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We also added a rewritten picture viewer, a new PDF reader and a 
number of new dock applets. An updated version of our web browser 
is available separately.

one recomandation under windows to unzip the syllable ISO image compressed 
in bz2 the best software to recommand to people is 7-zip (http://www.7-zip.org) 
it's free pretty performant and unix compression algo compliant unlike 
winzip :)

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! ;~>

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 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

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

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

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 :-)

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.

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

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

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

I use it to boot up with and check PCs with XP for viruses and spyware.

And: did Carl say anything further about porting rebol there? MAybe 
he can make a short test-case for that select-stuff?

No way to put the install on some partition and install from there? 
(i have a partition, really!)

JForth seems to be a freeware binary distribution. Without the source, 
there's nothing to port. Also, it seems to be completely Amiga-specific. 
There are plenty of Forths that would be much easier and more useful 
to port

No printer support yet. We're planning to port and integrate CUPS 
in the 0.6.x series, which we will start soon. Basic printer support 
will probably happen in the coming year

but that reminded me on bigforth, and i confused typing.

It says it compiles to 68000 machine code. This thing is very specific 
to 68000 and to Amiga. Not at all suitable for porting to Syllable

but then bigforth has everything else too, and a swapdragon.

Replacing it with an X86 compiler would mean rewriting it. And then 
you have a new compiler that can't be ported when we port Syllable 
to some other architecture

This is one of the things where Syllable is generally much more modern 
than AmigaOS. It's all portable C and C++. There are just a few very 
small fragments of assembler code in Syllable

forth-compilers are not that complex, mostly "look word up, copy 
some bytes". Except of the professional ones which do register-optimizing 
and tricks.

fig yes. and every compiler-bit can be reused in the application 
as a menu-system :)

The boot floppies are old. They may not contain the unzip executable 
that you need to unpack the Syllable base package. You may be able 
to extract unzip from the base package and add it to the floppies, 
or put it on a FAT partition and mount that from the floppies

Can i install an old syllable and upgrade that?

You could, but it would be messy, especially the last upgrade to 
0.5.7. And you may not find out that newer Syllables don't run on 
your machine until you upgrade

Did you find the base zip and the floppies yet?

Do you know how booting works? if i extract the cd to hd and fidle 
with lilo, can i then boot something?

If you want to boot with something else, like LiLo, you have to install 
GrUB in the Syllable partition instead of the Master Boot Record, 
and chainload to there from LiLo

Syllable boots in about ten seconds and shuts down in a few, so reboot 
time would be about fifteen seconds plus the time the machine takes 
to initialize and get to the boot loader

And there's no one in the torrent swarm.

Azureus - very good Java based client with all stuff needed - auto-updting 
etc., nice and responsive GUI. I wonder if REBOL would handle such 
app :-)

The live CD site and the other Scandinavian sites are down due to 
a double hard disk failure

What AtheOS site are you trying? The original atheos.cx domain and 
site are hijacked by some thug selling drugs. Our archive of the 
original site was on the Scandinavian server, so it's down

the iso image is compressed with bz2, and now I have to find a japanese 
web site that has lzarc to decompress the bloody thing

It's like a website -- two clicks and I'm out.

that goes the same for .rip - fine format - bug ugly .... I want 
to enter all common archives as a directory of some kind ... so I 
want rebol to handle .zip and get rid of .rip

I have windows which has zip support, and I have Dopus for windows. 
 I had to download lharc support the other day.

you change the filename, and it won't decompress anymore!

Graham, I thought you ran Linux and BSD?

And I only set up servers to run linux.

I simply want my file manager (Total commander) to treat it natively, 
and it does so for .zip, .arj, .rar and probably others - the same 
goes for ftp - just normal as a directory ... so my-file: read %/C/some-dir/some-zip.zip/my-file.r 
:-)

I don't know lzarc; what is it? It's certainly far less common than 
bzip2 and 7Zip

it's an izarc and not Lzarc .. misread it.

7Zip is only 1 MB, has a normal English web site and is open source

BZip2 compresses quite a bit better than Zip, and the CDs are fairly 
big, so...

Original archive was 34.7 Mb, and recompressed with zip was 45.2 
Mb.

Howver, the time taken to search for a bzip2 decompressor, download 
and install, and then decompress was longer than the time it would 
have taken to download the extra 10Mb.  Maybe offer people  the choice 
of what archive they want.

I guess I need to read some docs, as there are two accounts - one 
user and one root.  Both require passwords.  I guessed the user account 
password of "guest".  Didn't know what the root password was.  Reached 
a low res screen, and network chipset not detected ( using a Centrino 
chipset ).

I guess you don't have bzip2 if you pay a few hundred bucks for the 
privilege of running Windows XP. Older Windows versions come with 
nothing, XP comes with Zip. Syllable comes for free with Zip, GZip 
and BZip2 installed, and the Archiver utility has more

640x480 Is the default screen setting. It doesn't upset monitors, 
and the login screen doesn't need more. Can you set a higher resolution: 
is your video chip supported?

