SkyDeveloperStudio is available. This IDE makes it possible to create C, C++, Perl and Java projects with syntax highlighting, intergrated source level debugger and an intergrated profiler. Also, SkyOS 5.0 beta4 will be released today to the beta testing team including: SkyDeveloperStudio, GTK, Abiword, and The Gimp. On other hobby OS news, the AROS team gets nVidia support.
SkyOS 5.0 beta4 Release and SkyDeveloperStudio
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
These guys work *fast*. I secretly think that Robert is hiding a colony of cocaine-addicted coding hamsters in his basement
These guys work *fast*. I secretly think that Robert is hiding a colony of cocaine-addicted coding hamsters in his basement
Either that, or he’s independantly wealthy and doesn’t need to work a normal job!
Either that, or he’s independantly wealthy and doesn’t need to work a normal job!
you don’t need to be wealthy to do that. just work for a few years and save any penny you can, then quit working. that’s what I did. It works well if you don’t have any expensive habits.
It seems to me he has bigger plans for Sky than just another hobby OS. Why else spend the time on an IDE and porting gtk, abiword, gimp, the documentation, etc.
It is amazing how far this OS has come. Really, really amazing. The design is beautiful, & I only bring this up because they have placed so much emphasis on the importance of the design with the contest & all… What is the motivation behind those little black bubbles in the center of every window where the window title resides? Everything in the GUI looks so professional & slick except for that. The font just seems to sort of hang below the bubble & look like it is haphazardly placed. Don’t get me wrong, I am only nit-picking this LITTLE thing because the OS is already so impressive, but honestly, this is my one big turn off to the design. Thoughts?
since SkyOS was originally built for i386, would it be easy to extend it for amd64, and will it be done when amd64 will be more widespread?
I agree. I’ve brought it up before in the SkyOS forums, and I’ve heard pther about it as well… Maybe I’ll set up a poll in the SkyOS forums…
Well, the poll is up.
http://www.skyos.org/board/viewtopic.php?t=17850
Here you are.
I DLed the nightly ISO build and could select the NVDIA drivers.
Works fine! Good job!!!
I think this project is very cool! Good work guys!
I think IMHO that the three boxes in the upper right corner does not fit very well into the design… What about trying something else?
in focus: http://exire.no/sider/fil.asp?id=193
oo focus: http://exire.no/sider/fil.asp?id=194
Maybe it’s just me.. :O)
Mmm, I must say I like your little twist. Make sure you create a theme of it once 5.0 comes out!
I noticed 2 things:
The Taskbar (or whatever it’s called) doesn’d have a shadow.
And the shadow at the windows right top corner has a wrong shape.
If you are referring to the two images, I haven’t done anything else than replacing the three boxes..
(..and ajusted the title one pixel up..)
I don’t know anything about SkyOS, except that it looks wonderful. What will it do (or do better) than other OSes, and will the final version be available on a Live CD?
I agree, the title “bubble” looks out of place, and the title text is too low. Has anyone tried the new version? What happens if the titles get too long? Does the “bubble” resize automatically?
It says their no longer available.
http://www.skyos.org/downloads/binaries.php
ftp://lynx-tech.biz
I have 3.8.
I think I have later versions somewhere…
Kinda off topic, kninda not… any word on python being ported? If I could run pygame in SkyOS, it’d suddenly be the OS I use for 99% of everything.
Here’s some info I’ve heard from SkyOS.
I have been told SkyOS 5.0 will be free and commercial (Like BeOS) However… When I e-mailed kelly it appeared it would be 100% commercial. Robert told me over IM that it would have a free version and a paid version. I think the SkyOS People should give some clarification.
I’m unsure of what will happen but this OS, it is certainly good and I’d certainly pay money. I was also told that they are getting together a developer team to port apps to it.
Sadly, It’s volunteer work.. Which makes me think there is still going to be a free version like normal. I really don’t know and I am confused.
