Rocklyte Systems announced the first public release of its commercial operating system technology after five years of development. “Athenyx 2003” is an operating system distribution combining the Rocklyte technology (not based on XFree86), SciTech’s SNAP graphics technology and the Linux kernel, into a desktop platform. Designed for multimedia use and general productivity, Athenyx 2003 includes these features. Coming soon: Internet dial-up support from the desktop interface, fully functional web browser, an X11 server for backwards compatibility with X11 programs. The OS costs $40 USD.
Rocklyte Systems Releases New Commercial OS: Athenyx 2003
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Even though it’s not OSS this sounds like a very interesting operating system. But is the development framework (Pandora) as good as they say it is? Will enough appilcations be created by third party developers to make this OS successful? Is it worth diving into this?
What is the advantage of this over a Desktop oriented Linux distribution like Xandros or Lycoris? Using SciTech drivers is kinda cool for use in an X11 replacement but that means no 3D acceleration in the near future.
Is their any developers developing applications that run natively on the Athene display server?
Great idea to not use X-windows. The problem is that X-windows helps tremendously in porting UNIX software. Where is the software? They say they don’t even have a web browser.
I am not impressed by the screenshots. I think that an OS should pick a desktop design and stick with it. It doesn’t really look all that modern or professional.
I doubt that it will ever reach anything besides a highly specialized market. Sorry to say it.
But I love the fact that it works as a demonstration that you don’t need XFree (or even X? I couldn’t tell) to have an alternate OS based on Linux!
It looks to me like it’s not based on Linux, however there is a version that runs on top of Linux. I didn’t read very far though, so I could be wrong.
> I think that an OS should pick a desktop design and stick with it. It doesn’t really look all that modern or professional.
Rocklyte have a great and innovative product (with the use of DML and Pandora engine), but unfortunately, I will have to agree with the above. Rocklyte should stick with a single *unique* design (as opposed to copying Windows or Amiga looks) and employ a UI designer and usability engineer. They should differentiate from the competition but in a way that corresponds to today’s looks of OSes.
The old version, runs on top of Linux and Windows (Athene 3.0). Athenyx is the effort to bring together Athene in a more integrated way to the Linux kernel + GNU, therefore this is a new OS based on GNU/Linux (it is NOT a Linux distro in the traditional sense of the term, not directly at least).
I’ve been on the Athene betatest team for a long long time now and I got my hands on this current version (without some final minor tweaks) a few days ago. I’m not sure if my agreement with Rocklyte allows me to discuss these things, but I feel that I must make these heard.
This is NOT a desktop release. Paul Manias himself put it best: “This is not the retail (boxed) version yet – that’s not due until after August. This first release is just to get it out there for people (especially developers) and gear up for the boxed version.”
This is NOT the final release.
You people are expecting too much.
From what I’ve seen, the whole thing is shaping up rather nicely. The developers are quick to fix any bugs and they’re moving on very fast.
Expect lots of good things in the future
My friend was a beta tester, and he seemed to like it very much and was impressed with how quickly they fixed bugs. He’s a hard guy to please, so for me, that says volumes for this OS.
I don’t think it’s fair to knock Rocklyte for their desktop interface design. The same can be said about Linux with it’s various window managers. Granted some Linux WMs actually look nice, but again they’re all emulating Windows, MacOS, Amiga, in a way.
Check out those APIs (in the SDK). I don’t know whether to be impressed, or horrified. The OO module approach sounds like it might be very powerful, but the C/C++ interface is full of crazy macro stuff, and lots of identifiers look like FORTRAN code (all caps). Just take a look at the complexity C/C++ version of “Hello World,” or even the DML version for that matter. OTOH, the DML API looks extremely high-level, whic his something I miss in all current GUI APIs. I suppose only time will tell if people will develop for this platform, but personally, I’d be scared off by the introductory examples.
Rocklyte have a great and innovative product (with the use of DML and Pandora engine), but unfortunately, I will have to agree with the above. Rocklyte should stick with a single *unique* design (as opposed to copying Windows or Amiga looks) and employ a UI designer and usability engineer. They should differentiate from the competition but in a way that corresponds to today’s looks of OSes.
What’s wrong about making a OS of which you can easily change the looks? It gives lots of opportunities for creative people to change their work environment as they please. Hey, everyone seems to like themable apps, so isn’t this the next logical step?
I do agree that they should make a new and innovative interface as the default look and feel, however.
-truls
You could say the same for EVERY SINGLE window manager/desktop environment for any platform—they’re all just ripping off Xerox PARC stuff.
