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Ask AtheOS Creator Kurt Skauen About His Creature

Posted by timothy on Fri Aug 24, 2001 10:15 AM
from the no-x-no-worries dept.
News
Developer Kurt Skauen, programming for fun, ended up answering the frequent cries to write a graphical Free OS not tied to the X Window system by doing just that. His AtheOS has been mentioned here a few times before -- it's a Free (as in GPL) Operating System for Intel-and-compatible CPUs with an integrated GUI, a tendency toward POSIX, and more than a hint of BeOS. There are quite a few sites with more information about AtheOS, but you may have trouble just getting past the beautiful screenshots and nearly as beautiful AtheOS FAQ. (There are also ASCII parrots.) Ask Kurt about the past, present, and future of AtheOS here (ask as many questions as you'd like, but please only one per post) and we'll forward the best ones to Kurt for his answers.
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  • Windows apps? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JohnTheFisherman (225485) on Friday August 24 2001, @10:17AM (#2213390)
    I know a lot of people hate Windows here, but it certainly has the lion's share of apps. Can/will/do you plan to add a windows emulation layer, or some fairly painless way of running Windows apps? Same for X/GTK/etc.

    • Re:Windows apps? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by n3m6 (101260) <n3m6@hotmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Friday August 24 2001, @10:32AM (#2213468) Homepage Journal
      why not include a DirectX emulation ?? it would be easier on his OS since its not tied to X and input devices are not a seperately controlled.. if he could do that could this be the next gaming platform ?? now that would be serious competition..

      • why not include a DirectX emulation ?? it would be easier on his OS since its not tied to X and input devices are not a seperately controlled.. if he could do that could this be the next gaming platform ?? now that would be serious competition..


        I'd love to see that. A nice, tight Gaming OS that's Windows compatable with full DirectX emulation would be friggin' awsome. Probably never happen, unluckly - that's A LOT of bloody work to do to get even enough Windows compatibility to run games. (And, well - I was involved in a project to do something like that once. Long ago... the project in question (Freedows) appears to be dead and gone now...) None of the projects that have set out to do something like that have flopped so far. Doesn't mean it's IMPOSSIBLE, just damned hard.


        But if it ever happened - I'd have me an MS free game machine built very quickly :-) (And no, a Linux box doesn't count as an MS free game machine - most of the games I want to play don't have Linux versions :-/ )


          • BeOS has Dx layer, alowing Dx games to be easly ported to the BeOS.


            Ported. That's the problem here - most developers really don't seem to be that interested porting thier games to other operating system (note I said MOST, not all). A nitche operating system designed for multimedia and games already happened - and BeOS didn't get that many developers porting thier games over. Binary compatability, IE - no recompile or porting, would make for a very popular alternative OS for gamers. (but, again, probably won't happen ;-)

      • A directX emulation layer would be very useful not just for gaming, but for a variety of real-time sound synthesis [propellerheads.se] applications. Software synths frequently use DirectX to get a low-latency connection with the audio card, so that you can make realtime changes without a lot of lag between the time you twist a knob, and hear the results.

        Besides, not needing windows to run Reason would truly rule!

    • Mod this guy up, because this was my question as well.

      Of course, it's possible that WINE, Win4Lin or one of the others will port or compile fairly easily under AtheOS.

  • Now what? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by baptiste (256004) <mike@@@baptiste...us> on Friday August 24 2001, @10:18AM (#2213395) Homepage Journal
    My question: Sure you did this for fun and it is a beautiful OS. But as it gains attention and user interest, do you have a target audience in mind? Who do you think should use AtheOS - who will derive the most benefit?
    • What did linus say when he created linux??

      I think he hasically created it cause he wanted to..

      Why climb that mountain? yadda yadda..

  • Other developers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rppp01 (236599) on Friday August 24 2001, @10:20AM (#2213402) Homepage
    I have noticed that you prefer to work on the kernel and UI portions by yourself, leaving apps and drivers to other developers. When do you plan on allowing other developers to begin working on the core of the OS with you? This would speed up development of the OS.
  • Who would you recommend Atheos to?

    In other words, where could Atheos be a better choice than other open source OSs?

    Thanks!

    Flavio

  • Developers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Adelvillar (96720) on Friday August 24 2001, @10:27AM (#2213439)
    Now that many developers coding for the BeOS were left hung to dry, do you have recived support from them?
  • The AtheOS UI strikes me as a bit Amiga-ish.

    Was the Amiga UI an influence or inspiration for the design of the AtheOS UI?
    And, if so, are there any other aspects of the Amiga platform that influenced your design?

    C-X C-S
    Keep up the good work!
  • Never complain about a site being slashdotted as long as we have google...

