Submitted by There are many contenders to the desktop crown, and a relative newcomer in that area is Whitix, an operating system which, despite what the name suggests, is not based on Linux. It comes with a fully pre-emptive multitasking kernel as well as ports of GCC, Python, and Mono. A bugfix release has just been posted on the website.
So, what makes Whitix different? Why should you try it out? Thoughtfully enough, the developers answered that question for us.
New kernel features. New features, like the information and configuration filesystem, a filesystem that lets system components expose information and configuration data about themselves (for an Ethernet card, /System/Config/Devices/Network/Ethernet0/macAddress, or /Devices/Network/Ethernet0/macAddress using SysConfRead, would be the way to edit and access its MAC address). Other features include a new network stack design that minimizes latency (netchannels) and a new thread scheduler.Clear filesystem layout. /bin, /etc and /usr/bin are replaced with /Applications, /System/Registry and other intuitive names; great for a clear view of the system internals.
This bugfix release fixes several bugs (really?) in the 0.2 release, some of which were rather show-stopping. Get it from their download page.
0.2a not 2.0a
Of course, it’s open source. We can’t expect it to make it to anywhere near 2.0 until some time next century.
Edited 2009-02-11 15:40 UTC
Why don’t you name some open source projects that have taken the best part of a century?
GNU Hurd?
Please look up the following words in a dictionary:
Humour, joke, jape, jest, and wit. Your life could really do with some.
it is an interesting little OS and I like that its intent is to make things simple. I like the directory names being common sense based. I wish the project luck.
I like that there’s a variety of options out there.
Whitix looks like it has promise, and I like it’s philosophy. The desktop looks like it’s in it’s infancy, but once they get the AMD/Nvidia drivers going, who knows what will happen!
Kudos to the developers, I think I’ll be trying this out when I get home!
Thanks for all the comments so far. I’m about to release another bugfix release, 0.2b, that fixes several more issues. There’s also a new (much faster) scheduler in development, so I can see another release happening for that!
Looking further into the future (next century
), I’m currently experimenting with a 64-bit SMP kernel written in D (with support for in-kernel exception handling and garbage collection of userspace applications). A lot of D is similar to C, so it definitely won’t be a kernel rewrite in any case. Expect to see a Git repository appear soon; I expect this will be the future of Whitix at some point.
I’ll be starting a series of idea posts over at http://www.whitix.org/blog to motivate and inspire the growing community. I’ll also be discussing the experimental kernel, and what role it might have in future development.
Edited 2009-02-11 19:22 UTC
Very interesting news CloudNine, thanks
It’s a very interesting project, I’ll keep a close look to its development. Keep up the good work!
I like the kenrel written in D idea, very very cool. Are you going off of D 1.0 or 2?
Currently D 1.0. LDC (which I use currently) focuses mainly on 1.0 for now. I may switch to DMD at some point.
What is the difference towards Gobolinux?
Gobolinux is based on Linux, this is not.
And, I believe Gobolinux uses a symbolic links to “simplify” the filesystem. The underlying complexity is still there.
Actually, you got it backwards. Gobolinux uses symbolic links to maintain the old FHS compatibility, and the actual programs are installed to their Gobolinux paths. The old complexity is still there though, it’s just the symbolic links that maintain that old complexity.
Although his statement isn’t very strong, I’m a bit bothered by his attitude towards 64bit.
Considering he started writing in 2005…at that time I think it was becoming almost impossible to buy a desktop x86 cpu that wasn’t 64bit capable.
Perhaps the intent is that this only be used on old hardware?
It’s not a general attitude about 64-bit (I’m actually writing an experimental 64-bit SMP kernel in D, as I’ve mentioned above). The thing is, back in 2005, Bochs’ support for 64-bit machines, where I did most of my testing, was not good enough for me (IIRC). I may have been wrong though!
There will be a 64-bit Whitix eventually, just not too soon. (we’ll see how things work out, especially with the community’s growing size!)
Wow! And I thought Apple was the only company smart enough to know that on the desktop you don’t need to see all the other stuff!
I can do system administration just a fine on my Mac as I can using Linux or Unix.
I hate trying to tell people things on Linux and trying to get them to understand. Well you need to go into /etc and then you need to go into /usr/bin
Bad enough trying to tell people to go to C:\Program Files etc, etc.
I don’t know what happened to the gnome virtual file system. 🙁
Thanks a lot for this great article. I must have missed or ignored previous releases of Whittix, but I’ve downloaded 0.02a, will give it a spin and keep an eye on this interesting project.
Keep up the good work!