The Syllable project has released a live CD for Syllable Desktop 0.6.6. It has been a long time since the last live CD, so Syllable 0.6.5 was skipped. The creator of the original live CD left the project, without releasing the build scripts. Further it turned out that a needed patch to Syllable wasn’t available, either, so the project had to create a whole new live CD, including a modified kernel. Also, some eighty SDL programs were recently ported to Syllable (video of the Power Manga game).
The goal of this live CD is to make it usable for many more real tasks. This is the first Syllable live CD that can run from a USB CD player. Compared to the old live CD’s, it also has specific support for emulators and some netbooks. The default screen resolution is more comfortable and virtual desktops are used to provide other resolutions at a keypress. The desktop is arranged with quick access to functions that are useful when running the live CD. The old ABrowse is succeeded by the Webster browser. CUPS, SANE, CDRTools, SimpleBurn, 7-Zip, OpenSSH, Transmission and NetCat are now included. More drivers are also included, such as BFS and the native AtheOS network file system.
There are also several improvements over Syllable 0.6.6. For the first time in a Syllable release, it ships with the REBOL 3 programming language, including the cURL binding that was written by the Syllable project. The Boron programming language is also included and the Webster browser is a fixed version. The boot menu is based on the enhanced one in the current Syllable development build and has extensive troubleshooting options.
Be sure to read the Welcome document on the desktop. It was written especially for this live CD to introduce its (new) features.
…Syllable’s actual development would speed up for a change. You know, actually release something new.
I mean, what is this? A live CD updated to the latest and greatest April 30, 2009 “standard” version of Syllable 0.6.6? Is this a joke? Eh, you’re a little late at releasing that “live” version, don’t you think? Seriously, as interesting as I find Syllable and as much as I would like it to succeed, I can’t find an updated “live” image interesting. How about an actual new version, for a change?
Edited 2011-06-15 08:55 UTC
Releasing a usable live CD is a great way to get new developers.
Why? Do developers work on a live-cd normally?
If I give you a live-cd with Windows XP or Puppy Linux, will you become a Windows/Linx developer?
Because being able to try it out without too much hassle will make more people try it. Some of them will find that they like it enough to want to help out.
Sounds like more of a hassle then a VirtualBox, VMWare etc. appliance… Have to make and burn a CD that has no persistence and have to reboot any time I want to give it a spin?
Meh…
Err… You know that you can use your favorite VM (be it VMware, VirtualBox, etc…) to run a liveCD, right ?
I don’t know why I even bother replying, but anyway…
A VMWare image is not the same thing. (BTW, they have those as well) For example, it doesn’t give you an idea of the support for your hardware. It also doesn’t “feel” the same way.
If you still don’t understand the desire to run an alternative operating system directly on the hardware, please just accept that you’re not the target audience.
Because when it doesn’t work on your system and you report that back, the developers give you additional in depth debugging homework to figure out why it didn’t work for your system. If you’re not careful, you’ll soon be a developer without realizing it.
Only works with alternative Operating systems with smaller user bases.
Edited 2011-06-15 14:02 UTC
In the case of Syllable, you tell them that it isn’t working, and they shake their heads, telling you they don’t know why 🙂
The creator of the original live CD left the project, without releasing the build scripts. Further it turned out that a needed patch to Syllable wasn’t available, either, so we had to create a whole new live CD, including a modified kernel.
I see you’ve mastered copy and paste, now could you explain your point / the reason for quoting that extract?
You don’t have to be a medium, try reading the post title.
And I think he “implies” a valid question about the management, or the lack of.
A clever decision to offer compressed archives. It’s easier to download 67MB than 237. Less bandwidth, less power consumption etc.
Think green
Having time to spare in developing proyects like this is always difficult, and it gets worse as time goes by and you have to become more and more involved with “real world” issues.
Surely this is not only ‘not a joke’ but the product of as much or as little time as the devs could devote. They could always choose to do nothing and share nothing, yet they offer what they have.
The last thing they need is harsh comments, the least they deserve is a pat in back.
Thank you Syllable team!, there is always people who appreciate your work, even is perhaps not “loudly” enough. Best wishes.
[q]Having time to spare in developing proyects like this is always difficult[\q]
Yes, it’s especially difficult, if you hunted away the developers, and you are alone, and you are not able to write decent c++ code, and have just “scripting abilities”.
[q]They could always choose to do nothing and share nothing, yet they offer what they have.[\q]
Yes, that’s what they did in most cases. They have gone! Vanders didnt contribute anymore for a long time. Just kaj is still there and being occupied with making conferences :-))
[q]The last thing they need is harsh comments, the least they deserve is a pat in back.[\q]
Syllable forked from Atheos, and it was little OS with a big potential. If you managed to destory it, then you deserve at least the critics.
