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Syllable: A different open source OS (NewsForge)

NewsForge reviews Syllable, a GPL-licensed operating system. "Once I had Syllable installed, I was floored by how fast it was on my test machine, a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM. Syllable blew away Windows, Linux, and Solaris as far as speed is concerned. From the time the boot loader came up to the time the login prompt appeared was just under eight seconds. It took another two seconds or less from the time I logged in to the time the desktop was ready to go."

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Syllable: A different open source OS (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 23, 2006 19:04 UTC (Wed) by anonymous21 (guest, #30106) [Link] (1 responses)

fast and buggy are things you might expect of a new OS.
Maturity tends to slow things down, as frameworks are put in place to manage problems a new system doesn't know it needs to manage yet.

Hopefully, Syllable is an exception.

Mark

Syllable: A different open source OS (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 24, 2006 20:47 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I sure hope so too, but...

NOTE: You should never delete the application object. This could cause both the app and the OS itself to crash.

If it's not a joke, then... they still got a lot of space to cover before it can be called "an OS", and not "a toy OS"...

Syllable: A different open source OS (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 23, 2006 23:32 UTC (Wed) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link] (5 responses)

The thing is, what slows down Linux boot is mainly system services. I'd bet that Syllable probably doesn't run all the things a linux box does (apache, postgres, sshd, cups...). Also, boot speed isn't really what matters if you only boot once every few months. That said, Linux (the whole thing, not just the kernel) could do with some speed improvements. Much as I love choice, it really isn't exactly efficient to have so many dependencies!

Incidentally, for amazing speed, try MenuetOS. Full GUI (but not many apps yet), all on a single floppy, hand coded in assembly!

Syllable: A different open source OS (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 24, 2006 1:36 UTC (Thu) by jstAusr (guest, #27224) [Link] (2 responses)

I really like short licenses but to be useful it should address modification and redistribution at least.
http://www.menuetos.net/m64l.txt

Syllable: A different open source OS (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 24, 2006 6:00 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

Eh? That license is for MenuetOS. We are talking about Syllable here, which seems to be under standard GPL.

Syllable: A different open source OS (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 24, 2006 13:17 UTC (Thu) by kpower (guest, #37136) [Link]

He was responding to this:
Incidentally, for amazing speed, try MenuetOS. Full GUI (but not many apps yet), all on a single floppy, hand coded in assembly!
Which is what the prior commentor mentioned.

Syllable: A different open source OS (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 24, 2006 16:54 UTC (Thu) by TwoTimeGrime (guest, #11688) [Link] (1 responses)

> Incidentally, for amazing speed, try MenuetOS. Full GUI (but not many apps
> yet), all on a single floppy, hand coded in assembly!

A whole OS written in assembler? My mind boggles at how hard that must have been to write.

Syllable: A different open source OS (NewsForge)

Posted Aug 24, 2006 23:22 UTC (Thu) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

Geoworks was a GUI/Application system that ran on XT and AT class systems. It was *all* 8086 assembler, and quite a bit faster than the roughly equivalent Windows 3.0. AOL apparently used it as the underlying system for their client for a while.

As you might expect, the machines got faster and they got out evolved by Windows because the Microsofties didn't have to do register allocation by hand. Pretty much what happened between Lotus 123 and Excel.

it's a fork of AtheOS

Posted Aug 24, 2006 1:42 UTC (Thu) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link]

According to the Syllable FAQ, it's a fork of AtheOS due to the "lack of progress" in the latter. So, it's not quite as new as the Newsforge article might make you think.


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