I am head of the open source, Revlin OS project http://p-quinn.com/entries/announcement/announcement-presenting-revlin-s-testing-framework-for-rave-[updated]
First and formost i am a full time Haiku user and see the great potential now that i had seen 5 years ago, i love i haiku and must at the least, tip my hat to the community and the devoted team of developers.
We are currently looking for developers who wish to get involved in this project to get in touch, either via this thread or via our email ( revlinsoftware at gmail dot com)
In short the project is a new desktop operating system which uses and amalgamation of modern web and native languages for its desktop environment and a kernel which is derived from the linux kernel (in the same way that apple uses a mach/BSD kernel for its os ) while still maintaing driver compatibility (which is one of the main problems that many modern Operating systems face, hardware support) . More information can be found here : http://p-quinn.com/entries/report/report-revlin-features-and-how-it-all-works imagine being able to create a desktop app as easily as you would a webpage while also being able to use native code for all of those hard to reach places. Googles chrome os runs a a similar principle, but unlike chromeos it does not rely on constant web acces to be able to view YOUR files.
We are looking to build and Open Source foundation and community around the OS (Called the RevLin Software Foundation or R.S.F) but we can do it alone.
We are looking for PR people, site admins, community managers, people with graphic design skills and of course developers with either web or native coding skills
So please feel free to ask any questions you would like about the OS .
What i love about your reply is that its like saying to a girl, your fat, plain and ugly but hey, im sure you will find a date for prom! haha
EyeOS is totally different in as far as its ment to be thin and not ment to be a full desktop os in the traditional sense, what you should compare it to is a desktop version of palm’s webOS. An OEM could not, even if they wanted,ship eyeOS on there hardware as a replacement for windows , there just too much fundamental client side stuff missing (like maybe a network manager or power monitor and so on) and the whole eyeOS ecosystem is set up to be web orientated. your basically saying,‘why would i want to you haiku when i could just use linux?’
Also as a foot note, this is not aimed at haiku developers, this is aimed at people who dont fit into the haiku model like web developers
Thanks for taking time out to reply to my thread
Hope to here more feedback soon.
p.s its in the Off topic section so yeah it would need to be nothing to do with Haiku, im reaching out to an open source community as i have done on many different forums.
uh… how is this different from eyeOS (which could be booted off a kiosk type linux distro etc…or even haiku)? I can see how eyeOS could be modified to support your ideas ie running webserver locally with local file access…
Your post is a bit spammy btw mainly because it has nothing to do with haiku… and asking for developers on a site that is kinda already short crewed is rather awkward. Interesting project though I hope it pans out…
I see, then it doesn’t sound nearly as much of a fork as it originally did. That said, if you’re looking for a stable kernel, borrowing one from Debian or Redhat (CentOS) might be a good shortcut; though those kernels may be a bit outdated for your purposes. Since I’m not aware of any major linux players offering something similar (except Google) you may be able to pair up with one of them, which would get you plenty of developers (though you’d probably lose a lot of control over the project.)
I would at least try to use ext4 before writing a new filesystem, but as I don’t know what all that entails I may be wrong.
OSS is a good audio api. It’s also generally faster then Alsa (even when emulating Alsa.) Though Alsa is embedded into the kernel and I’m not sure what removing it would do. So just sticking to Alsa is probably easiest. Also since Alsa has been embedded in the kernel it has more drivers.
I found the use of a modified Linux kernel strange myself.
It seems like a lot of extra work to add onto that needed for the GUI and Userland changes that will already suck up developers’s time.
Haiku uses a different kernel because it needs features that were not available in other kernels at the time, also the license to the kernel was a good match to the rest of the OS.
For the RevLin OS features listed I don’t understand the need to change the kernel code at-all. The special features all look like they can run on top of the kernel in UserLand, not inside it.
It’s actually a little surprising that Haiku doesn’t attract more of these.
A lot of people briefly get the idea that they’d like to make an OS. Then they get a new car, or a new girlfriend, or their class goes on a trip to see a real working farm, or they learn about something on Sesame Street and they have a new passion and they forget about the OS.
But meanwhile, they have to tell everybody about it. Which is kind of tedious.
It is not as though we dont appreciate what you are saying just trying to highlight a few things to help you better grasp the core concepts behind the project.
