While everybody was out partying and what not this New Years eve, Tech^salvager decided to sit down and write a review of SkyOS beta 8.2. Read the review here.
Review: SkyOS Beta 8.2
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
At least, they don’t proclaim their betas ‘RCx’ or ‘Neo’.
“Another reason is because I was learning C++ at the time and wanted to develop applications that could be useful for people, but I saw that my apps would get very little attention on OSs like Linux distros and Windows. So I decided to sign up and help further development of apps on the SkyOS OS.”
thats not true, skyos uses free software all the time. in fact im sure hed have a greater shot at getting his software into skyos if it had the GPL on it.
thats not true, skyos uses free software all the time. in fact im sure hed have a greater shot at getting his software into skyos if it had the GPL on it.
—-
not necessary. A completely proprietary base can very well use gpl’ed apps. there is a whole lot of them on skyos right now.
gaim
gnu stuff including gcc et all
firefox, thunderbird, khtml? and so on
not all “free” software is GPL, so what if the skyOS team use OSS to get some strong apps for the platform, yeah they’ll have to give the makefiles and *.diff’s back but in the end who does them using OSS hurt?
You know why people feel SkyOS is not contributing back to the community because their OS is almost useless without GPL applications. If you are making your OS popular by using all major GPL applications, atleast morally (if not legally) you should contribute some thing to the community.
Its his first review of an operating system and I know it takes time and some courage to start publishing reviews for everyone to read. While this first attempt is most likely a good learning experience for him – it doesn’t answer many questions about new features or changes in the OS.
Maybe I’m just a bit of a crumudgeon but telling everyone how GAIM, Abiword, and 1 or 2 games work in an OS doesn’t give a clear picture of the state of that system. Even if GAIM and Abiword worked absolutely perfect that means they’d run exactly like people expect in most linux distrobutions – i.e. it doesn’t tell me anything interesting about SkyOS itself. Its almost like writing a review about how gentoo, suse, fedora, windows, freebsd, openbsd, netbsd compare to each other by describing just the “firefox user experience” in each one.
skyOS team have contributed quite a few bug fixes and new features back to the OpenBeFS project, not alot really considering how many OSS projects they use but its a start
there used to quite a few reviews on expert zone before i changed the CMS ill see if i can dig them out for you.
Quoted from Vincet Mortellaro
“Its his first review of an operating system and I know it takes time and some courage to start publishing reviews for everyone to read. While this first attempt is most likely a good learning experience for him – it doesn’t answer many questions about new features or changes in the OS.
Maybe I’m just a bit of a crumudgeon but telling everyone how GAIM, Abiword, and 1 or 2 games work in an OS doesn’t give a clear picture of the state of that system. Even if GAIM and Abiword worked absolutely perfect that means they’d run exactly like people expect in most linux distrobutions – i.e. it doesn’t tell me anything interesting about SkyOS itself. Its almost like writing a review about how gentoo, suse, fedora, windows, freebsd, openbsd, netbsd compare to each other by describing just the “firefox user experience” in each one.”
Thank you very much for your advice Vincent Mortellaro I’ll keep that in mind the next time I write another review. Thank you very much.
-Tech^salvager
that is exactly how I feel. I would love for people to use FS/OSS more often. On SkyOS the software is getting ported to actually be a part of this proprietary os. How about we get Microsoft to jump on this train and dish out FSF/OSS as a part of their Windows OS.
Since you’re reading, would you mind answering a few questions about your experience with the OS? I don’t have an x86 box lying around and I’m guessing trying to run a beta through a virtual pc isn’t the best way to see how the system will do natively.
The GUI interface do you know if its tied directly into the kernel? How stable was it? Is it multithreaded? Did the interface hang or crash at any point? Did this take the whole kernel with it or was the GUI just restarted? How customizable is the GUI?
How is the installation of 3rd party programs that are not installed when the system is being loaded? In terms of configuring programs and the OS is this more of a text based system or does the GUI handle most of the configuration?
How are the fonts in the system? Are TTFs supported out-of-the-box? Is there support for right-to-left languages? Does the system use UTF8?
Did you run into any hardware support problems during the installation? If so what did you need to fix the situation? What resources were avaliable for you to get that information?
Thanks in advance if you have the time to answer.
Really nothing helpful at all. I learned nothing about SkyOS
Good reveiw for your first try, better than I could of ever done. I thought it was good, though it didn’t go much into the features and stuff.
TheCenter what would you like me to go over the next time I review SkyOS. What do you want to see in a OS review? Thanks for your advice
-Tech^salvager
Sure I will answer you question to the best of my abilitys Vincent Mortellaro.
