After complaints about the previous videos being released a video recorded from VMWare. “This is VMWare and everything runs 3-5 times slower in it than normally” Rush warns.
Due to popular demand: a SkyOS VMWare-video
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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They need screen recording app (like xvidcap for linux or screencorder for win)
I think that they rather need to reales a public-free-beta
so that we would not need to download some useless videos. And I think that they have many more important things to code, than a screen recorder app.
Please do remember how slow these are. When I said that they are 3-5 times slower because it is VMWare, and then probably an extra 3-5 times slower than that due to Camtasia, I was being conservative. When using SkyOS on a real computer (i.e. not VMWare), not recording, it is VERY responsive.
Sometimes I boot up just so I can watch SkyOS power down in 4.6 seconds. =)
SkyOS is multitasking. It just became unusably slow when I had more than one application open, due to VMWare and the capture app. I originally made a video leaving the applications open, but once 3-4 applications were opened up, it just got too choppy.
Eventually, we’ll be able to capture from SkyOS, but until then, this is the best I can give you. =)
I watched the previous video, which was a recording of the screen, so you loose picture quality. The responsiveness was very impressive, even though the hardware was nothing fantastic.
Is there going to be a way to purchase SkyOS without Paypal i.e. just using a credit card. Right now Paypal does not include my country (RSA). There are some other services which will work for me. I used them to purchase Navicat. But the ability to put in a credit card would be great. I really don’t want to have to mail off a money order.
Sorry about being off topic.
I believe there is going to be a Live CD. May have to wait for the release of 5.0 though.
“s there going to be a way to purchase SkyOS without Paypal i.e. just using a credit card. Right now Paypal does not include my country (RSA). There are some other services which will work for me. I used them to purchase Navicat. But the ability to put in a credit card would be great. I really don’t want to have to mail off a money order.
Sorry about being off topic.
”
its not really off topic. robert is the hero who single handedly designed and wrote this recently hobbyist turned commericial operating system from scratch. he deserves all the money he can get. so pay him his 30$ and use this next generation operating system of the future.
weekly videos an beta releases show the marvelous enhancements of this great operating system
“Is there going to be a way to purchase SkyOS without Paypal i.e. just using a credit card.”
That is our hope, yes. It costs us extra money I believe in order to accept credit card payments through PayPal, but it can be done. We do want to accept credit cards though, so we will do our best to find a way.
Provided you have a computer with a vidcap card you could just connect the gfx-card of the skyosbox to that one to make fancy videos at full speed.
natively the cursor moves as smooth as it does in windows.. and im not exaggerating.. skyos isnt slow at all, trust me.. but screen capturing like tihs is the only way they can get a good quality video reperesentation of skyos.. check out some of the videos of it running natively before you judge
Yes, but OSX has a building or two full of highly paid professionals working on it. Now compare that to a couple folks working out of their dens on this. The comparative results highly favor SkyOS. Sure I like OSX better, but SkyOS is nice and shows some promise. Give it time. Maybe in the end, it’ll be better than OSX. In the meantime, I didn’t mind spending $30 on it. They’ll have a free version once v5 is released, for people who don’t want to spend $30.
Of course, it’s ‘cool’ to have a running OS with a nice-looking user interface and to port or implement so many features in a so short time.
But … is this really the way to go? They simply _can’t_ do as much debugging/optimizing as would be needed to get really stable and fast OS. This sort of code works only until someone calls for example a syscall with a NULL argument where something is expected, the hardware reports an error (disk full, r/w error, …), or another sort of unhandled condition and then nobody is able to fix it.
It is a big amount of work to get an OS running. But it’s a lot harder to bring its quality to a level where you would entrust your data to it.
“But … is this really the way to go? They simply _can’t_ do as much debugging/optimizing as would be needed to get really stable and fast OS. This sort of code works only until someone calls for example a syscall with a NULL argument where something is expected, the hardware reports an error (disk full, r/w error, …), or another sort of unhandled condition and then nobody is able to fix it. ”
who cares. there are nice videos to watch. there is a beta every week and the interface is nice and attractive. you pay 30$ and you get everything you ever wanted in an operating system.
there is no time to worry about debugging or optimising now. we can have the next release by then.