    Atheos homepage [google.com]

    the FAQ [google.com]

    Atheos links [google.com]

    Screenshots are here [google.com]

    the parrots [google.com]


    • The google cached pages that pjgunst (and others) are linking to are not the same as the pages at atheos.cx.

      The site has been redesigned and there seems to be substantially more content than the cached versions.

      Sorry karma hunters.

  • I've never used AtheOS and before giving it a try I'd like to see information regarding its hardware requirements and performance. For example, how does AtheOS perform as a web/ftp/samba/db server, considering it supports multithreading and SMP?

    Do you have any numbers to show us?

    Thanks.

    Flavio
  • Why such emphasis on OO paradigm? While building the system, did you have trouble bending some things around OO model (i.e. could some things be only done in straight C)? Do you think many developers will be turned off because objectOriented style of variable and function naming was used in the C parts of the source (as I noticed)? Finally, why do you want this to be a primarily desktop OS? What do you think of the current desktop environment offerings in *nix world?
  • I know AtheOS has its own GUI, but I imagine that have X on board would make porting most Unix apps easier. Has anyone attempted such a thing?
    • I don't know how hard that would be. The BeOS and AtheOS APIs have a lot in common, and there is a BeOS X server. Plus, AtheOS has some networking features that BeOS doesn't, and porting Wine and X to AtheOS would probably be quite easy.
      • I think any such emulation should be done by making an Xlib emulator so that the applications, as much as possible, cooperate with native Atheos applications. It would be best if many X things, in particular window managers, were not supported.

        Unfortunately it appears this is difficult or people are not interested. Most "emulate X" schemes I have seen require an entire X server to be emulated. This either takes over the screen, or puts a screen in a native window, or at best actually mixes the X windows with the native windows but they interact in strange ways. I think this is the wrong approach.

  • AtheOS and GPL (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Midnight Ryder (116189) <midryder@@@midnightryder...com> on Friday August 24 2001, @10:42AM (#2213531) Homepage

    Greetings...


    Another poster mentioned the idea that you were considering moving AtheOS to a different license. Is that the case?


    Secondly, if you are considering putting it under a different license, why? And, why did you select GPL licensing for AtheOS as opposed to a number of different licensing choices out there? (Reguardless of if you are or aren't moving AtheOS from a GPL license.)

  • PPC (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mcc (14761) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Friday August 24 2001, @10:45AM (#2213545) Homepage
    Some minor questions.

    Do you consider it likely that at some point in the near future AtheOS will develop a PPC port?

    I realize that the AtheOS developers are very busy with the hard work they are doing and that there is no good reason for them to expend effort on a PPC port. However i was wondering if you think that there is enough interest among extant developers familiar with the ppc/chrp/macintosh platform that someone might feel like cobbling together a port.

    That being said, i was checking and trying to figure out: does AtheOS have some kind of flexible arbitrary-server auto-upgrade "package"-style system along the lines of the debian apt-get? if not, are there plans to implement one, or perhaps port apt-get and dselect to atheos?

    Please excuse my ignorance.

    - mcc
    (I am quite curious about AtheOS, and have been meaning for some time to try to check it out (well, or at least check out the screenshots and read the API documentation, since as implied above i do not personally have an x86 machine on which to test the OS..)-- i was thinking about looking over the atheos webpage yesterday morning, actually. I'm looking forward to learning more about this OS in the future.. if only i knew more now, maybe i'd have some better questions :) :shrugs: oh well. thanks.)
  • Since you don't support text-mode console without a full GUI, what are your plans to enable remote logging access to an AtheOS box through Unix-like facilities like telnet, ssh or X-Terminals?
  • do you think it'll be before a partition can be installed painlessly side by side Windows? Should be the quickest way to gain mass adoption, right?

  • Limiting the scope of AtheOS (Score:4, Insightful)

    by brennan73 (94035) on Friday August 24 2001, @10:47AM (#2213558)
    It seems to me that it'll be extremely difficult for AtheOS (or any new OS, really) to do everything well; even Linux, which is pretty widely used, isn't a be-all, end-all solution yet (and maybe never will be, or never should be).

    So have you considered limiting the scope of AtheOS (possibly severely), and aiming at doing a relatively few things exceptionally well? Here I'm thinking of BeOS, which was usually promoted as a "multimedia OS." It seems to me that this might be a way for alternative OSes now and in the future to stake out some territory: do a few things very very effectively rather than trying to be all things to all people.

    Of course, if you're doing this as a fun/interesting thing, you may not care as much about a niche or widespread acceptance. But, still.