I believe the GUI is not intergrated into the kernel, but I do not know for certain. The GUI is very stable for me. The only time I saw the GUI lock up was when I messed with Developer Studio. Yes I believe it is multithreaded. One Time and the whole system froze up ( That was when I was messing with Develop studio ). Most of the time if a certain app crashes it will only crash and won’t effect the GUI or Kernel. Customizablity of the GUI is right now unknown to me, I know they have a couple different themes and you set different wallpapersBackgrounds. I do not think the skyos has yet released the info on how to create a Theme for SkyOS.
Hmm Since most of the apps come with the betas for use there really no thrid party apps I know of for install and since I installed every app at the beginning of the skyos install I can’t comment on how installing apps of the skyos beta cd was. The GUI handles most of configuration.
For your next set of questions I will guote the overview of the skyos about page
“The entire SkyOS GUI and core system supports UTF8. From the time you press a key on the keyboad (UTF8) to the final step (rendering UNICODE TrueType characters), all text and characters are handled in UTF8. Because of this, you can type and view text in any language like english, german or even chinese.
A built-in translation system makes it possible to translate applications very easily to other languages. Language switching works on the fly. This means, right after you changed the language settings, all applications are switched to this language.
The primary language for the SkyOS GUI and native applications is english. Out of the box, the GUI and most applications have a german translation too.
The GUI and a few appliations are available in german, english, dutch, swedish and polish already.”
I didn’t run into any Hardware support problems when installing SkyOS except I did have to repartition my drive cause I wanted to use SkyOS’s native FS, SkyFS, instead of a FAT 32 one. Very easy to do to with the tools provided too. All I had to do was click on the partition delete it then create a new SkyFS partition and format it for use.
No problem Vincent Mortellaro, I am glad to help out other people.
hehe but can’t since I’m only 17 and wouldn’t drink anyways.
So now I know I won’t be paying 30$ for this, thank you.
Okay, because someone who wrote there first review did not advertise the OS, you decide not to use it. Whatever. Its your choice not mind, I do recommend you reconsider.
In the future SkyOS will have an advantage to linux and other OSS software because of flexibility, usablilty, and most importantly there is only ONE of it.
“hehe but can’t since I’m only 17 and wouldn’t drink anyways.”
That is nice
I feel that we should support smart young people. They are our future.
I would like to read comments about a skyos story and just once not have the OSS thing come into it. Yes, we all know you are unhappy. No, your useless comments again and again aren’t productive. Just like this.
>In the future SkyOS will have an advantage to linux and other
> OSS software because of flexibility, usablilty, and most
> importantly there is only ONE of it.
I’m sorry, I’m just curious: How is having ONE version of SkyOS an advantage to OSS software?
Anyways, I wish SkyOS success. Just don’t pull a Microsoft one and we’ll be cool.
Mabye I should clarify, more of a one distro.
It will lead to less confusion and better product support.
And I hope SKyOS doesn’t pull a microsoft, and even if it does, i doubt it will anytime soon.
Thank you for the review of SkyOS, Tech^salvager. You did a great job for your first time, and we look forward to more reviews in the future!
Where were the screenshots!?!
Most of the review were arbitrary “x out of 5” assignments for pieces of tangential applications. It seems like it has been a while since there was an indepth examination of SkyOS for us non-subscribing folk. I would’ve liked to see him examine the OS bits, not the applications. Some screen shots of the control panel, task bar, program menu, etc.
To the people who get pissed about Sky’s use of GPL software: Why don’t you put this much effort into bashing Apple? Apple is using a kernel they didn’t write and then closed practically everything the free community would find useful or interesting. SkyOS is already committed to contributing their filesystem modifications and has promised to contribute more to the community once they get their feet off the ground.
“Most of the review were arbitrary “x out of 5″ assignments for pieces of tangential applications. It seems like it has been a while since there was an indepth examination of SkyOS for us non-subscribing folk. I would’ve liked to see him examine the OS bits, not the applications. Some screen shots of the control panel, task bar, program menu, etc.”
I myself am planning to make a review of beta 8.3 once it’s out. Also on eXp Zone, so you might as well keep an eye on that site.
Thank you Mike, I will keep that in mind the next time I write another review. I’m glad you mentioned what I should do next time instead of just saying this was a crappy review thing.
Thanks
-Tech^salvager
I spent about 30 minutes looking around the website last night trying to figure this whole thing out. While I’m impressed of the amount they’ve accomplished with relatively few people, I wasn’t as impressed when I took a look in the forum.
There seemed to be a very large anti-open source undertone. If it wasn’t for the GPL/LGPL and its applications, this OS would be dead in the water and nowhere near useable.