There is a lot of debugging going on. We have set up a bug-tracker just for that purpose. We have had 61 bugs reported so far, and they are all in the process of being fixed. This number will be a lot lower in the future, as this is 1) the first time most people have been able to get SkyOS installed on their computer (rather than VMWare), and 2) this is the first time we have had a bug-tracker. Before everything was just posted on the forums, and it would get lost quite often. Now we can track the bugs a lot easier, shoot them down, and check them off.
As for optimizations, well, that is always going on, and has been since day one. SkyOS didn’t just start out this reactive.
“There is a lot of debugging going on. We have set up a bug-tracker just for that purpose. We have had 61 bugs reported so far, and they are all in the process of being fixed. This number will be a lot lower in the future, as this is 1) the first time most people have been able to get SkyOS installed on their computer (rather than VMWare), and 2) this is the first time we have had a bug-tracker. Before everything was just posted on the forums, and it would get lost quite often. Now we can track the bugs a lot easier, shoot them down, and check them off.”
you had 61 bugs and you are actually using a bug tracker?
you guys are way too cool
While it’s very nice to see that GIMP and AbiWord have been ported, am I correct that there is not yet a usable email client of any kind?
I would think that would be a pretty high priority for anyone wanting to stay booted into SkyOS for any length of time. There are some things you can do without, and other things you can’t. At this point, to pay $30 for something that’s just a curiosity I could look at for a few minutes at a time seems unreasonable.
I’m seriously impressed by the hard work & dedication the SkyOS team is putting into this project. The progress made by such a small group is astronomical – it just goes to show that you don’t need hundreds of developers to produce software of this caliber.
I’d love to try this out. I just wish I had a way to buy it…
Xandros, Coral, Lindows, SuSE, Apple. What do they have in common? They have taken GPL code, packaged it into there own products and are selling it. Is this wrong? No because the GPL allows this (you might want to take the time to actually read and understand the GPL).
Are you a troll?
oh yeah, what makes you think the SkyOS teams is using any GPL’d code? Only gpl code in their is from ported apps. thats IT. nothing in the main OS.
“Is skyOS willing to share their source code back to me? Can i recompile it and use it as an alternative to their stuff?”
Well, any applications that are licensed under the GPL will have theor source code released by us, as obligated. We’ve said that for the past 6 months. None of the actual OS code contains any GPL code, so no, that will not be released.
We will release other things as well, such as the SkyFS, which is based on the OpenBFS (MIT license). We will be making our changes to that source available back to the OpenBeOS team so that they may make any improvements that they wish to.
Xandros, Coral, Lindows, SuSE, Apple
Xandros – debugging k-apps(konqueror in paticular) and added more functionality into kcontrol
Coral – it was aquired by xandros, therefore xandros = coral
Lindows – Um hello? sponsers Nvu, KDE, kde-look.org, kde-apps.org, etc
SuSE – opensourced YAST/Connector, finacial supporter of KDE for many years. Novel is also sponsering sourceforge.net
Apple – They used Khtml for safari and contributed alot. Dont belive me? Try opening http://www.geek.com with konqueror before the 3.2 release. It wont work.
SkyOS – ???
really is in need of Rectal Cranial Inversion Surgery..
That is classic! I am definitely going to recommend it to a few acquaintances.
It seems like, now that SkyOS is looking somewhat promising you are going to get the trolls who will come along on try all sorts of creative ways of putting down others good creative work.
heh, a friend of mine told me that one a bit ago. I thought it was great.
The trolling will only get worse as mor eand more cool features get added to SkyOS. best to just ignore it I suppose.
“The trolling will only get worse as mor eand more cool features get added to SkyOS.”
I think thats uncalled for. The main reason why people are voicing their opinions(NOT trolling) is that they dont see any value in it. I dont remeber any trolling when the SkyOS project was free.