    -brennan

  • CD-Rom support (Score:4, Interesting)

    by timothy (36799) on Friday August 24 2001, @10:48AM (#2213561) Homepage Journal
    Kurt:

    I much prefer to install software (at least anything over several megs) with a CD than over the net, and there are a lot of old documents that I have converted to CD for storage. I wouldn't want to buy a machine without a CD-ROM drive :)

    Is bootable (or other) CD-ROM support planned? Perhaps many people would be able to sample AtheOS easier if they could (for instance) order a CD from Cheapbytes and install it locally, pass to a friend etc.

    Considering the progress on the other aspects of the system, how important do you think this is, or are there technical difficulties (other than time) in getting CD-ROM support to work?

    Best,

    timothy
  • why have you implemeted a custom GUI lib ?

    as aposed to implemeting a backend for GTK/QT/X lib which would mean alot more GUI software

    regards

    john jones
    • I agree that it would be far more useful to make the "official" Atheos interface much more low level, on the "create a window this shape, draw these rectangles and colors, tell me where the mouse clicked" interface, and put all the work into a powerful graphics engine (which X and Windows lack).

      Writing buttons is pretty trivial (I have done it!), the reason toolkits on X is so hard is the enormous amount of work needed to do things that should be easy, like select fonts and draw them and draw images.

      I also feel that putting the toolkit into the system will lock the design into something that would quickly become obsolete. X, for all it's problems, is still used today, and able to emulate stuff invented 15 years later. Do you think X would be anything other than a joke if it required all programs to use the Athena toolkit?

      However, I cannot prove from the documentation whether or not Atheos is designed this way, but I don't really like what I see. But his toolkit may just be an example, he certainly would need to write a toolkit layer so that there could be anything other than trivial demo programs, and perhaps he intends to allow that layer to be replaced.

  • Are you happy ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2001, @10:55AM (#2213603)
    about not having some bearded weirdo running after you, crying: 'It's GNU/Atheos, it's GNU/Atheos!'?

    b.

  • Design an OS with C++ (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JWhitlock (201845) <John-Whitlock.ieee@org> on Friday August 24 2001, @11:14AM (#2213713)
    According to Bjarne Stroustrup, the core application domain for C++ is systems programming. Having created an OS in C++, what would you say are C++ strengths and weaknesses for your needs? Has the OS evolved along with the evolving standard (the STL, templates, the new type casts, etc.), or have you stuck with the C++ that was around when you started? What features do you depend on, and which do you avoid like the plague? And, of course, if you did it today, would you use another language or make different language choices?
  • Kurt,

    I'm sure you developed AtheOS in your free time and then let me ask you what is your day job? How do you find balance between the two especially when you are in that coding bubble that everything seems to be coming together well.

    Secondly, (this may be for all /. ers as well), do you see yourself doing AtheOS development fulltime? If yes, then how do you foresee this transformation? In fact, I'm sure there are many people here who once worked for a big/medium company but were good at a certain thing and went solo after a while. I'm curious to find out their journies as well.

    You're doing a great job! Good luck and keep it up!

  • Does your operating system not believe in Jesux [geocities.com]?
  • I am curious what sort of user you find showing the most interrest in AtheOS? Also, it looks like the sort of thing that could do quite well in an Information Appliance or other embedded application because it doesn't have as much baggage as UNIX or Windows.
    One more thing, were you an Amiga fan?

  • Embedded devices? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by proxima (165692) on Friday August 24 2001, @01:06PM (#2214396)
    Have you ever considered promoting AtheOS as an OS for GUI-based embedded devices? The competition in that arena now is Windows CE, Palm OS, and Linux - but an OO based GUI built into the OS may be beneficial in terms of performance.

    With Linux, a device developer has to get the core Linux kernel working and then build a GUI on top of it (XFree86 or a smaller X server). Palm OS doesn't have multitasking and isn't very scalable to powerful devices. Windows CE requires a royalty. AtheOS could provide a powerful operating system for embedded devices for free.

    • this depends on how resource hungry and Divice drivers are done

      GUI has to be faily light weight and done in software only as hardware bliting is still a novelty

      the link loader also would have to be tweaked for a differant arch (e.g. gnumach can not run on mips because of the linker and loader at presant (nor can apple darwin only ppc and intel))

      keep in mind that in terms of microprocessors out there intel is very small

      PPC sells more than intel and MIPS may be 10-20 times as much with ARM arch well ahead of these (do you have a cell phone ?)

      my advice to kurt is target it generically and try and build it for MIPS ARM and PPC as well as intel and this will make it very easy to add any others that you want to

      regards

      john jones

  • How does Atheos handle Binary Compatibility? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MeowMeow Jones (233640) on Friday August 24 2001, @03:20PM (#2215213)
    (As I'm sure you know) one of the problems with C++ is that modifying a class changes the binary structure of an object. This then breaks any programs that were dynamically linked against this. This problem has been addressed in several ways (CORBA, COM, staticly linking in the code, or keeping 800 copies of MFC40.dll on your machine, etc, etc)

    This seems (to me, at least) the biggest problem with writing an OS in C++. How does AtheOS deal with this problem?