One of the reasons that people think that XFree is “clunky” is because of the non-integration of the DEs to the OS, plus the amount of “choice” presented. Did you ever heard anyone saying “GDI sucks” or “Quartz sucks”? No. People beat XFree for the problems that the non-integraion of the *DEs* have. They think that it is XFree’s problem, while XFree is just an engine. The means to get to graphical mode. It is the equivelant of GDI or Quartz. But on Windows and Mac world, users don’t even know what GDI is. They don’t have to. They do know what Luna is, because this is what they SEE.
Rocklyte has the opportunity to eliminate this “idea” people have about XFree (while the modules to be blamed here are the DEs and not the graphics engine), by using a well-integrated DE, Athene. By offering too many interfaces, you confuse your users, you don’t change the psychology that people have regarding “clunkyness”, and it looks less professional and focused. It just propagates the same problems that “xfree has”.
Hey, I am trying to help here. If they don’t like these suggestions, fine, it is their product, they take the decisions.
>I don’t think it’s fair to knock Rocklyte for their desktop interface design.
From the moment a product (any product) becomes a commercial product and sells for more than $1, it is in all fairness to debunk or to critisize the elements of the said product. It is part of the game.
I did, it was one of the first things I did to see how well it resized a Window with the contents being shown… After resizing past about 800 x 600 (I think, it was close to that since I run my monitor at 1280 x 1024) the edges of the window disappear and the window bitmap doesn’t get any larger. Kinda a silly bug to have in a public beta I think. Besides that I had serious hangups about the file/drive lists and single click nonsense. C’mon are people so lazy that double clicking is too hard? I’ll keep my eyes on it anyways. Still haven’t found a linux distro to make me happy and thus am still with Windows.
all effort should be put in developing an alternate OS for the desktop. I feel that linux is probably our best bet for now, but I think that it will be some sort of BSD/Linux/GNU hybrid that finally get developers looking their way.
If this project can find a specialized market, then great!
But what can they offer that you really just can’t get anywhere else? What advantages do they have over BSD or Linux?
I think that what the Linux market (actually the whole alternative OS market) needs is consolidation. We need 1 desktop environment per OS, 1 good kernel, 1 office suite, etc etc.
Xandros did it (and to a degree I never though possible with Linux) but it wasn’t all that modern-looking (I did buy it though). I wish we could all agree to either work together or just agree to disagree and take each individual desktop environment to where it is going to go.
Eventually we will have some GNU/HURD/GNOME distros and some GNU/LINUX/KDE distros and then the public will decide on what they like better.
That’s what I think. Flame on about how I don’t understand the OSS community or how I’m trolling or whatever. I can take it. C’mon…. do it.
I really don’t understand how this is any different from Luna being themable. The only difference is that here Rocklyte is publishing screenshots with the different themes, where Microsoft doesn’t. The situation is different in Linux, because you have applications which use different toolkits and don’t look and act the same. Here, all the apps look and act the same on any given desktop, but not necessarily between desktops.
>I really don’t understand how this is any different from Luna being themable.
Athenyx is booting to a screen each time asking you to select your interface. The beta I used, didn’t have a DEFAULT look to boot into it and then, manually, select an alternative interface.
It truly FEELS that Athenyx doesn’t have an identity of its own. It FEELS unfocused.
Please retain the proper header when replying.
Their “Hello World” has almost 150 lines of code! That’s just ridiculous. Sure, it creates a window with the text and a close button instead of just printing a line, but how long would a corresponding GTK-based program be?
[One of the reasons that people think that XFree is “clunky” is because of the non-integration of the DEs to the OS, plus the amount of “choice” presented. Did you ever heard anyone saying “GDI sucks” or “Quartz sucks”? No. People beat XFree for the problems that the non-integraion of the *DEs* have]
Well simply speaking for myself, from a programming perspective (as well as a user), the reason *I* dislike X is *not* because of the protocol, nor is it because of XFree. The reason is that XLib, which is the basic c interface to X11 that you end up working with, unless you want to deal with all the low level guts of the X protocol by hand, provides you with next to nothing beyond the most primitive windowing functions, and crude drawing capabilities. GDI and Quartz/Carbon, on the other hand, offer a basic set of UI primitives, in addition to a pretty reasonable set of drawing primitives (for example, using xlib, I can’t draw a round rect – I have to re-invent this algorithm myself). This guarantees a reasonable set of widgets a developer can immediately begin to work with. Both Quartz/Carbon and GDI make it relatively easy to set up production quality event loop. They both provide basic support for timers and easy to understand handling of both posting and sending events. Xlib is not so obvious on how to do these things (unless you are an extremely experienced *nix based developer), thus developers who write toolkits must re-invent much of this baseline support as well as solve a whole bunch of other low level look and feel issues.