If anything, more features that are *ONLY* avaliable in SkyOS would definatly attract a much kinder reception.
For *now* I dont see anything special. Id rather donate money to a project like PearPC, something that is new and intresting.
I just noticed that you guys are using the crystal icon set from kde. thats very cool.
“http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=skyos.com“
I think its because this site runs on linux that everybody is expecting skyos to be free.
i think robert is working towards self hosting
I’m sorry, I don’t really know a lot about skyOS but I am curious, what is new and cool and innovative about skyOS? The movie does show some attractive features and apps but really nothing new or that different from windows/gnome/kde. Similar panel, menus, desktop, filebrowser ideas. Definitely not as “new” or “innovative” as osx.
Please, someone make a list for me, what are the cool and innovative things about skyOS that will make it popular when there are free alternatives or alternatives that have millions of apps already written for it. It really seems like this is not a whole lot different that existing operating systems except skyOS is more attractive that others. Check out windowblinds however and you will see that fringe desktops already exist that are as cool.
Also, I’m sorry, but unless this guy is an absolute super-human genius, there is no way this thing will every be usable as a production system if he is the only developer. I thought the 61 bugs things was hilarious. 61? 61? Are you kidding? How many people have actually used this OS and reported bugs, like 10? If a free beta were released or somehow several thousand people were using this os and reporting bugs that number would go up by 100x! Maybe this guy can work his way up slowly and pay a bunch of developers to work with him but by himself he has no prayer unless he is like Nicola Tesla 2 for intelligence.
that link has no value it said http://…skyos.com the skyos site is SkyOs.org
@daddy: you’re right at the moment no gpl code is being contributed back but SkyOs isnt obliged to under the GPL well not yet, only once 5.0 is released do they have to give the source away with the binaries, and the OpenBeFS thing, they are contributing code back to the OpenBeOS team.
“61? 61? Are you kidding? How many people have actually used this OS and reported bugs, like 10?”
there are over 100 beta testers, the bug reports are infact SkyGI and Kernel Dumps with contain debugging code each kernel dump is a full record of everything that system does from the very start screen to a crash or shut down. and these logs are appended so they can be months worth of data in one bug report log. so 61, is quiet large if you consider how much data there is in one report
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=skyos.org
how about this. ?
It is nice to see the quality of people we have posting on OS News these days.
Will people please understand that this is simply a bunch of people who have got together to create a pretty incredible, well integrated, overall operating system. SkyOS exists because there are people who wanted to create it and work on it and people who want to use it. I have questioned SkyOS, its direction and validity, but you can’t argue with the people developing it or posting on their forums.
It seems that they fully understand their obligations regarding things like the GPL. When SkyOS is released publicly, source code will be distributed for the relevant GPLd parts that they have used or modified. Some people are under the impression that the GPL license means complete public disclosure; that is not the case. I know it could be said to be stretching it given that they do sell copies (although not the beta of the current version), but the spirit of the GPL is that you give people some room.
I enjoyed the video. It seems as though the desktop is using some KDE graphics and icons, so it is good to see them being used elsewhere. It is difficult to get a feel for the desktop though, because of the way it has been captured i.e. VMWare.
The Diff-FS sounds interesting, although it could make for some confusion as a file you thought was altered isn’t! Sounds interesting though.
It would be pretty cool to see skyos.org running SkyOS according to Netcraft! How far away is SkyOS from being able to host things like a web server?
Cut the people some slack and just appreciate how much has gone into this over a period of several years. This is supposed to be a site where all sorts of items are posted about the sorts of incredible, weird and wonderful things that people are doing with operating systems everywhere. It certainly makes a change from the Longhorn and .Net stuff.
I posted this comment a couple of SkyOS items ago, but didn’t get a response, so I hope no one will be too offended by me posting it again:
@ Kelly.
