the comunity produces tons of crapware as well.
Furthermore, if ms develops a product, and people buy it< And keep buying it despite it sucking, then from a buisiness standpoint it’s perfectly sound to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the sucking part.
my 2 cents
Take Care
Kevin
While the screen shot may look like much, remeber that they are building a Windows clone from the ground up. Running GUI apps is a very big deal, even if it is in the early stages.
although i always like to see improvments on OS’es , and there are many of them that are growing toward a mature version , i dont understand why everybody wants to copy the Windows GUI , be creative, create a new GUI , or , at least , copy from an os that looks BETTER , windows IS ugly and has always BEEN ugly ….
my 0.02€ :p
Speaking of version numbers, didn’t Linux Slackware jump from version 3 to 7 (or something like that).
The version numbers aren’t that important.
While the screen shot may look like much, remeber that they are building a Windows clone from the ground up. Running GUI apps is a very big deal, even if it is in the early stages. React os Looks Interesting, I’ve been watching it for over a year and now it looks like it might become somthing useful soon.
Because they consider windows to be THE refference platform. UNIX in general does not have a consistent gui. Hell even efforts like CDE/KDE/gnome differ heavily amongst numerous flavours of UNIX, if implemented at all.
Things like TWM always look the same though
I agree with you for the most part though as you probably know.
my 2 cents
(my keyb doesnt have the !@# euro sign, damn qwerty)
Take Care
Kevin
> Are there any commercial software or shareware available for this OS?
None that I’m aware of, but if you like to have a shareware app, I would maybe write a shareware version of Hello World for you, that displays H#ll# W#r#d. You can then send me a registration fee.
It pisses me off when people write an post and don’t think.
(1) Microsoft has somewhere around 97% desktop control. Thus if you want to convert someone, convert them to something they already know because they will be MORE ACCEPTING.
(2) Explorer.exe if faster and more responsive than any *nix window manager. Enough said, agruement ended. I have been a debian user for the past 4 years and no one can tell me that either ice, sawmill, windowmaker whatever is more responsive than explorer because it’s not. That is the reason why we have SO DAMN MANY window manager.
(3) Explorer has been proven to work! How many window user do you hear complaining about the GUI. NONE, let me say that again, NONE. The only complainers are the people who jack the shit out of enlightenment and run some type of cryptic hacker shit they saw on a movie and makes’s it unuseable to navigate. Yet they do it because they think they are COOL. Now enlightenment is great for the fact that you can customize it to how you want, but even they are movie towards a more simplified experience (look at cvs 17 if you don’t believe me).
As a die-hard linux user, I must address the TRUTHS. Microsoft does AA fonts better than anyone now (including Apple). It is fast and responsive (you don’t have to wait 10 seconds for Nautilus to open even after the updated gnome 2). They command the Browser war, only Opera comes close to a fast good looking broswer. They make / bought out the products that make the killer app, Microsoft Office. To be honest, XP is actually great. It does everything that people complained windows didn’t do and it does it well. It is stable (for the number of combinations of different hardware / software it supports) which alone should blow you away. It supports nearly everything outthere other than a different chip set, for that alone it is stable. What else do you want, graphics look great – it’s useable, fast and functional. It does everything you want to more. PERIOD!
Commercial implementations are just better. I run an SGI at home, Indigo magic desktop is verry functional/fast. It is running on an old indigo2 R10K/195 SolidImpact with 384 mb RAM.
X is also verry fast on itm but hey, its an sgi right ?
Commercial solutions are just better in the aspect of developper devotion. Because people just work harder for money then they do for free.
Also with a commercial project, there is a certain goal that is set, and the funds serve to meet that goal.
In contrast to that, open source projects are numerous in quantity, and many are just there to serve the purpose of the author and not much else. If it works, or even if it works for them, then it’s okay. There is just not enough commitment te really finish something before moving on to something new.
sry for the rant
tired
must sleep
going to bed now
bye
Kevin
I don’t care if familiarizing the GUI will help to sell copies of Linux. The last thing we need is to introduce a bunch of computer illiterate people to Linux and have them dealing with our great Technical support in IRC channels.
I’m not saying Linux should stay as it is, but why nothing original? Be Different! Think Different! Apple isn’t dying because it has a different GUI, it’s dying away because it’s losing to a monopoly, not like i’m saying Microsoft is evil. But can’t Linux be different? Isn’t that why it exists? To be Different.
I think that the quake screenshot in SkyOS is puke-worthy. Compare it to another OS-in-your-garage project like MenuetOS, see how much more class that has.