It seems to me, that this is the major reason why the DE’s on X are so different in their look and feel, and why so much effort goes into them. I think that if XLib had provided this basic level support for from the beginning things would be very different today.
It appears that Athenyx has done things right (IMHO) and provided a base set of services so developers for the platform don’t have to re-invent the wheel when working with it. I wish them the best of luck, and I will be very curious to see how it all pans out.
Basic hello world! program in GTK with close button is 48 lines. You could probably shrug off a few more if you wanted to.
My big curosity is how much these SciTech drivers will cost and now that I see this “new OS” using SciTech’s technology but costing $40 for the whole OS. I’m guessing that the SciTech drivers for XFree86 will be very reasonable priced.
This new OS doesn’t sound like my thing although it sounds very interesting and cool nonetheless.
>>this is a new OS based on GNU/Linux (it is NOT a Linux distro in the traditional sense of the term, not directly at least).<<
And it’s about time that someone has stepped up to the plate and done this. I have said for a few years now that this needs to take a Linux System with CLI GNU tools, put on a proprietary UI with it’s own API and get it to market as a seperate, distinct Operating System. I think this is similar to what “Cosmoe” is trying to do in GNU-land. X and KDE/Gnome/Whatever are OK – but IMHO they are terrible from a performance standpoint for a home user, and quite franky more powerful than they need to be for a home user. Sure, they are great for me – Xnest into my Solaris 8 box, etc – but I’m not the average user.
Don’t get me wrong, I like X and and Gnome/KDE/Whatever added to a distribution – but the real point is what is there in choosing one distro over another? They are all pretty much the same – save for some additional tools or configuration files, or where those files go.
The main factor to purchase will be the availability of native apps. A brand-new OS running the same old Linux ports doesn’t interest me at all…
The price seems reasonable ($40 – the same as the upcoming Zeta release) but they need to include a basic selection of native software (browser, e-mail, configuration tools, word processor, simple games to waste time, etc,).
I’ve had Athene installed within Windows since version 1.3 and I look foreward to reading Athene reviews at OSNews.
Best Luck,
Bob
Is this different from Oeone? (www.oeone.com). It seems to me that Oeone has a better approach to the interface. I think they should have stayed with a single interface (default) but made it easy to change.
>I really don’t understand how this is any different from Luna being themable.
Luna is not the interface, it’s a theme or to be technical just a skin. I’m sure nobody calls a DE it’s default theme do they?
Everybody is always whining how X sucks blah blah blah, well, here it is.
A Linux-kernel with a non-X display layer. I for one am very interested to see how well this performs compared to Linux/XFree86.
I was quite happy to shell out the 30 pounds i paid for my Redhat 8.0 boxed set, and i’ll be quite happy to shell out the 40 dollars for this.
What amazes me is that these guys have been able to implement an entire OS and display layer in the time it has taken the XFree86 guys to finally agree on the need and add support for antialiased fonts.
However, my fear is that Athene, even if it is a brilliantly engineered and high performance OS will simply not be able to find a market, trapped as it is between the Linux world, in which closed source is frowned upon (for good reason), and Microsoft, who will stop at nothing to destory any company who shows even a glimmer of ‘innovation’ in it’s sacred desktop market.
Good luck, Athenyx 2003, youre going to need it.
Heh. It takes 150 lines of code to do “hello world” in Athenyx 2003, 48 lines in GTK+. And in Squeak Smalltalk, one is enough-
(AlignmentMorph new addMorph: (StringMorph contents: ‘Hello World!’)) openInWindow
🙂
Athene 3.0 was downloading when I first posted above. Now I have installed 3.0 and booted. What a mess!!! I have no idea what’s going on, but the screen is totally f&cked up…
I seem to be locked in 16 colors, when I change the resolution the menu bar falls off the bottom of the page, and the pop-up menu is contorted at a 45-degree overlapping angle. The read-me documents are also distorted at 45 degrees. I’ve never seen such a mess on a desktop!
If anyone would like to witness this for themselves, e-mail me and I’ll send you a screenshot.
ebehrend(at)raton(dot)com
So I re-installed Athene 2.01, which works just fine!
It was difficult to see what other changes have been made, but I did notice that the Icebreaker DE is no longer included.