Robert said its just about creating the best OS for everyone to use, closed so he can have more control. I agree with him. Rock on
Robert said its just about creating the best OS for everyone to use, closed so he can have more control. I agree with him. Rock on
Linus has great control over what goes into the Linux kernel, even though it’s open source.
Victor.
As a beta tester, my understanding is that SkyOS will have a free and a full version. I don’t know if Robert has decided what exactly will be the difference between the two.
“I have been told SkyOS 5.0 will be free and commercial (Like BeOS) However… When I e-mailed kelly it appeared it would be 100% commercial. Robert told me over IM that it would have a free version and a paid version. I think the SkyOS People should give some clarification.”
Sorry if I might have confused you, but what Robert said was correct. The “Full” version of SkyOS will cost $30, and for that you will get, among other things, the full version of SkyOS on a nice CD. There will also be a “Free” version available for free download off of the website. This version will be used for evaluation purposes. It will be functional, but will be limited in some way(s) that we haven’t decided yet. This is so people can get a good understanding of what SkyOS is and if they would like to put down $30 to use it. You wouldn’t buy a car without test driving it, would you?
Linus has great control over what goes into the Linux kernel, even though it’s open source.
Ever look at the kernels used in the major distros? No one uses a kernel directly from Linus. It’s always loaded with various patches the vendor felt like including.
Look at RedHat 9.0 – it had a 2.4 kernel but with a lot of 2.6 features, such as NPTL, backported to it. NPTL was the main reason RedHat 8 and 9 weren’t fully compatible. Despite RH 9 coming with a 2.4 kernel, a multithreaded app had to be designed for the 2.6 kernel to work. That’s the kind of stuff Robert is trying to avoid.
RedHat and SuSE generally have very specific requirements for their enterprise customers. They usually cannot wait for all the changes they need to be incorporated into the main kernel. Hence the backport of NPTL (which isn’t a source-level change, btw, but a binary one). Of course, RedHat sends these changes back upstream, so they go into the mainline kernel eventually.
This is generally one of the strong points of open source. Customers can VARs can customize the OS to the specific needs of the customer, instead of burdening the main development team with trying to serve everyone’s varying needs.
I went to the website to check out SkyOS and searched the forums but couldn’t find a definitive answer to my question of what’s the point of opengl if there’s not going to be 3d drivers for SkyOS. Some kind of wrapper for windows drivers or something?
that’s why linux bazaar sux.
But there are OSS projects that work.
Each BSD is one big project. No forks, no conflicting versions.
“Each BSD is one big project. No forks, no conflicting versions.”
Erm, that’s a bit crazy. Why do you think OpenBSD exists? And DragonFly BSD? And EkkoBSD? They’re all FORKS of other BSD projects. It’s actually worse than in Linux; there you get minor kernel variations between vendors, but the userland tools and libraries are pretty much identical. When a BSD forks, development is split, diluting resources and (as time progresses) making it harder to move new features and drivers between them.
The way you say “no forks” for BSD makes me believe you haven’t been watching the BSD scene for the last 10 years. It’s had a lot of trouble with forking. As of today, though, there have been no major Linux kernel forks, or glibc forks, or coreutils forks, etc.
Well, I think the SkyOS developers have a nice clean API that does a lot of resuing of old code, if you are clever enough to build an API makes the rest of your programming easy, you too would be supprised at the results!!
But on another note: DAMN THEY ARE FAST!!
I tried SkyOS 4 and this was the first version that actually ran for me,and it was impressive for a one man project,on the down side it was buggy and didn’t support my Crystal sound chip or my soundblaster live,also I coudn’t get on the net with it.So at that point at least it was not really ready for prime time and certainly not even close to being a viable commercial product.My take on this is when the fuctionality of this OS hits the level of BeOS or Linux ,I would gladly plunk down 30 bucks for it,but not a minute sooner.Perhaps Robert should set up some kind of tip jar so people a little more finacially well endowed than I could contibute to his development efforts!