I just wish that the fantasticly friendly, fast, responsive, IO-optimized OS we good people love (hint: :o))) it’s BeOS) had more marketshare. That OS is so ahead in so many ways, including UI to anything desktop today, it’s really sad how it got smashed.
I don’t like neither of MenuetOS or SkyOS UI. From all the hobby projects, AtheOS/Syllable has the best one. Not to say that Syllable has a perfect widget set, it still sucks in many places (I have written Rick about it with accompanied screenshots for fixing
, but in comparison, SkyOS and MenuetOS are both “behind”. I could spend a whole hour nit-picking what needs fixing.. First, Robert needs to fix the colors. These in-your-face blue colors are just not usable. OSes need “matte” colors, easy to the eye. 😉
ReactOS has as its direct goal to be a windows compatible Operating System. So i think that its only fair that it have a GUI that resembles it. But to the rest of the OSes, they are damned if they do, and damned if they dont. Make a UI that is windows like and you get “Be Original!”, make one that is new, and un-windowslike and you get “No one will ever switch! its too different! how are they supposed to do stuff?” There are 2 camps to the UI world, you cant please both, so pick one and do it well. I personally LOATH the windows look/feel, i find it totally counter productive.
It’s nice to hear that ReactOS is actually progressing though, it seemed rather dead there for a while.
Eugenia, do you really not like MenuetOS’s UI? I played with it (installed it and booted into it) and I think it’s excellent, and it has your matte colors :o) No, it really does, it’s all in those matte/baby colors, and all the widgets have those sexy shades and all.
I don’t call this matte/baby colors:
http://menuetos.org/070e.png
>all the widgets have those sexy shades and all.
Riiight…
I wish they didn’t.
Disregard the background, but otherwise those colors are, in fact, milky/sweety/baby colors. Come on, be objective, see it my way ;o))))
I wonder if anyone has told them about tenebrae?
http://tenebrae.sourceforge.net/index.php
I seem to recall a post on the Calmira II website
where it was claimed that the Reactos team had been
making overtures towards possibly using it for their
shellWindow manager…that was ages ago and I haven’t
heardseen anything since, does anyone know more?
PS: Calmira II is a free open-sourced shell replacement
for Windows 3.x that allows it to use what is basically
a clone of the Win95 enviroment complete with taskbar.
>I seem to recall a post on the Calmira II website
>where it was claimed that the Reactos team had been
>making overtures towards possibly using it for their
>shellWindow manager
I follow the mailinglist and project closley, and from what I can figure out, although atleast one person likes Calmira, the default shell (or at least the one that will be running first) looks like its going to be geoShell. Right now geoshell has been imported into cvs and I believe it will stay there until it fully compiles with mingw. Then the patches will be submitted back to the main geoshell cvs.
I also wonder (I’m no athority on this because I don’t have that much programming skill) how long it would take to get Calmira to work considering it is 16-bit and I believe that the reactos project has decided not to support 16-bit apps. (this is what I believe, but I could be wrong so don’t take my word as 100% correct until you ask one of the project devs).
>>I don’t like neither of MenuetOS or SkyOS UI. From all
the hobby projects, AtheOS/Syllable has the best one. Not to say that Syllable has a perfect widget set, it still sucks in many places (I have written Rick about it with accompanied screenshots for fixing
, but in comparison, SkyOS and MenuetOS are both “behind”.
Have you ever looked into the source of atheos/syllable or skyos? I did.
Because atheos/syllable kernel sources uses so much of linux source that is no problem to focus on GUI development. The other projects like skyos and menuetos have to develop much more on the kernel design because they use a total new one.
I don’t think that you can say they are really behind syllable because they have a totally new design without using big parts of linux kernel source.
>> It [explorer] is fast and responsive (you don’t have to wait 10 seconds for Nautilus to open even after the updated gnome 2)
My computer[1] starts nautilus in GNOME 2.0.2 in about 6 seconds after reboot. After that, new folder windows open almost instantly. I’d like it to get even faster, though. Opening large folders is still way too slow (I haven’t got another file manager here for comparison, so I might be hoping more than my hard drive is capable of 🙂
I agree on MS Windows desktop being more complete in features at the moment.
I’d like to hear some differences in user experiences between commercial X servers and XFree86. There has been much talk about XFree (or X Window System in general) slowing Linux desktop down, but I haven’t got any experience of anything else running on a comparable system. SGIs and Suns usually have somewhat different hardware architecture than my PC…
[1] Linux, 800MHz/256MB, which I think is higher middle class these days.
Cencerning commercial X implementations. The overhead created by X11R6 is omnipresent, being a commercial or free implementation.