Please stop giving that bullet point list of SkyOS advantages. It doesn’t give enough detail to put SkyOS above other systems anyway. For example, I have a journalling filesystem (reiser), advanced themeable GUI (gnome), LiveCD (knoppix). And so all that sort of list makes me think is why are you not mentioning other features? Are you trying to cover over the windows alike C api? The windows alike RC file dialog creation? Calling shared libraries dlls?
And yes, I am trying to provoke a response by picking windows style features, but hopefully instead of shouting at me it will be just writing an advert or something for the OS that says what SkyOS is trying to be, and how it’s going to be that.
skyos already comes with a port of apache, there used to be a port of MySQL and PHP but compatibility appears to have been broken with 5.0beta releases, hopefully they get ported to 5.0 soon, then i guess its up to the network drivers
in terms of Windows Like API i dont think the SkyGI API is like windows, im new to C / C++ programming so i may be wrong but things i’ve learnt for win32 dont work with SkyGI i’ve had to use trial and error to get some things working.
in terms of themeability i havent used Gnome since red hat 5.2, im mainly a KDE man, but from what i’ve seen i maybe wrong, in Gnome the task bar doesnt change with the themes with skyos 5.0 it does, if im wrong about the gnome theming i appologuise in advance.
journalling file system is SkyFS based on OpenBeFS, a 64bit journalling system, and with the recent development of Diff-FS it allows files to be edited on read-only mediums as if they were on a normal hard disk. from what robert has said the present implementation of SkyFS doesnt allow for a true Multi-user system which is a shame as on WinXP i have admin and restricted accounts, and on SuSE Linux 8.2 i have the root and user account, to help with security. but i guess this will be added with time.
i hope my post helped abit
Daddy wrote :
<< If people who wrote that origianl GPL and MIT stuff you guys took, never wrote it originally, then skyOS wouldn’t have been where it is today. Shouldn’t you guys also share your originally written code too, though i bet that is not more than 10% of the whole code. >>
<< i am never going to use skyOS because i get windows and linux and *bsd which are much more stable and much better OS. >>
What the f*ck? You talk about sharing code and all and then you say that you use Windows? Since when did Microsoft shared ALL their code? MS is not sharing and is making money. Robert and SkyOS can do the same. They return what they used under GPL/MIT but they can keep the rest close source.
You sure don’t know what you’re talking about. And if you don’t like SkyOS or what they do with the code… Don’t use it. Don’t troll like that, you sound very stupid.
Really, if the developers working hard on code didn’t want other people to use thier code, they would not release it under an open-source license. SkyOS shows how someone can take open-source code and blend it together in to something arguably superior, from a user-experience point of view, to what the open-source communities have to offer (which couldn’t have been done otherwise), which is a success of the open-source model.
If the open-source guys suddenly said, “we don’t like you using our code”, then they would be contradicting thier own ‘philosophy’ at least to some extent. I can understand how they might be frustrated at the rest of SkyOS being closed, but hey, so is Mac OS X!
Personally, I think SkyOS is an impressive achievement, that makes me quite envious of thier coding ability… But the OS itself is nothing exiting to me. I am trying to build up my own system, using no pre-existing code because I don’t believe in the layering approach to development. I use NASM and good old DD, and Linux of course (but also some development in Windows), but I would hope to break away eventually and write my own assembler and disk utilities. It would be nice if SkyOS eventually did this, writing thier own C compiler (god help them writing one for C++!) and libraries to improve consistency and integration… And overall coolness factor, but please note that I suffer from chronic NIH syndrome
How about the first free openGL desktop on x86? Does that count for anything. People have a right to their opinions, but this is the most negativity i’ve seen for an OS that’s being coded by like 5 people. Dont we generally support the little guy?
> How about the first free openGL desktop on x86?
Is there any other (at all)?
(No, OS X uses OpenGL just for compositing. You certainly can’t call that an OpenGL desktop.)
Dont we generally support the little guy?
Some of us only support Free or at least open source software. That’s our call. If the ‘little guy’ wants my support, which he may or may not want, I want his code. If this is too great a sacrifice for him, c’est la vie. (That doesn’t mean I wish the SkyOS team ill, I just don’t wish them well and they won’t see my money.)