I think they will fail to obtain any substantial market mass.
there is no Anti-Open Source undertone on the skyOS forums its just people suggest using GPL drivers for skyOS without understanding that the use of GPL drivers in skyOS is a violation of the GPL
Its not that they are anti-open source. SkyOS is Robert’s baby, its been his hobby long before it became something the OS community was paying attention to. Robert doesn’t want Sky to become forked and inconsistent like all the linux distros out there.
The SkyOS team will almost certainly work with the OSS community on various projects and contribute, but Robert wants to retain control. So long as the closed parts don’t contain any GPL code, that decision is Robert’s alone.
I don’t think they are really looking for any level of commercial success at the moment.
As far as the commercial sector is concerned, there are no real linux distrobution forks in the US. Your choices are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux – no ISV will agree to supporting their product on any other linux flavor. So while yes linux is great, linux is wonderful, linux is gpl, linux is open source, linux is also a lock-in for businesses.
Sure you can change your OS from RHEL to Novell, but your ISVs won’t support you in your switch anymore. Its not much of an option to be able to migrate operating systems w/o your key applications having support anymore.
RE: @ Tech^salvager, by Vincent Mortellaro
“The GUI interface do you know if its tied directly into the kernel?”
There is no lower-level command line behind SkyOS. The GUI is made up of a series of applications launched by the kernel (bootscreen, login, desktop/panel/notification window). Think windows/explorer.exe.
“How stable was it?”
There are some tearing/redraw speed issues, but generally speaking, completed applications run fine. It is a relatively stable OS, and what isn’t stable is due to it’s beta status. People seem to forget that we’re .5-1 year away at least from any kind of public release (whether it be RC or final) when they comment. You’re not looking at the final product. You’re not looking at anything close to the final product.
“Is it multithreaded?”
Preemptive multi[task/thread]ing.
“Did the interface hang or crash at any point?”
When unstable applications are launched, the interface has hung for me. But during normal operation, the interface is stable.
“Did this take the whole kernel with it or was the GUI just restarted?”
Doesn’t take the kernel down, but some GUI apps will stop responding. I’m not sure if, when GUI applications crash, they’re restarted, but if they’re not, it’s early yet.
“How customizable is the GUI?”
Theme selection, GUI preferences (amount of GUI detail, shadows, etc)
“How is the installation of 3rd party programs that are not installed when the system is being loaded?”
Program installation works through a package system. Files are zipped using your favorite zipping program. Each zip (or “package”) must contain a configuration file in the root directory. That file is not copied to the harddrive. The rest of the zip is copied, keeping the directory structure (IE: if you want to place a file in /boot/programs/appname/, the file in your zip should be in /boot/programs/appname/).
“In terms of configuring programs and the OS is this more of a text based system or does the GUI handle most of the configuration?”
A full BASH command line is available for general debug purposes, but by 5.0-final, a command line should not be needed. That was one of the original goals of SkyOS.
“Are TTFs supported out-of-the-box?”
Our font engine is FreeType 2 (I’m pushing for something with subpixel AA, but that may take time). Yes, they are.
“Is there support for right-to-left languages?”
I don’t think so, actually. There has never been much call for it. Though I know there is support for Asian charactes (inherent to FreeType).
“Does the system use UTF8?”
“From start to finish.”
RE: SkyOS, by Jay
“There seemed to be a very large anti-open source undertone. If it wasn’t for the GPL/LGPL and its applications, this OS would be dead in the water and nowhere near useable.”
You’re completely right. Without developers sharing code, every start-up project like ours would have to completely reinvent a webbrowser, office package, image-manipulation program, etc. Every one of the opensource applications we port is a project that has taken that specific group years to develop. It’s insane for anyone to expect two programmers to do in one year what hundreds of programmers have done in ten. Hence we use and contribute to open-source.
“I think they will fail to obtain any substantial market mass.”
That’s probably a safe stance to take. Chances are, we won’t. But it’s about the risk. Look, we’re a loose congrigation of people from around the world held together by a forum. As potential arises, SkyOS takes a larger priority in our lives. We’re looking to legally form a company, I’m months overdue for a new website, etc. No one claims we’re the OS prophacy. We’re just doing our best to produce a product everyone involved can be proud of. (And, this isn’t in response to anyone in particular, but it needs to be cleared up. We’re not in it for the money. Everything we get goes back into development of SkyOS. None of us have profited from this personally.)
I wrote this fast, so we’ll just pretend there aren’t any errors.
Er, freetype2 does subpixel hinting, doesn’t it? At least, fontconfig+freetype2 does.
