World: r3wp

yes if yiu want why not the point is promoting GPL project than yet 
well known shareware :)

The Syllable project is trying to stay out of political issues. We're 
open source, that's political enough. We want to be a platform for 
all software: free, commercial and shareware. Within the Syllable 
project, we don't necessarily have an opinion about how you should 
unpack our CDs

Several years ago I researched every compression application that 
I could and did some heavy testing with a wide range of data to see 
which one I liked the best.  7ZIP does have the best compression 
IF you use the ZIP7 algorithm with any other algorithm WinRAR is 
just as effective and has a much nicer interface.  I recently checked 
7ZIP out again and IMHO the user interface still is really ugly and 
difficult to understand let alone use.  So, if you ask my oppinion, 
don't change your compression programs or algorithms! ;~>

BurningShadow just changed the live CD from 7-Zip to RAR for the 
size, but that's up to him. The main Syllable project recently changed 
application packages from GZip to Zip. The compression is worse, 
but this allows us to include extended file attributes, so that's 
a completely different consideration

So RAR is getting better compression than the 7-Zip algorithm?

On the new live CD, at least

Interesting...

I'm downloading it now, but it is taking its time... :-(

I think it's still on Burning's private connection. Must be swamped 
by now. I got it in half an hour

When we were Slashdotted, his provider had to push more than 11'000 
live CDs :-)

I think the real problem is that open-source project can't invest 
into a hudge advertising campaign like  commercial apps. So the only 
way for open source project to be known is beeing included into open 
OS distributions :)

Or being on Slashdot - although that also has its drawbacks :-)

for example Winzip is null for Tarred files  and as most or open 
source content comes with tar.gz format Winzip can't only serv for 
the first layer.

it's not political it's hilosophical ;)

it's not political it's phylosophical issue. Do you prefer people 
having tones of shareware and not paying for them or do you want 
people using freeware and donate what they can to the author ?

Even if I have a personal opinion about it, from the point of view 
of Syllable, we don't care. We just want all that software to run 
on Syllable, and integrate well with our platform

sure but one is doesn't forbid the other ;)

That's what we mean :-)

Gregg? Same question as for Linux: can someone move this group under 
the Operating Systems divider? Thanks

Done.

Last weekend we released Syllable 0.5.7:
http://syllable.org

We're moving to a new C library over the course of several releases. 
After introducing the new GLibC in the previous release, this time 
all of the Syllable base system is recompiled on top of the new library. 
The old C and C++ libraries are still included for compatibility 
with older POSIX applications, but the old versions of the higher-level 
Syllable and AtheOS libraries have been removed. This means that 
native Syllable applications should be recompiled. Several of us 
are currently releasing new versions of our applications

There are also some releases of new stuff. For example, Simple Directmedia 
Layer (SDL) is now ported to Syllable. This opens the door to porting 
many games and other multimedia applications that are written on 
top of SDL

For Syllable itself it's the usual mix of gradual improvements all 
over the system. Lately, most of the bigger improvements have been 
in the included applications. Among others, there are new versions 
of ABrowse, our browser, XPDF, our PDF reader, and a rewrite of Whisper, 
the email client

Kaj, This sounds interesting!

I was hoping so :-)

Kaj, why AGG nor Cairo were found as insufficient for Syllable purposes? 
IIRC it is Cairo, which will be used by Mozilla platform or even 
OS-X to render, no?

I'm interested in that, too. :-) What I know is that Arno is making 
deep changes to the video driver framework to add backbuffering in 
the memory of the video cards. We think about AGG as a crossplatform 
rendering library, but Arno is considering the few simple drawing 
functions in Syllable. Things like line drawing are passed directly 
to the video drivers, and if a driver supports 2D acceleration, the 
draw is done in hardware by the video card. In our new framework, 
these drawing operations need to be able to work directly in the 
memory of the video card when necessary. It makes sense that crossplatform 
libraries are not suitable for this deep integration

Another thing is that Arno considered using OpenGL for this, but 
according to him, the OpenGL API is not suitable for multithreading, 
at least not to the extent that we need it at this low level in Syllable

who's Arno? :-)

Arno Klenke, our new coding machine after Kurt burned out over AtheOS 
:-)

you guys are terrific :-) In current days, when only Windows and 
Linux are considered as having chance to succeed, well, I forgot 
OS-X of course :-)

any news from BeOS camp, how are they doing? Are their initiatives 
differing way to much not to join the forces?