I like the feature where you can mark your folders with colors – I don’t know if I’d use it that much, but it’s still cool
Other than that, I saw nothing that impressed me. A calculator, sticky notes, and mp3 player – yippie. Of course, I wouldn’t be saying this if it where just a hobby OS, but when they plan to charge money for this, I think it’s relavent.
will it have a WINE like app.. but much more robust or can Win F*ck off?
Darius –
“Other than that, I saw nothing that impressed me. A calculator, sticky notes, and mp3 player – yippie. Of course, I wouldn’t be saying this if it where just a hobby OS, but when they plan to charge money for this, I think it’s relavent.”
Excellent post. I’m of the opinion that since SkyOS is still basically in its infancy as far as OS features go, that it should still be free at this point, if just to get a more accurate reading on the bug tracker. Pardon me, but 100 beta testers isn’t crap when you could be dealing with hundreds of system configurations. Even microsoft makes their beta programs free, because they know only a very rare bird will pay to test software for them.
That being said I have no problem with them wanting to get paid, they just need a better plan. First they need to offer a system the regular user will want to use. Might be worth it to talk to those wine guys (codeweavers.com) and try getting a port of that. Like it or not we live in a Windows world and to make headway against windows, you need to lure away users with programs they understand and already use. Most the User oriented linux distributions realize this and ship with crossover office. The alternative being you write your own killer-apps, or talk to every developer individually and bribe them to port to your OS.
Point is, commercial is a whole new ball-game and the open-source community usually aren’t that supportive of commercial OS’s. SO it doesn’t surprise me that there are a lot of negative posts on OSAlert about this move. Look at pratically every MS headline they post there are probably 30-50% of negative posts. In general I wouldn’t say OSS people are negative, we just have some very VOCAL negative people.
after reading some info on the SkyOS we know now, I’m getting a little excited. I just wish that they would spruce up the GUI a bit more (file selector dialog, the buttons, they should probably make the title bar font bold, but that’s just a personal preference). But they’ve come a LONG way with the GUI so I’m not complaining.
@Kelly and Youlle
I wonder what is the audio IO latency and whether it is possible to get decent audio/midi applications like Rosegarden and Ardour (and JACK, of course) to work in SkyOS.
Hint: decent latency for IO is between 2 and 10 milliseconds. Any comments highly appreciated.
from what robert has said the present implementation of SkyFS doesnt allow for a true Multi-user system which is a shame as on WinXP i have admin and restricted accounts, and on SuSE Linux 8.2 i have the root and user account, to help with security. but i guess this will be added with time.
… well, only if you are still talking about SuSE Linux 8.2. Currently, Linux systems (Fedora Core, Debian, …) are moving towards EA (extended attributes) based mandatory access control. On theses systems, you do not only have a root and user account, but rather security contexts. Root process without an appropriate security context cannot necessarily access everything, for example.
SkyFS supports Un-limited file attributes so if we could possibly get SkyOs to support Security attributes e.g. password locks, etc it would in effect be similar to having multiuser.
i personally dont know the IO latency for Audio, you’d have to ask robert about that.
Do you have the link?
link for? skyos? http://skyos.org or for information regarding I/O Latency?
Some of us only support Free or at least open source software. That’s our call. If the ‘little guy’ wants my support, which he may or may not want, I want his code. If this is too great a sacrifice for him, c’est la vie. (That doesn’t mean I wish the SkyOS team ill, I just don’t wish them well and they won’t see my money.)
Some of you are less than 1% of the computer using population and others realise being totalitarian is not always as good as being open minded. Maybe SkyOS isn’t targeting all BSD/Linux users in the world but rather another public, those who just want something that works? Maybe they target enthusiasts who like options no matter closed nor open. Me personally would find it quite ridicolous to target a group which wants everything for free aimed at earning support money with a product which is self explanatory, hence not much support needed.