But couldn’t the same be said about commercial linux distros as well? Even Linus said that he’s ok with it. I’ve seen lots of BSD style licensed code in both linux and windows apps so I think they do want commercial companies adopting and making their product better even if they make money off them. Do you know how many game companies have adopted Quake engine eventhough they didn’t pay a dime to ID sw? A lot. Sometimes profit takes a second place to knowledge. It’s ok to copy and use other’s ideas when the license says it’s ok. I don’t think they just took the linux code and dumped it straight into their own os. They did developed their own os code also so think of it as paying for that.
Many people here are missing the point. At no point in time have the owners/representatives of SkyOS (Robert and his few helpers) encouraged anti-OSS activity. Robert has contributed lots to the softwares he has borrowed from, inlcuding submitting fixes to BeFS, and writing a 30-page document on porting Mozilla apps to alternative OS’s (very soon).
The *entire* kernel of the OS, the GUI and almost every other “main” function currently in SkyOS is 100% Roberts code. There have been about 6 different OSS projects that have been ported thus far, and there is nothing wrong with that. Robert is not violating any licenses or shunning the projects he is borrowing from.
I don’t understand why people flame sometimes..
@ i3x171um,
Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. Since I don’t have a machine to really test this out as a better tester, your answers were a great help for me to understand this project a bit better.
@ OSS/GPL Posters,
Enough with the “its my ball” syndrome. Please read your license. No where does it say, or imply, or hint that just because a project includes GPL code that the developers have to share not only code relating to the GPL code they used but whatever else you feel like. Its childish, and a waste of time.
Typically, I roll my eyes at the “OSS == communism” comparisons. But the attitude that “giving back to the community” is voluntarily-compulsory, that’s downright Soviet.
Who in their right mind would put the gui in the kernel?
I don’t mind if it is a limited version ala Xandros and their OCE version, or even if it is a livecd like SUSE does.
I’m very curious about testing it out but I don’t want to pay for it until I know if I will like it enough to buy it.
I just recently bought Xandros 3.0 Deluxe because I was so impressed with just how usable the 2.01 OCE edition was.
If I like SkyOS I’ll definately buy it and support the creators of it.
We’re waiting until 5.0-final to release a limited version, and we’re not entirely sure as to how it will be limited.
Appearently, Microsoft.
Win2k+ has win32 bits in the kernel as win32k.sys. It’s a kernel-mode driver.
Of course, that might not actually answer your question… :p
The hosting site for the article is giving off an error…
“Unable to load database indicated by configuration file.”
–bornagainpenguin
“Appearently, Microsoft.
Win2k+ has win32 bits in the kernel as win32k.sys. It’s a kernel-mode driver.
Of course, that might not actually answer your question… :p”
Hey guess what, it’s like that on linux too. Stuff like DRI or even nvidia linux drivers use kernel mode drivers/modules so don’t be a smartass.
So now answering a question makes him a smartass? He said nothing about whether or not Linux had kernel mode drivers for graphics, he simply said that Win2k had them. Maybe he doesn’t know Linux. Maybe he only knows Win2k.
Better to consider these options than to label him a smartass for a correct answer.
Nvidia drivers are _drivers_, so they live in kernelspace(as linux is monolithic). BTW, in windows, drivers live in kernelspace too.
No drawing/rendering is done in the linux kernel. DRI is simply an infrastructure that guides various packets of data to various places. E.g. it allows an opengl application to draw directly into the framebuffer, so the app doesnt have to write to an X image first. DRI does *not* do any drawing in the kernel. This is quite different from how it is in windows.
Thank you. I knew it was much different in Linux, but to be honest I wasn’t sure how. I figured it was better to let someone else answer than to speak of something I wasn’t certain about.
-Preston
in the review, it is said that there are hw-accelerated nvidia drivers. How did you accomplish that:)?(’cause, in linux the only way to get this is the “official” driver)
I should think that’s 2d acceleration, not 3d.
It means ‘not using vesa’.
Yeah, sorry, i just got carried away:)
@ Tech^salvager : You did a good job on your first review.
@ Everyone else:
I figured I’d mention briefly my experience with native SkyOS programming.
I’ve been developing in SkyOS off and on for several months. It is a lot of fun to develop applications in SkyOS and I’ll admit rather easy.
I am writing native SkyOS API applications and games.
