World: r3wp

As I've tried to make clear, Syllable is targeted at people who want 
to use open source and Linux but in an easier way. But this is a 
huge and ambitious task, and we are as far as we are. If you want 
more, you have two options: helping or waiting

Ok, I'm just letting you know at which point I'd be interested ...

The thing about Ubuntu is .. not that it's any better or worse than 
anything else, but I can google a problem and always find an answer

OK. Anyway, if you have all your apps without problems on Ubuntu, 
I suppose there is no problem

Yep, I've got three ubuntu servers running 24/7

and I've setup ubuntu to run HylaFAX servers for a number of people 
too

Please note that David asked me for elevator pitches. In an elevator 
pitch, one usually sheds light on what a project can do, not what 
it cannot do

Server is among the leanest and easiest general-purpose Linux distros.

Also, we're not very interested in generically replacing other systems. 
Syllable's goal is to create new systems with their own personality 
and strengths

So, what exactly are people using it for if not one of the things 
I need?

Do you have case histories?

We're running it on our servers, desktops and laptops

as web server?

and ?

Yes. On our personal machines, we're doing development and office-type 
work. On our servers, we're running AltME and Cheyenne with supporting 
servers such as OpenSSH and FTP. We also have BitTorrents running 
to support Syllable downloads

sftp ?

That should work, as it's included in OpenSSH, but I haven't tried 
it yet. People are FTPing their websites to us from REBOL on Windows 
and Mac, so no SFTP there, and the data will be public, anyway

Kaj, I have looked closely at your website, but I wanted to see if 
I could get some additional insight from the man himself.

We're in the process of moving our REBOL-based ASCADA software from 
Windows to Linux. We already have a successful deployment at DHL 
using CentOS. I want to standardize on industrial PCs such as the 
Advantech UNO1170E running a lightweight Linux and our software. 
I'm evaluating Syllable Server even though it is only at 0.4 because 
it is console-based and REBOL friendly out of the box.

My Linux admin skills are not great . I spent several days of off-an-on 
attempts to get Syllable Server running. Now that I'm past the worst 
part of the learning curve, it's pretty easy. I just did another 
install on an Aspire One Netbook in about 15-20 minutes. I'm using 
Puppy LInux on a USB stick to partition and format the drive, run 
Grub and edit the text files.

I have a looming project with Glad where this can be deployed. I'll 
be doing some extended load testing next week to see how our services 
run and verify the server's stability. These days a lot of software 
gets used for years and never makes it to 1.0. I'm running REBOL 
scripts, sqlite and Cheyenne. We'll also be using another third-part 
y so library for PLC communications.


Kaj, do you feel confident in Syllable Server's present state to 
run this kind of workload. I'm just looking for a personal opinion, 
of course. The ultimate decision and responsibility is mine. From 
the customer's perspective, our product is an embedded system running 
a custom version of Linux.

Kaj, I see that you've included Oracle's BerkeleyDB, but not the 
less corporate sqlite. Was there a specific reason for that choice?

Yes, BerkeleyDB was one of the oldest and most popular open source 
databases before Oracle acquired it. Many open source packages require 
it. We would rather have kept it out of the base system, but one 
such package is in the Syllable Server base system; I believe IPRoute

We're using SQLite in our own Syllable Desktop web browser, though, 
so it's even ported to Desktop and it would be easy to use our build 
system to compile it on Server

Your goals are quite suited to Syllable

Although both Desktop and Server are designed as general-purpose 
systems, we're obviously about thirty thousand software packages 
behind on the likes of Debian. On Server, because it's a Linux, we 
can install many of those packages from third-party package managers, 
but then we can't guarantee their stability because they're not integrated 
with Syllable

Much of the integration of Syllable comes from my build system. I 
always meant it to be able to build varieties, of which we now have 
two major ones: Desktop and Server

Server is not yet very suitable for people such as Graham, who have 
lists of requirements that vary a lot from year to year because they 
want to cherry-pick it from the entire open source pool. But if you 
have a well defined set of software choices, and especially if you 
would like to package that up appliance style for customers, Syllable 
is a good base to do that on

If you're interested enough, I'm available to produce a customised 
package of Syllable

Are there any open source packages you need besides SQLite?

I'm not sure what your workload is, but we have been running a small 
website provider on Server for two years now, without any system-related 
problems

Server 0.3 was meant to enable that and 0.4 was meant to mature that 
functionality. We did improve security during that time, and improvements 
such as those were rolled into 0.4

Security could still be improved, but we are running the Try REBOL 
site on it to test it, which allows the public to run almost any 
REBOL expression, and although many tried, we haven't had any breaches 
yet :-)

http://tryrebol.esperconsultancy.nl/

Server 0.4 uses the latest stable Linux kernel instead of the bleeding 
edge one, so that should also help stability

Syllable should run very well on hardware such as the Advantech

Thanks. The only open source package missing for my current project 
is sqlite. I downloaded the SO binary from http://sqlite.org, but 
haven't tested it yet because I still need to purchase the REBOL/SDK 
for Linux. My Windows SDK license file doesn't work. :) As you know, 
REBOL/Core doesn't support library access.

Yes, I even recently requested this limitation to be lifted. I suspect 
it's an oversight, because View should have the library access

We're using View on our graphical version of Server, but that's a 
development version using binaries from GoboLinux

I thought library access might have been left out to keep REBOL/Core 
as small as possible. That's still a great selling point.

Kaj, in your documentation, you mentioned how to start Cheyenne and 
the FTP server automatically by uncommenting lines in their respective 
start scripts. On startup, where are these scripts being called? 
I ask because I would like to add applications to run at startup. 
If it's a standard Linux thing, that's fine, I can look it up. I 
noticed that the directory structure, though, is different from Linux 
installations I've seen in the past.

Yes, that is one of Syllable's selling points. :-) On Server, startup 
is currently a mix of traditional Linux start scripts and our own. 
The traditional ones are from the Linux From Scratch project, so 
you could refer to their documentation

Cheyenne has no traditional Linux packaging, so it's in the Syllable 
format. You can make your own resource package in the same format 
to add extra start scripts in a modular way. You would add a package 
directory under /resources/:

cd /resources

s mkdir my-package

Start scripts go into an extra subdirectory:

/resources/my-package/tasks/

Most start scripts such as for a server would go here:

/resources/my-package/tasks/start/

In some cases you need to set extra variables in the user's environment. 
A script for that would go here: