World: r3wp

I have to go protest against the government soon so I might put that 
on hold for now. Thanks very much for your help. I feel I'm pretty 
close to an install now.

OK, go get 'em

What's it about, anyway?

Industrial reform. Basically converting people into slaves.

Just repartitioned with win98 FDISK. Have to start Syllable install 
again.

Ok, my new reading of the instructions during the install means that 
I didn't have to start DiskManager at all.

Success! 19 sectors are embedded. Now booting Syllable from harddisk.

OK :-)

Logged, played around, shutting down.  Very good :) Now I can go.

Good luck

Thanks again.

No problem

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 (!).

Shutdown has never worked. Reboot does. Shutdown should work in the 
next version when we introduce ACPI power management. (Although maybe 
not on your old machine)

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

The thing to remember about the file system is that journaling works 
well, unless you had a lot of file activity just before hard booting. 
This can damage your file system. A good thing to do after heavy 
file activity like big copies or downloads is to issue a "sync" command 
in the terminal

This is due to bugs in the journal recovery that we're still hunting 
for

So theoretically the filesystem is supposed to be bulletproof.

The BIOS does have power management features, but I didn't see ACPI 
written anywhere just now.

Is there any USB support ? I have a USB ethernet network interface 
which I could plug in.

Yes, it's pretty much bulletproof until you hit the bugs with large 
journal replay content

Shutdown is supposed to work with APM now, but I don't think it has 
ever worked

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

We released Syllable 0.6.0:

http://syllable.org

The most important enhancement is a new rendering architecture for 
the video framework. The contents of windows are now backbuffered 
in the video memory on the video card, so they can be restored much 
faster. Amiga smart window refresh, anyone? :-) But this time it's 
with hardware support

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

We're now officially out of the 0.5.x series, which were meant to 
update our base technology and were thus fairly chaotic. We now have 
a good development platform for the innovations that we have been 
planning

Kaj, does Syllable use any particular library for gfx? I don't remember 
what you said. am I right you considered even agg, but then your 
gfx guru decided to go his own way?

that smart buffering thing sounds interesting. Maybe similar aproach 
could be taken for View :-) ... well, one day ... maybe :-)

We have just a few rendering functions, but they're deeply integrated 
with the video driver framework, now with backbuffering. When we 
add more functions they may need the same deep integration for the 
best result, and then we can't use an existing library directly. 
Of course, you can still use existing libraries on top of our framework, 
but that's not the most efficient solution

For example, I just ported SDL_gfx, a fairly powerful drawing library, 
but it's on top of SDL and SDL is ported on top of our system

View is also not the most efficient because it has to be portable

let's hope new blitting at least is in the pipeline for View ......

Kaj - can I boot Syllable from CD or do I have to have partition 
for it?

No, just boot the live CD to try it. Only there's no live CD for 
0.6.0 yet, and the 0.5.7 one is taken offline until that happens

ok, so I will wait .... Syllable seems to be getting better and better. 
I will give it a try around Christmas, when I have some time to not 
work, but enjoy :-)

I will put a notice here when the live CD is out

I released a binary package of the new Orca version 0.0.22 for Syllable:

http://kamidake.other-space.com/display_entry.php?id=336

We just released Syllable 0.6.0a, an update to fix a number of small 
issues with 0.6.0:

http://syllable.org

Kaj - there is a OSNews article, which suggests SkyOS is better route, 
because it is backed by commercial company or so ... did not agree, 
but I have not yet read the discussion ...

Ah, I'll have a look

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=11085

There are those people who seem to think that all good comes from 
companies, however small and whatever their track record