  • Application framework & Development (Score:4, Interesting)

    by absurd_spork (454513) on Friday August 24 2001, @03:33PM (#2215274) Homepage
    Two questions, actually:
    • I think that not having X on board is a good idea, actually, because if you had X on AtheOS, everybody would start porting over X applications and then you'd have a lot of applications with an entirely different look & feel, which would spoil the integration that AtheOS currently offers. However, for the future, there's going to be need for a well-documented application framework in order to facilitate application development (for options such as component development and so on); since you already ported part of Qt to the native AtheOS system, what would you think about porting as much of KDE over to AtheOS as possible without including X, so that not too much of the native system's advantages would be lost, yet you could use the portability of KDE to ensure a broad supply of end-user applications?
    • I realize that you do very much of the actual development yourself, at the moment. What would you think of partially delegating development, such as putting up a list of "what is needed" to-do's, discussing the actual implementation with some developers, but letting them do more of the actual work? Because you've come really far with the OS, but I presume it's at a critical point at the moment where it needs to gain momentum. You could assume some sort of "benevolent dictatorship", we have at least one case in operating system development history where it worked out fine :-)
  • Do you consider AtheOS to be born as a curiousity? Or do you consider Linux, BSD, and other growing OSs to be flawed in some fundemental way that only a fresh start could fix? If the latter, what are the biggest strikes against these OSs and how do you plan to overcome them? And what do you think other *nix need to do to match your goals?
  • Out of curiosity, anyone know what program he used to generate that webpage?
    • Care to support this assertation at all?
    • Can you please show me one single statement anywhere where I threaten to close-source AtheOS? You couldn't find it? Ok, then how did you conclude that I have often threatened to make AtheOS closed source? I have never threatened to do so and I will not threaten to do so in the future.


      I have said that I'm might going to change the lisense to a more liberal one in case the GPL would cause problems for non-GPL drivers, apps, or other "third-party" components somehow. How you managed to twist that into "often threathened to close-source" is beyond me.

      Kurt Skauen

        • Let's say I download a copy of AtheOS. It is licensed to me under the GPL.

          Let's say a year later Kurt closes it, and no longer distributes it under the GPL. He no longer has to distribute it under GPL, of course.

          However, that doesn't at all change the fact that I have a copy, licensed to me under the GPL, and all that implies. I can distribute it myself under the GPL, etc.

          GPL is not designed so people can 'close up the code, revoke everything else out there, and start charging for it' might be another way to put it.

          If you are really concerned about the monetary value of your code, because you think you can sell it, and you think having a closed license is paramount to getting a sale, then you probably shouldn't publish it under GPL.
        • Say I release versions 1,2,3, and 4 of my Program under the GPL. These versions, by being "released under the GPL", are exactly what you say : GPL 4Life.

          I am under no obligation of releasing version 5 under the GPL. I can also re-release versions 1 - 4 under someother licence. For example, I can sell them as closed source to M$. However, these actions in no way invalidate the licence on the existing released code. And only I can take these actions.

          You on the other hand, are free and encouraged to build on my GPLed code, but if you do so, it MUST be released under the GPL 4Life as well. You have no rights to resell/relicence your _derivative_ work. ( I guess I could sell/transfer these rights to you tho, once again, without invalidating the licence on already released code).
    • One that can run all the damn binary forms so you aren't stuck with emulation layers and so on.

      Running binaries from other platforms not native to your own is emulation. You're platform A pretending to be platform B (no pun ;), for the purpose of running code from platform B without changing that code.

      a standardization of binary files probably would make applications more platform independent,

      A few such standardized formats are ELF (Executable & Linking Format), AOUT, and JAVA. The last of these, with the proper VM, does make applications more platform independent (sort of :).

      but what do I know, I'm just a 15 year old nerd :)

      Keep learning! :)
    • Are you scared of religious groups attacking your OS because they believe it's an atheist one?

      At least there's no need to worry about losing market share to christian hackers as they're already running Jesux [geocities.com].

        • Is this a troll, or did you really not grasp that the site is a joke?

          None of the above. I was passing along the joke because I thought it was appropriate given the topic of conversation in this thread. I think that a holy war between AtheOS and Jesux would be far more entertaining than Gnome vs. KDE or Emacs vs. VI. The Jesux kernel could refuse to talk with AtheOS daemons and AtheOS could refuse to recognize any Jesux binaries as authentic. The possibilities are endless!

    • A-the-OS. It's all in capitalization baby!

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