Michael Krueger has written an ATi Radeon driver, based on the Linux 2.6 framebuffer driver. It should support all chips up to 9800/Pro/XT and features native mode setting, 2D acceleration, hardware cursor and YUV422 video overlay support. Arno Klenke has released a beta version of his new ATA disk driver. With support for 48bit LBA drives, chipset support for Intel, Via, SiS, AMD and nVidia chipsets, better performance throughout and a multi-threaded design Syllable gains a significant speed boost. In the meantime, Rick Caudill codes Sourcery, a source code editor for Syllable (screenshot).
Syllable: New ATA & ATi drivers, New IDE
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Sourcery is not an IDE for Syllable. Sourcery is a source code editor. sIDE which is also by Arno Klenke is the IDE that will use Sourcery. BTW: We have a new toolchain in the making. Sometime in the next couple of weeks(not sure of date as it is up to Vanders) we will release GCC 3.3.2 and Binutils 2.1.4 for Syllable. It has been thoroughly tested by the main Syllable developers and works great. Certain applications will not compile now: including ABrowse, but we plan on updating them. Also, Vanders has finally got Glibc 2.3.2 to compile. This is a major milestone for Syllable as Vanders has been working on this port for quite a while now and finally got it working. Congrats to Vanders
wait for the new release, 0.5.2 can’t install on my box.
Wow, Syllable looks really nice. What toolkit do the use, is it QT or their own?
Also, does Syllable uses X or their own windowing system?
Yay! I just might have to try it. I have a radeon 9800 pro… And I have an 80 gig parallel ATA hard drive installed for os’s that don’t support my sata raid controller.
Syllable has its own windowing system, and uses a native “toolkit”
Completely tangental, Rick, very nice code editor btw.
That screenshot showed the properties for the file, including grokking comments etc.
Rather than lines of code, statements and function counts might be better? And maybe a measure of the length of a statement and the length of a function? There are bound to be complexity guidelines by some academic somewhere!
Keep up the good work! GCC 3x certainly will be a nice big step. How does Sourcery differ from CodeEdit?
I’ve made this point in several places now but the new ATA driver makes Syllable very fast and more than pleasent to use. Both machines I am currently using (One Intel and one Via chipset) both boot from Grub to the Syllable login dialog in aprox. 6 seconds. That is the fastest I’ve ever seen any OS boot (Even if I am biased, you can’t deny that 6 seconds is fast)
Good to see Syllable’s boot time is very low. I think that could be a great selling point for Syllable — when Windows and modern Linux distros can take over a minute to boot (depending on hardware), it’s good to see an OS aiming for efficiency and not just bloat.
Keep up the good work. If Syllable 1.0 can boot in around 15 seconds on my laptop, I’ll be in heaven.
Vanders: why did it take a whole 6 seconds?
Seriously though, my Syllable install has always booted up faster than that even with the BIOS driver, and I’ve got old hardware.
Syllable seems to be the new OpenSource BeOS. I’ve tried AtheOS some times ago and it was very impressive what Kurt Skauen had done but now a Team keep up the great OS and they can make the next desktop OS. Great!
It’s been over a year since I last installed Syllable. I think it’s time again
Lately I’ve been going through some of the OSs I rarely use. Last week was QNX week 
It’s a very nice OS, even though it’s still lacks a few goodies. Also, they have one of the ugliest musicplayers I’ve ever seen. That has to be worth something
Vanders is not kidding when he says that the driver is fast. It used to take me about 10 seconds to mount a fatfs in Syllable and last night I was able to mount one in 3 seconds.
My boot up time has also improved, but I have always had fast boot up time. I would say that it has never taken me more than 9 seconds to boot up Syllable/AtheOS
Im glad that syllable seems to be doing so well. But i dont see any real improvements happeneing. The kernel has barely changed since AtheOS was forked. Kurt seemed to be the only one doing any major inovation. As far as the OS goes the only thing happeneing is people porting over linux code. How boring. Id had high hopes for Syllable but I dont think it will ever get anywhere unless the actual OS gets worked on.
Thanks for the suggestions and I actually plan on adding function and statement counts. There are going to be a lot of differences between Sourcery and CodeEdit. I don’t have time to explain them all, but I will have a website up soon.
Im glad that syllable seems to be doing so well. But i dont see any real improvements happeneing.
Really? You don’t think the multi-media framework is interesting in the very least? libsyllable and the appserver have also been improved; you might not see the imediate or obvious benefits of what we’re currently doing but then you’re likely not actually looking at the code. Believe me, some the changes being made are a big deal but you have to look ahead to understand why.
The kernel has barely changed since AtheOS was forked.
Thats because the AtheOS kernel was actually 95% complete and works very well. The driver management has changed totally since AtheOS and works much better. Swap has been fixed. What else do we need to change?
As far as the OS goes the only thing happeneing is people porting over linux code.
Again you might not see the benefit of what we’ve been doing with things like Gcc and Glibc but believe me, these are a big deal for Syllable. We’ll not need to maintain an out of date toolchain, for a start. As the OS is in development, the toolchain is one of the most important things you can have.
I dont think it will ever get anywhere unless the actual OS gets worked on.
Just because we’re not steaming ahead with new and flashy features with little substance does not mean the OS has not been worked on. I’d suggest you take a look at the Changelogs and see where the work has gone. If there really is some feature you’d like to see in Syllable you’re more than free to do it and submit it to us; thats one of the benfits of an Open Source OS.
“The kernel has barely changed since AtheOS was forked.”
Erm, so in your book a USB subsystem, media framework, new ATA driver and all sorts of other goodies count as “barely changed”? Theres a lot going on – if you actually read the ChangeLogs you might see this.
This should also be pointed out: you don’t see the same kind of massive subsystem rewrites (a la Linux) in Syllable because much of the kernel already WORKS. The VM subsystem, the network stack, etc. are proven and usable, as are many other components in Syllable. It’s perhaps the most complete “hobby” OS at present, but the coders are still working on stuff like APIs and the desktop etc.
Hi,
Kurt left us with a pretty stable kernel, so why mess with success. We do have some stuff we have to fix/implement in the kernel, but we are all so busy doing fixes/improvements to other parts of the OS. What you are forgetting is that Syllable is the whole system together. The OS would not run without the AppServer/LibSyllable, so while we are kindof neglecting the kernel right now, we are still working on the OS.
The Screenshot looks very nice.
Existing more of this?
More newer one… (not the old one on the Syllable homepage)
The last time I have tested it, was for some years, where its was calles AtheOS. But on this time, it don’t run with my S3-virge graphic-card, I think. So, I gived up, to test it.
I have no internet-connection at home. So I can only test Syllable, if it is on a Magazine-CD – like the AtheOS for some years.
So, I can’t test Syllable, but the screenshot looks very nice. Congratulations to this!
“I’ve made this point in several places now but the new ATA driver makes Syllable very fast and more than pleasent to use. Both machines I am currently using (One Intel and one Via chipset) both boot from Grub to the Syllable login dialog in aprox. 6 seconds. That is the fastest I’ve ever seen any OS boot (Even if I am biased, you can’t deny that 6 seconds is fast”
Hey, my Atari 800XL booted in a second or three, and it doesn’t have to go through the BIOS and GRUB.