Or if Syllable is similar to AmigaOS, why not to join with Aros or 
MorphOS?

Thanks!

I strongly feel that we are joined ideologically in the Syllable 
project by all having reached the conclusion that we want to do something 
new - which was the AtheOS philosophy. The projects that aim to clone 
older systems have to deal with some significant problems. They're 
tied by backwards compatibility, and they're working in an environment 
of decay, because their legacy systems are getting ever more outdated, 
while still having significant numbers of users. This puts a lot 
of pressure on them and often leads to negative attitudes

For us the only way is up. Every improvement is a positive thing, 
and we're free to design a modern system

yes, but is it for fun? Or what is your intention? Let's say in a 
few years you reach some 1.0 state and what then? For whom is the 
system targeted?

The BeOS efforts are fractured, but Haiku seems to be doing quite 
well. Nevertheless, they're far behind Syllable. They can test parts 
on BeOS, but their own system is only running at a very basic level. 
They do have interesting pieces of code, and quite a bit of it at 
that. They use a BSD license,  so any code we want, we can integrate 
into Syllable. :-) Soon we will release a port of the OpenBFS file 
system for Syllable

Amiga has long been fractured, too. There's Amiga Inc., there's MorphOS 
and there's AROS. Recently I read that their ports of the GNU toolchain 
and other Unix tools are all different, for example, and can't be 
integrated anymore. I like AROS, but it's clear that Syllable is 
much more modern. We have all the things Amiga and Be users always 
wanted: memory protection, virtual memory, hardware abstraction layer, 
driver architecture, multi-user. We're also far ahead of AROS because 
we can port POSIX software and Linux drivers much more easily. Our 
development environment has been selfhosting for ages, we have lots 
of drivers, USB, etcetera.

Although Syllable is fun, a big reason for its founding was that 
a stated goal of AtheOS was that it was a hobby project, while we 
mean business - albeit in the long run :-)

Syllable is clearly focussed at the desktop, and we want a system 
that is as friendly as possible for regular users, while still being 
very powerful for people who know what they're doing, and offering 
a smooth learning curve between those two states. Pretty much the 
Amiga philosophy. And we have no intention of resting on our laurels 
once we call it 1.0 :-)

:-) thanks ... and what about Syllable and scripting in general?

Ahum; that's my area and it's kind of a struggle. I like high-level 
languages, but when I joined Syllable I had already established that 
there were better things than Python. I had ported Ruby to AtheOS 
and that's what we're using now in my build system and in the installer

will there be API to "plug" other languages? :-)

Ruby is very powerful, but not as elegant and agile as some others. 
We can use it well in the periphery, but we don't really want to 
include it in the system. I ported R# to Syllable, but it stalled, 
so I had to look further. Then Io came along and I ported that. It's 
great, but I still want to swap it for REBOL. That's hard, but I'm 
going to try porting Orca next

Bindings to the native Syllable API are a big problem, as with other 
systems. One of my requirements for a high-level language is that 
it makes bindings as easy as possible, and supports multithreading 
very well. I looked into many things, like .Net, but found that this 
is not the case for most languages, so I'm more focussed on getting 
one good language than a general bindings framework now

If you're interested in the video driver framework, we're now having 
an excellent discussion on the mailing list about how to integrate 
OpenGL:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum=syllable-developer

The driver framework is going to be revamped with better use of the 
video card: backbuffering and integrated 2D drawing functions. The 
current discussion will also lead to deep integration of 3D. Both 
software rendering and hardware rendering are being worked on. This 
takes the kind of fundamental changes throughout the system that 
take many years on for example Linux, because no project has control 
over all the parts that need to be changed to coordinate everything 
in the best way possible