The way it is handled can differ though. For example, if i open a remote x session with X secure under windows, then i perceive it as being faster then my local session (yes its weird but true), BUT as soon as you start setting a root backround, using fancy themes, etc, it crashes and burns.
XFree is slow yes, but a verry admirable effort to make X usable for FREE.
Look at it this way, XFree is not the thing/project to blame, X11R6 is. This makes XFree inheritently slow, yes.
X11 is just not the protocol to use for local display of data.
boot a clean system without X (no matter what unix), run netstat. Startx then run netstat again…
local sockets, local loops … why ? Why not have proper communication channels ? Channels that are designed for high speed low latency data transfer.
In order to compensate for this X buffers and therefore HOGS memory, A LOT. An unbuffered XFree session is almost non-usable (again that depends on what you do with it).
blah blah i could go on for a while.
NEWS and OpenWindows, etc they’re a way more viable solution to our problem. Fact is though, most of, if not almost everything graphical for unix/linux/whateverix is X isn’t it ?
my 0.02€ (i have a € key on this one
Take Care
Kevin
> Have you ever looked into the source of atheos/syllable
> or skyos? I did.
> Because atheos/syllable kernel sources uses so much of
> linux source that is no problem to focus on GUI
> development. The other projects like skyos and menuetos
> have to develop much more on the kernel design because
> they use a total new one.
> I don’t think that you can say they are really behind
> syllable because they have a totally new design without
> using big parts of linux kernel source.
I just had to respond to this. There is almost no major linux code in the kernel for Syllable – sure there are borrowed pieces here and there, but the core part – No.
Heck, if it was as big of a Linux cut-n-paste job you say it is my job would be easy!
bear
Syllable coder
A close friend of mine is a ROS developer, and here is what he has to say.
“There will be a choice of shells, but GeoShell is what is actively being worked on.”
Hi all. I’m a ReactOS developer (no, you should not thank me for the advancements in the GUI – you should rather blame on me the pitiful state of the Unix layer, but that’s another story), and I’m working on the geOShell port at the moment, so I’ll clear some things up
> I seem to recall a post on the Calmira II website
> where it was claimed that the Reactos team had been
> making overtures towards possibly using it for their
> shellWindow manager…that was ages ago and I haven’t
> heardseen anything since, does anyone know more?
The policy is keeping the build environment to a minimum. You’ll see that we don’t even use autoconf/automake, nor sed, awk or shell scripts. Calmira is written in Delphi, and this means we’ll need a Pascal compiler, a Pascal runtime and a clone of the Borland VCL – in other words, we’d need FreePascal (if its VCL, Lazarus, is even usable). A bit too much, considering that the graphical shell is a vital part of the system (before you argue: most people use Windows – and will use ReactOS – as a desktop, so yes, it is 🙂
And, to be frank (but this is my personal opinion), Calmira is a bit outdated, in concept and realization. We’re not supposed to provide the lowest common denominator of graphical shells, IMHO. That’s why we gave up porting LiteStep too (that, and the fact that the project is dead). I like geOShell, it has a lot of potential
> Right now geoshell has been imported into cvs and I
> believe it will stay there until it fully compiles with
> mingw. Then the patches will be submitted back to the
> main geoshell cvs.
Exactly. We’ve imported geOShell R4 (later releases depend on ATL, a library for which – amazingly – no single free implementation exists, while R4 is 100% OLE, and we can import that from Wine), currently the core and a few plugins compile without warnings, but I have trouble running it on Windows (haven’t tried on ReactOS yet)
I can’t believe some people are actually bashing skyos because of the quake screenshot, what are you? morons? Being able to port something like quake to any os is actually a great accomplishment, it means someone is having a lot of hard work and you people should respect that!
Eugenia: Check today’s Dilbert:
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2812750…
I guess you haven’t seen the later ones where Alice goes to the doctor and he tells her she has one week to die blah blah blah?
p13as3: NEWS and OpenWindows, etc they’re a way more viable solution to our problem. Fact is though, most of, if not almost everything graphical for unix/linux/whateverix is X isn’t it ?
Does NeWS exist anymore? And what is OpenWindows?
NeWS doesnt exist anymore, well maybe it does internaly @ sun. It was proposed together with X11 amongst other to give unix a graphical interface. It was rejected, X was chosen in it’s place. I’ll see if i can find some RFC’s on it. I know it’s been developped until recently.
Openwindows is dead, it was a complete graphical interface to unix, and it barfed. It eventualy resulted in the openwindows window manager.
Take Care
Kevin