Syllable is dead, and kaj killed it. It’s that simple.
Syllables has no c/c++ active develoopers.
All are gone, even their leader vanders. Some are still there but not being really active.
If you look at their source code commits, you will be surprized, to see that months are passing away without one single write commit! In other month they have just a few write commits, with quite unsignificant stuff.
The most work they do, is poring command line stuff, which in most stuff compiles without problems (or with little adjustments) just by typing ./configure ; make; make install;
And then they write a news about it sayinb: “the syllable team ported xyz”.
I guess Kaj is trying to use more and more scripting stuff in syllable, because his c++ abilites are as good as non-existent.
Since more than 2 years, they didnt release any new version, and they are even not even close to a new release. Their latest “development build” is also 1.5 years old.
They have such “intelligent” user, which think that you if you compile a lot of SDL games/applications you help syllable a lot.
If you browser their forums you will notice the level of intelligence of their users. They are comedians, which dont see that the progress made by syllable in the last years, is nearly zero.
How can somebody that blind and spend time with a project that is stagnant like that.
Even FreeDOS has a lot more potential.
The idea of kaj is to tell the users a lot of stories (plans for future) and making them believe that syllable will be great in future.
Browser their forums, and you will have a lot to laugh.
In their forum, I also saw that Kaj declares that Vanders is not the leader anymore. I guess that means, that now he is the leader.
To make an analogy, this situation is like:
There is an plane (airbus), and the captian used to parachute to leave the plane, and now the stewardess is flying the plane.
It’s really like that. Kaj, has no idea about kernel development, or drivers, or filesystems or app_server. He just knows how to use scripting languages. But he doesnt understand that you can develop an OS just using scripting languages.
Kaj, many congratuation that now you are the kind-of-syllable like I anticipated many years ago.
Now you are not anymore in the lucky position, that others write the code and you just merge their code/patches, and tell us how great you are and how much you contributed.
Now since you are the leader, we see how great you are. Nearly 0 progress since most of the developers left.
You are even not able to copy from haiku (even there have been attempts), not to speak about own development.
Congratulations to the king-of-syllable, your only problem is just, that now you dont have anymore people to control, now you have to do it by yourself. And we see the results.
What is (was) your position in the Syllable project? And if the problems are as you describe them, what solutions do you offer?
Hmm, in most cases I stay back from personal comments, but something has to be said to your attitude. Oh boy, what an idiotic comment you made? I know Kaj from the REBOL world, I know him for many years, and you’re just trying to make him look bad. Comment’s like yours should be smashed from the planet Earth. While you try to look like I-am-a-king, you don’t provide any solution, suggestion, you just ridicule others. The project might be dead, or almost dead, but if there is any interest of even a single person to develop anything, noone should dismiss such an effort. Anyone is free to express his/her opinion about the possible success of the project, but the way you do it, is just – idiotic.
Mostly you are right. Except for your attitude to Kaj which is quiet aggressive. I don’t like Kaj too. Development of Syllable OS is discussed in private, at AltMe, that is why nobody knows what is going on. I was trying to get involved with development, but dealing with people, who don’t understand what is open source and what is important when developing OS, is frustrating and discourages from being involved.
The only solution is to FORK from Syllable and create healthy development of OS, instead of promoting scripting language.
I admit, that perhaps I should have tried to express myself less impulsive. But mostly I tried to make funny comparisions.
I know you spent also quite some time with syllable too, and I know it’s not that easy to forget and to turn completely away (that’s why I also use to take a look from time to time at the syllable forums). But sadly fact is, syllable has a lot of bugs and short commings (not without reason there is no newer compiler on syllable, and also not a newer development build. Their latest development build will became in a few month, 2 years old).
A few years ago, I would have opted for a fork. Today the situation is completely different. Haiku, has nearly everything that syllable wished to have. In a few days Haiku Alpha 3 should appear, and it brings a lot of improvements. Haiku is a lot more feature complete and developing on Haiku is also easier (less buggy api, and if there are bugs, in most cases, they are solved very soon by the devs).
Haiku has a bunch of highly professional developers (alexd, ingo, stippi, mmrl, and many more). Additional, Haiku has also quite a lot of money, which is spent of paying developers. There are so many advantages with Haiku, that’s why I could not recommand anybody to fork syllable. Why fork syllable if you can fork haiku, which is a lot more easy to develop and maintain and a lot more advanced than syllable.
A syllable fork would be very difficult to do, because “builder” is in a quite obsolet state, and it would need to be totally replaced, and that would imply a lot of work. On the other Haiku is trivial fork.