Can't you change it, then? You should at least be able to set a few 
more resolutions. With the VESA driver, the resolutions and refresh 
rate are just more limited

It will be an awful lot of work, but it should happen someday, and 
then we will really be in business

Because what I expect from usable OS is: browser, communication tool 
(IRC, ICQ, ...), audio software, some office suite (it's needed sometimes), 
REBOL and some games (or UAE ;). That's what I'm using 99% of time.

We're on the virge of having reasonable browser, email, chat and 
SDL games. I believe UAE is a priority for our project leader. :-)

If you're familiar with a Unix command line, there are a lot of standard 
CLI and Curses apps you could use to fill the gaps

That's just Core on PPC Linux. Both ports on PPC and on Linux were 
already done, so this is little more than saying that Core 2.6 still 
builds successfully on those systems

How much work to reinstall? And is there a spare machine for installation 
experiments?

ANd thanks for the hind. I try that more carefull now.

It wants root, like all the Linux installers. It can do what it wants, 
and it does

The effect it had was eerie. When I moved a file in the Gnome filer, 
the hard disk stopped running and wouldn't come back when rebooting

VMware supports just about any Linux as a client with no difficulty. 
However, it requires a bit of hacking and testing to host VMware, 
so they have only done so on a few stable, commercial distributions 
like RedHat and SUSE.

OK, but those 1600 lines build a complete desktop operating system 
with applications, while those 13,000 lines install and configure 
one application - without checking for destroying your system

Sorry, haven't kept up here. Should I be able to run Syllable under 
VMWare? I tried it on my laptop, but it never completes the boot 
process, and no time to spend digging right now.

Seems they have an old image with vmware, and vmware ate Kajs ubuntu 
when he tried to update that. If a normal install works Kaj will 
say. :)

I am happy to report that I ported Orca, the open-source REBOL clone, 
to Syllable. I intend to make this the default scripting language, 
and in the long run, the default programming language in Syllable

I had heard of R# and Freebell, but not Orca. A link?

When our sites were created I wanted to have them done in REBOL, 
but I had no control over it and no time to contribute to it myself, 
so I focused on the Syllable system itself. Of course, it's nonsense 
to have our small amounts of data in relational databases and things 
like this would never have happened with a REBOL implementation

Probably comparable to the first stages of REBOL/Core years ago. 
On the other hand, it also has some much newer functionality already 
implemented. It has a simple interface to QT on Linux and the beginnings 
of an interface to OpenGL

What I like a lot is that CALL and things like GET-ENV are already 
there, so you can do a lot in a Unixy system by calling external 
commands, which is exactly what my programs do

Not very well. It has the interactive REBOL mode, but it's still 
very primitive. No tab completion and history recall and such

Just tried installing Syllable to a AMD K6-350MHz system. I checked 
the menu.lst file and it seems to be correctly pointing root (hd0,0) 
  (there's nothing else on the drive.)   On rebooting, I received 
"Error loading operating system. Setup cannot continue."

The installer gives you the option to press "e" and AEdit will start 
automatically with menu.lst :-)

I know how you feel, though. I also have the tendency to feel my 
way through the installation and did it several times in the beginning 
to form a mental picture of it

You have to boot the CD again and enter the GrUB shell. Please read 
the install.txt

/Install and then maybe deeper in a docs directory or something

Ok, finished install, used 'r' to reboot, escaped into grub shell, 
did root (hd0,0) and setup (hd0), that seemed to be successful.

Then I typed 'reboot', set my bios to boot from C only, and now it's 
just sitting with
	GRUB _
and a blinking command prompt, but no interactivity possible.

Ok, first I am going to try go back and see what those error messages 
were.

DiskManager is for when you only have free space and need to make 
a new partition

First shutdown actually froze, had to use power button (sorry..:). 
Second boot and shutdown OK.

Third boot (I think) I changed window decoration and ps/2 mouse froze 
over the apply button, never to move again. I fumbled on the keyboard 
but did not find a way to shutdown without using the power button 
again (!).

Control-Alt-Delete is also OK, although you have to use the upper 
delete key on the keyboard. This is a clean shutdown and reboot

The appearance preference applet is indeed broken in this version. 
It does freeze, and then Control-Alt-Delete is the best way out. 
As far as I've seen, the decorator does change after rebooting

We have a USB stack, but few specific USB drivers, so only USB mice 
and mass storage devices like memory sticks are supported right now

There are drivers for UHCI, OHCI and EHCI USB 2, so all controllers 
should work

While the user interface was already fast and smooth for relatively 
simple windows content, this also makes the experience smooth for 
complicated windows that would otherwise take noticable time to redraw, 
like web browser windows. Currently available on nVidia GeForce, 
Ati Radeon and SiS video drivers

There were also a lot of bug fixes and small enhancements to drivers 
and applications, further approaching a stable platform. Syllable 
should now boot on a lot more machines