Is it already clear, if the free version of SkyOS5 is only functionally limited (e.g. no Gimp/DevStudio/AbiWord, etc.) like BeOS5 or is it like a 30-day trial of the full version?
“Is it already clear, if the free version of SkyOS5 is only functionally limited (e.g. no Gimp/DevStudio/AbiWord, etc.) like BeOS5 or is it like a 30-day trial of the full version?”
We still haven’t decided this yet. More than likely, it will be feature limitations, rather than time limitations. I don’t like letting people use something and be productive on it, and then lock them out of their information. If they want to keep using a feature limited version of the OS, then that is up to them.
We haven’t decided what features will be limited yet. We still have a lot of other things to worry about at this point. When we decide on the specifics, we’ll let everyone know.
“We still haven’t decided this yet. More than likely, it will be feature limitations, rather than time limitations. I don’t like letting people use something and be productive on it, and then lock them out of their information. If they want to keep using a feature limited version of the OS, then that is up to them. ”
Very good, exactly that’s also my opinion.
however, I can imagine that it is VERY difficult to decide which features to let out.
example: DevStudio: ok, this is a very advanced thing, worth being only in the Pro-Edition, but on the other hand, you may lose potential developers.
On the other hand, if you strip out too little, why should people buy the full version?
And by stripping out too much, people may think, the OS is not really complete and more of a hobby-os.
however, good luck in succeeding.
Thank you. We have done some thinking on it, and have some ideas, it shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll figure it out, just like we do everything else.
Man this OS is growing fast!
I think this OS has the potential of beeing a TRUE Windows alternative in the near future (1-2 years).
One big reason for that imo, is that it’s not filled with dozens of variants of the same thing, like Linux is and it’s kept very clean and standardized.
This could very well mean that SkyOS will get commercial support soon, from both hardware and software companies, or atleast I hope so.
If Linux fails as a TRUE desktop alternative (and it will unless it decides on ONE or at the most TWO standards of different apps etc, and not filled with everything you can think of including the kitchen sink) then SkyOS is what I’m hoping for instead.
Linux at this point is a mess, SkyOS is not, I think the closed source idea of this project has paid off.
-Plague
“If Linux fails as a TRUE desktop alternative (and it will unless it decides on ONE or at the most TWO standards of different apps etc, and not filled with everything you can think of including the kitchen sink) then SkyOS is what I’m hoping for instead.”
Why? It would just be trading one proprietary master for another.
open-source isn’t ALWAYS the answer and closed-source isn’t ALWAYS a bad thing.
MS are evil, which is something I cannot say about the SkyOS team, yet..
MacOSX isn’t open-source either, but people still tend to like it better than Windows, so what’s the problem?
Also, SkyOS will be cheap, so there’s really nothing to complain about.
You’ve seen what TOO MUCH freedom can do, just look at Linux and the complete mess it’s in right now. No standards, several huge fangroups that all use different software for the same thing and every single one of them refuse to switch to something else or even to not have their software of choice in default installs.
This means that just about every single Linux distro installs with several alternatives of the same type of app, as default. Which is NOT good..
SkyOS tries to avoid that by keeping control of what gets added and what doesn’t.
If you cannot live without complete and total freedom of EVERYTHING, then by all means stick with Linux or some other open-source OS.
However, for everyone else, there’s a need for a serious alternative to Windows, nomatter if it’s open-source or not.
We need competition in the OS market, just like in every other market. Monopoly is never good.
-Plague
looks like we don’t like business regarding software. Closed bad? sounds like communism… communism would have not failed if everyone became communist ya know (im not saying its a bad thing, id just perfer being more creative)
I never said open source was bad, but I said it’s not ALWAYS good, just like closed source is not ALWAYS bad.
I’m all for open source so don’t get me wrong, but there ARE examples of where open source has gone bad, or kinda bad, and there are alot of examples of where closed source has been good..