But since the Haiku devs are doing a great job, there is no real reason for a fork.
Related to Altme:
I guess Kaj likes Altme (even if it’s nor working on syllable), because everything is closed. Like that he can give the impressiont to people that there are a lot of syllable developers, but we dont see them because they are hidden in altme. I guess that’s the reason, why they use Altme, just to hide their penibel situation. Another reason could be, that they want to hide what they talk related to developement, because it would be clear to people that they mostly have just “academic/informal discussions” and that nothing real is done. At least they could have posted the AltMe logs, if they didnt intend to hide. But no, they are really hiding, in my opinion.
Obviously, there were quite a few things that could’ve been done better & could’ve been done worse in the Syllable project. However, that’s a moot point. The things that happened, happened long ago, so it’s a done deal. As a matter of fact, it’s been a done deal for a very long time. Everyone want’s to jump all over Cipri, without knowing the whole story. As a matter of fact, it would be very premature to even bother to pick sides without knowing the story. As far as his opinions & why he hasn’t offered any solutions, well, why would he? Opinions & proposed solutions were handed out like candy when all of this drama really started. I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions about that. As for now, why would he offer solutions in 2011, since he’s very much a Haiku guy instead of a Syllable guy these days. For many of you, his opinions are news. But this is something that’s years old. So, it would be best to let sleeping dogs lie in this case. And for the record, I’m not speaking in favor of or against Cipri’s statements.
I’m trying to solve some problems, there exist more than 240 makefiles, the API is poorly documented, the kernel, also has a poor documentation. If someone wants to clean a little all that mess, i’ve created a google code project with my effort in to make a better documentation (really, i have no hope, but a lot of energy)
http://code.google.com/p/wave-os/
The very first i want to do is to update the building script, create.sh, because i not just want to build the whole system in a straightforward way, but also to assemble the whole iso and then burn first a copy of the new iso and then an installation cd.
No new code, no fork, just more documentation and a clean sh build script without ruby, rebol crap (nothing personal about rebol, just want a better compile way)
The syllable development is that hillarius, that you even write about ported sdl-games, which in most cases just compile on syllable without any kind of work. In some cases some little changes had to be done to the makefiles.
Great Development, great success. Go on like that Kaj. The syllable situation becomes more and more funny. I have a lot of fun watching that funny syllable situation.
Syllable is still using gcc 4.1, and instead that you tell us that the latest gcc was ported to syllable, you tell us that some SDL-Games run on syllable.
To see what kind of people are “developing” for syllable i give a quote of the guy who “ported” that sdl games:
Bogomips:
“I even think that SDL may become more important as GTK or QT because it’s easier with SDL.”
How can somebody compare GTK or QT to SDL? Yes SDL is simple, if you do just very simple stuff. But try to make a useable userinterface (including something like a layout manager).
I dont want to say something bad about somebody, but it’s really funny to see what developers syllable has.
With such developers I can imagine what a great future syllable will have :-).
I dont want to be mean, but it’s really funny.
I recommand you, browse the syllable forum,and have some fun :-).
Edited 2011-06-16 11:07 UTC
The developers could at least update the Syllable wiki page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable_Desktop_%28operating_syst…
Do you think the wikipedia site of syllable is not update because they have no time for that?
It’s not updated because they feel better with the old and wrong information.
For example, there it is written:
Developers:
Kristian Van Der Vliet, Kaj de Vos, Rick Caudill, Arno Klenke, Henrik Isaksson.
Now from that list they would have to remove all except kaj!
They would need to update to the page the fact, that syllable is as good as stagnant since a lot of time, due to the fact that kaj is not a c++ developer (he is the scripting guy, and anyone knows that you can develop an OS with scripting languages).
Why would they update that site? To write there how much they failed, and in what bad situation they are now? To write there that their leader vanders abandonated them?
Kaj is still hoping that using wrong information he has perhaps more chances to attract more developers/users.
And somebody asked for solutions:
Dear friends, there is no solution. What solution do you have when a clown is flying an airbus? None.
The only solution that might help, is that kaj leaves the project, then I can imagine that most of the developers would come back.
The funny thing is, once kaj decided to leave, but vanders, changed his mind. And not much time later, vanders itself was the once who left :-)).
Wow, you are so a disgruntled ex-developer/user of Syllable. Too bad your tone is so off-putting, because I think there’s valid points in your posts too.
Ok, I downloaded a VM image of Syllable 0.6.6, and it works in VirtualBox. But – what settings do I need in VirtualBox to get networking … eh … working?
OK, I found it: selecting “PCnet-PCI II” makes the network alive. Cool!