Syllable Desktop is a discontinued

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

lightweight hobbyist

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

for

Pentium Pentium is a series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel from 1993 to 2023. The Pentium (original), original Pentium was Intel's fifth generation processor, succeeding the i486; Pentium was Intel's flagship proce ...

and compatible processors. Its purpose was to create an easy-to-use desktop operating system for the home and small office user. Its development began in 2002 as a fork of AtheOS Another version of Syllable OS is the Syllable Server, which is based on

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

core.

History

Syllable Desktop is a fork of AtheOS, a free and open source operating system that was discontinued. AtheOS was originally developed to be an

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...

clone for x86 processors, and also took inspiration from

BeOS BeOS is a discontinued operating system for personal computers that was developed by Be Inc. It was conceived for the company's BeBox personal computer which was released in 1995. BeOS was designed for multitasking, multithreading, and a graph ...

for the file system it used. Syllable was started around July 2002 because the sole developer of AtheOS went inactive for nine months. Syllable Desktop aimed to be a successor to AtheOS and expand on it, such as adding additional hardware support. Further development aimed at porting additional software and libraries. The last source code commit was in 2012, but the developer is working on restarting the project according to information on the website.

Features

Syllable Desktop has a native Webkit-based

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

named Webster (formerly ABrowse), an

email client An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...

named Whisper, a media player, an IDE, and other applications. Features according to the official website include: * Native

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, a ...

journaled file system, the AtheOS File System (AFS) * C++ oriented

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

Object-oriented Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of '' objects''. Objects can contain data (called fields, attributes or properties) and have actions they can perform (called procedures or methods and impleme ...

graphical

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphi ...

on a native GUI architecture * Mostly

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...

compliant * Software

ports Ports collections (or ports trees, or just ports) are the sets of makefiles and Patch (Unix), patches provided by the BSD-based operating systems, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, as a simple method of installing software or creating binary packages. T ...

, including Vim,

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

, Python,

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

, others. * GNU toolchain ( GCC,

Glibc The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project implementation of the C standard library. It provides a wrapper around the system calls of the Linux kernel and other kernels for application use. Despite its name, it now also dir ...

Binutils The GNU Binary Utilities, or , is a collection of programming tools maintained by the GNU Project for working with executable code including assembly, linking and many other development operations. The tools are originally from Cygnus Solut ...

, Make) * Preemptive multitasking with multithreading *

Symmetric multiprocessing Symmetric multiprocessing or shared-memory multiprocessing (SMP) involves a multiprocessor computer hardware and software architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single, shared main memory, have full access to all ...

(multiple processor) support *

Device driver In the context of an operating system, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabli ...

s for most common hardware (video, sound, network chips) * File system drivers for

FAT In nutrition science, nutrition, biology, and chemistry, fat usually means any ester of fatty acids, or a mixture of such chemical compound, compounds, most commonly those that occur in living beings or in food. The term often refers specif ...

(read/write),

NTFS NT File System (NTFS) (commonly called ''New Technology File System'') is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft in the 1990s. It was developed to overcome scalability, security and other limitations with File Allocation Tabl ...

(read) and

ext2 ext2, or second extended file system, is a file system for the Linux kernel (operating system), kernel. It was initially designed by French software developer Rémy Card as a replacement for the extended file system (ext). Having been designed ...

(read) * Rebol as system

scripting language In computing, a script is a relatively short and simple set of instructions that typically automation, automate an otherwise manual process. The act of writing a script is called scripting. A scripting language or script language is a programming ...

Reception

OSNews OSNews is a computing online newspaper. It originally focused on operating systems and their related technologies that launched in 1997, but is now aggregating consumer electronics news. The content is managed by a group of editors and the owner. ...

gave a positive review of Syllable, calling it "astoundingly complete for a hobbyist OS at version 0.5" and praising the speed of the OS, but noting that some features and subsystems were not yet implemented, the limited range of apps, and the occasional stability issues. Linux.com noted similar points in their review. pro-linux.de stated that Syllable was a promising upcoming operating system. A review by Root.cz was negative, stating that "for now, Syllable is just one of the less successful alternatives to Linux or *BSD."

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Syllable Desktop (Operating System) Free software operating systems Hobbyist operating systems Unix variants X86 operating systems Software using the GNU General Public License

History

Features

Reception

See also

References

Further reading

External links