Here, check out a picture of a demo I wrote after about 3-4 days into it (note: I worked a day job and did this in the evening) http://mama.indstate.edu/users/arc/game/s2.jpg . I’ve come a lot further since that time (August). The picture does not show it animating/moving, but there are 25 objects and an MP3 playing. It had 50-100 objects, but it cluttered the picture, so I dropped it to 25. I am getting on average 50 fps on either version — note: I am forcing it to max at 50 fps. It’s from a 2D demo I originally wrote for embedded operating systems. It’s multi-threaded too and runs nicely along with Blender (3d renderer) and a 3d OpenGL demo running all together — no major cpu performance hit.
I should state, I use and test SkyOS beta 8.2 from VMware Workstation version 4. I develop mainly using Cygwin.
The game engine has been pretty much completed and I should have something to show in the coming month(s). The game engine is written in C (also working on C++ and Java versions for use on Syllable, MacOS, Linux and AmigaOS).
It’s fun to write applications for SkyOS. If you have spare time and want to join in the fun, please do!
Recently, I’ve had some discussion with sb. on skyos forums about where the heck all the drawing is done in skyos. Robert jumped in and told:
the basic windowing subsystem is located inside the kernel as a module. Yes, SkyOS is a modular monolithic kernel.
All the Buttons, Icons and widgets are drawn by the Library. Either A widget class sends a drawing command to the kernel library which is responsible for drawing on window areas – or it draws directly to its window area (actually the process gets the framebuffer memory area mapped into its adress space). AS I have not get an answer about where does the library get clipping information from, I think, the windowing subsystem passes an array of clips to the library when it is operating in “direct drawing mode”.
I don’t think it is a false approach to have the basic windowing alongside with some drawing primitives inside the kernel – and meanwhile offering possibilities to draw directly to framebuffer memory. Your average mileage concerning this might vary. Me as a kernel/os developer has just an other approach of thinking about that stuff.
regarding OSS stuff and sorta: Isn’t that settled already? AFAIK, Robert ‘n’ Kelly have talked to the “Owners” of the OSS projects in question and they have got an ok. SO what the heck do third parties meddle arond here, where everything is put straight and proven to be in correct state? Thank you so very much for Not issueing snide OSs comments being full of envy.
regarding paying or not paying: Thats your own decision. No one is taking it away from you. *shrugs*. so why even bother discussing about it? If you want to buy a pair of shoen, you pay for ’em too, don’t you – after you have decided to buy them.
Well in linux the framebuffer is a kernel device, therefore if you are drawin to the framebuffer then you are drawing in wich memory space? yes that’s right! now move along.
The linux framebuffer device does nothing else but this:
If you want to use the device, iirc, you use some IFCTL-command to get the framebuffer memory mapped in.
The Framebuffer device driver passes the request on to the memory manager which maps the framebuffer area into the calling process’ address space (surrounded with ro guard pages ?). This is accompaigned with an entry in the process address space management structure ( an entry like *framebuffer memory*region: 0x40000000-0x40ffffff – as a rough example)
so if the process dares to access any region beyond the mapped in framebuffer (or any memory region not belonging to it) – guess what? the process traps into page fault handler and gets killed.
You simply canna draw in kernel memory space directly – without issueing system calls to do the ring0-ring3 transition. so, mapping in the framebuffer memory is the most efficient method. 🙂
the nvidia driver offers, additionally to a framebuffer device, a set of commands to directly meddle with the graphic adapter primitives – blit, move, etc … in order to achieve hardware acceleration.
stay safe
starts at 0xa00000000 if i remember correctly. Anyway by drawing in kernel space i meant the function calls are on the kernel module not that video memory is part of kernel space.
sorry. I’ve misunderstood.
That’s of course correct – but wouldn’t this be a bit cpu-time wasting: for each drawing operation (and the X-Window server just carries out drawing primitives afaik – like draw_rect(window_hnd,x1,y1,x2,y2) directly to screen.) to issue a system call and draw to framebuffer memory?
wouldn’t it be better to carry out the whole drawing offscreen and then blit ´the affected chunk to screen in one single operation – by using the graphics card blit function if it uses one? Hmm … isn’t X doing it this way already?
> Who in their right mind would put the gui in the kernel?
Jay Miner put it in Amiga OS.
If the best os ever had it, it must be a good idea.
And linux is a good example why not having it in the kernel is a bad idea.
“wouldn’t it be better to carry out the whole drawing offscreen and then blit ´the affected chunk to screen in one single operation – by using the graphics card blit function if it uses one? Hmm … isn’t X doing it this way already?
Blitting involves copying memory from one place to another, page flipping would be faster (if you have enough video memory that is) because it’s just a simple pointer swap.
I’m pretty sure X can do page flipping if the drivers support it. Double buffering (drawing offscreen and then blitting to the primary surface) i don’t think X does.
What a complete test 😉