I’m off to the Rocklyte site to try and find out what’s up. Maybe there’s some display drivers I need to install – never needed them before though…
Best Wishes, and excuse my ranting
-Bob
Now it seems their website is down; all of the Rocklyte links are dead. Perhaps they yanked the plug before anyone else got the chance to install and see what I saw…
and in rebol its 1 line as well..
view layout [label “hello world” return button “close” [unview/all]
heh.. i forgot the closing ] .. ill blame programatic-dyslexia
view layout [label “hello world” return button “close” [unview/all]]
mmm, rebol… I have been using REBOL at a lot lately. for various scripting jobs, so much easier and quicker to use than perl, even though I’ve a year or two of on-and-off perling. Glad I found rebol. http://coid.highfructose.net is a some rebol web scripting i did for a local artist.
The Hello World example that is provided does it the long way for a good reason – it’s a tutorial! What would be the point in providing the user with a tutorial that just calls OpenWindow() and PrintText() stubs? Do you think you could learn something from that?
If you wanted to do the same thing in standard Win32 or X11 code, it would be exactly the same process in setting up your window, fonts, loading libraries etc. It would be just as long a process.
This should be obvious to any mildly experienced coder. I’m amazed that people actually think that a short Hello World program that just calls one or two assisting functions would be some sort of indication of SDK superiority.
Athene 3.0 was downloading when I first posted above. Now I have installed 3.0 and booted. What a mess!!! I have no idea what’s going on, but the screen is totally f&cked up…
Sorry about that – turns out there’s a bug in the display support for some graphics cards if you use 16 bit mode. You can fix it for the moment by switching to 24 or 32 bit mode. There will be an updated install file to fix this problem in the next 48 hours…
This should be obvious to any mildly experienced coder. I’m amazed that people actually think that a short Hello World program that just calls one or two assisting functions would be some sort of indication of SDK superiority.
It reveals that with this environment, as with Win32 or most X11 APIs, you have to do a lot of repetitive work.
Both the Squeak and REBOL examples aren’t just calling some assistance functions that do all the work unfairly. It has to do with how you interact with the APIs with those languages. It’s less work.
Yes, it’d be cheap if I put it all into a seperate function or method and just called makeAHelloWindow(); and pretended that made it a better language or API. However, the examples provided for REBOL and Squeak deal with the way you deal with GUIs in those languages on a fundamental level. Why should my simple GUI require anything other than simple setup?
The web site is down after being slashdotted, but here are some helpful external links for purchasing and getting file downloads:
Buy Athenyx: http://store.eSellerate.net/s.asp?s=STR710160950&Cmd=BUY&SKURefnum=…
Athene [Linux]: http://linux.tucows.com/preview/159024.html
Athene [Windows]: http://www.simtel.net/pub/dl/60070.shtml
(Beware 16bpp display bug – fixed version coming soon)
I’m not in 16 bit, but I’m having some issues with drawing in the Athene download… anyone else? Windows look fine when initially opened, but whenever I resize a window, everything within the window’s bounds gets redrawn at a 45 degree angle. Also, when I click on a menu, regardless if the window has the resize-weirdness or not, the menu rectangle bounds has the contents of the menu drawn inthe same 45-deg angle sorta way… anyone else running into this?
Both the Squeak and REBOL examples aren’t just calling some assistance functions that do all the work unfairly. It has to do with how you interact with the APIs with those languages. It’s less work.
Sure, but in this case you have compared the Pandora Engine, which is an API normally programmed via C, to some very high level languages. If you want to do a fair comparison, you should have been comparing Squeak and REBOL to our Dynamic Markup Language, which does Hello World with this code:
<window title=”Hello World” insideborder=”0″ height=”100″ width=”180″>
<text align=”center” string=”Hello World” colour=”#000000″/>
</window>
You see? Now you understand why comparing low level API’s to high level languages is not all that appropriate. If you take a look at the DML code in Athene, you will find that it is extremely simple to use and very competitive with other languages in its genre. So, knock yourself out and compare Squeak and REBOL to DML as much as you like… 😉
Funny you mention the DML stuff- I just played around with and quit Athene and was coming back here to ask what the “hello world” would be if done in DML.
I still think it is fair to compare Pandora/C with Squeak in a number of areas. You can do certain things with DML, but others yet will make a developer turn to C+Pandora; with REBOL or Squeak, the developer doesn’t have to go from a pretty high-level language all the way down to C.
However, comparing a “hello world” done in Pandora/C doesn’t make sense, simply because anyone who even vaguely knew what they were doing would turn to just DML rather than C/Pandora for such a trivial app.
Has Rocklyte considered writting decent bindings to Pandora/C for some scripting language? Something that would have the power of a ‘real’ programming language but without having to muck around in C to get the same power that Pandora/C provides but DML doesn’t. For me, Lua comes to mind, simply because it is simple, powerful, and super tiny… Unlike the biggies like Python or Perl, shipping it with Athene would only add maybe 300k to your total install.
Or is DML the one true scripting language for Athene, and Rocklyte not interested in providing something in between C and DML?
thank in advance for the reply-
>I’m not in 16 bit, but I’m having some issues with drawing in the Athene download… anyone else? Windows look fine when initially opened, but whenever I resize a window…
Yup – I can’t say why some of these things happen on some Windows configurations as yet, but we’re working on it *right now*. That updated setup file will be coming very soon.
Has Rocklyte considered writting decent bindings to Pandora/C for some scripting language? Something that would have the power of a ‘real’ programming language but without having to muck around in C to get the same power that Pandora/C provides but DML doesn’t. For me, Lua comes to mind, simply because it is simple, powerful, and super tiny… Unlike the biggies like Python or Perl, shipping it with Athene would only add maybe 300k to your total install.
We’d be quite happy to see other high level languages available for the system. There is a limit to how many languages that we can support internally though, and C and DML is enough for now. Maintainers of other languages would certainly receive our support if ports were to start appearing on the system.
Or is DML the one true scripting language for Athene, and Rocklyte not interested in providing something in between C and DML?
I’m sure it would work out much better for other languages to come from and be maintained by third parties.
Hello Paul, just another kiwi interested in this development. Just a quick question, are you using Linux Threads or NPTL? Just a small suggestion, the best thing I would like to see is the inclusion of Linux 2.6 in the final release so that users can get the full grunt of native threads and the improved kernel.
What’s up with their web site? I can’t access it.
The web site is down after being slashdotted
I get it
I want to see the fonts of the new non-xfree Athenyx OS.
I’m glad to hear Rocklyte is promptly addressing the graphics issue. If it were me, I’d halt the downloads to avoid distribution of the faulty software. It’ll clog your e-mail and forums for weeks, even after it’s fixed.
I can’t change the color settings; every time I press “Apply Changes” it reverts to 16-bit. I’m patient and can wait for the fixed release. Could you post an announcement when it’s ready?
Is there anything I can do to assist? Could you use my system configuration/hardware info? It’s all name-brand equipment and previous versions of Athene work just fine.
Best Luck,
Bob
Hello Paul, just another kiwi interested in this development. Just a quick question, are you using Linux Threads or NPTL? Just a small suggestion, the best thing I would like to see is the inclusion of Linux 2.6 in the final release so that users can get the full grunt of native threads and the improved kernel.
Standard Linux threads. It’s anyone’s guess as to when a stable kernel 2.6 is going to be released by the kernel developers. (Of course you could always upgrade your kernel when it becomes available).
Since the Rocklyte site is down — you may want to take a look at the screenshots I took with athene -xclient started from an xterm. At least you can get a feel for the fonts.
http://www.tuxreports.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album30&op=modl…
the site got OSnoosed.. and you know what they no noose is good noose..
I think it was slashdotted to be honest ;o)
The graphics issues surrounding the Windows and Linux versions are now fixed. The problems were mostly concerned with 16bit graphics modes.
An updated version for Windows has been uploaded to Simtel.Net and should appear sometime in the next 24 hours. Watch this address for V3.0.2:
http://www.simtel.net/pub/dl/60070.shtml
In the meantime I am encouraging our ISP to get the darned website back up…
One of the most elegant C++ GUI API’s I’ve ever seen would have to be the KDE/QT Libraries. They are very nice and do a *lot* for you. Getting a system tray icon is 2 lines of code. Also QT supports a HTML-like markup language I believe (QT Designer uses it for doing form previews).
Another API I really like is SDL/OpenGL. Man that is the cleanest combination of API’s for Game programming, it’s sooo neat and simple! Setting up a fullscreen opengl rendering context in SDL is sooo much less code and heaps easier to understand than xlib/glx.
The 3.02 download is now available at Simtel. Ignore the “3.01” description and click the Minnesota download link. I’m downloading right now…
I’ll write back after it’s installed and let everyone know how it went.
Best Wishes,
Bob
I’m arranging to have our rocklyte.com website hosted by a larger provider so that people can access the site. It also includes the latest download files. Here it is:
http://host63.ipowerweb.com/~rocklyte/
(Note that the transfer of the rocklyte.com domain will take a while and for now it still points to the old busted site…)