I dont expect people to rush to help out but in the long term i hope to see the OS gaining a large community backing and running the parent company (RevLin Software) like more a democracy than a dictatorship, because after all, its is the users who we are putting this forward to.
Even the most basic ideas and/or constructive criticism is much needed at this point of the project, so we do appreciate your comments!
Since I’m fairly blunt, I’m just going to start out by saying that all I mean to do is understand the choices that were made regarding Revlin.
I understand that the main reason for your choice of kernel is drivers, but I think that asking for help in a forum devoted to an operating system that uses a different kernel is a little misguided. As wonderful as free/open source software is, distracting and splitting developer bases is not very intelligent and is unfortunately very easy to do. At the very least, I’m the kind of person who dislikes seeing redundant work, as in people maintaining several versions of the same software that could be merged together but because of ego or simply ignorance the groups don’t come together. And while I mean no offense, RevLin, while unique in scope, seems to create a lot of unnecessary divergence. Perhaps, it is that I simply don’t understand why you don’t just use the vanilla Linux code and simply submit patches to the Linux kernel directly. I mean, it seems to me that your GUI is your main advantage, in which case I would recommend working on that and just that. Maintaining an entire OS is a lot of work and you could greatly lower the amount of work you have to do by doing one thing and doing it well…
Now then, that said, is there a reason (aside from drivers and a general lack of support for alternate GUIs) that you couldn’t use Haiku as a base? I would think that if you enjoy using Haiku you would want to bring more developers to it (which creating an alternate UI may do, so long as you change nothing else.)
I understand why you would question the use of a modified linux kernel, but linux has become very much a testing platform for new technologies and has accumulated a lot of excess deprecated code that just dosnt need to be there, basically its getting messy
With this “fork” (in a very loose sense of the word) we can take one kernel version, integrate our filesystem, keep a great deal of hardware support and tightly integrate our choice of audi,o video and other frameworks ( only having one set of frameworks for things like audio makes development of apps by third part developers infinitely more simplistic and attainable) , basically we control what goes into the kernel and if we see a feature upstream in the linux kernel we like we can integrate it with very little haste, admittedly in initial testing releases we will be using plain old linux with Rufs (RevLin unified file system), and embex (embedded x server, based on wayland and kdrive)
if you still have doubts about our methods please do day it is very useful to hear feedback
Please provide an alternative solution if you are going to provide criticism.
aggh … three times I have tried to reply to have my post deleted
to sum it up
I didn’t mean to bash your OS at all… I found it interesting in fact
Go the secure web app route like distributed encrypted cloud or some such to differentiate REvLin from ChromeOS… (like a P2P version of facebook. user pages cached on multiple computers and a token system to authorize access/decryption of friend pages)
It seems you have already started that a bit by having local file support
Oh and I think my question was legitimate as would be asking the same of haiku… obviously I didn’t know anything of your project I mean there had to be something to make it worthwhile so … I asked
I admit to not being particularly technically knowledgeable, but it was my impression that most of the cruft could be compiled out. If it can’t I would think someone already has, maybe a minimal distro such as slitaz. If so you could borrow their kernel.
I happen to prefer things to be in userland rather than in the kernel. So adding audio, video, etc. to the kernel seems mistaken to me. Also what exactly does Rufs do? What does it provide that is not elsewhere?
I should probably repeat that I’m just trying to help you reduce the amount of work that you have to do.
you would be right in saying most of it could be compiled out but some of the core code is riddled with comments saying ‘quick fix’ or ‘needs special attention’ with one kernel we can focus on fixing bugs that are viewed by developers as menial and other things like quick fixes that kernel developers implemented due to time constraints, basically just polishing up the linux kernel to a quote unquote commercial grade,
Also we dont have to keep trowing new features into the kernel so people have the choice, like the linux kernel devs do but rather focus on making the existing features work as they should, as for integration of frameworks into the kernel i would be in agreement that keeping them separate is the best course of action alright but adding some level of kernel support for those particular frameworks is important.
Thanks for the feedback guys it is very useful to us
Rufs has many of the same properties as ext4 at the moment but as it progresses it will potentially have better and more consistant write speeds than other file systems (ext4 is still an option if we can get it where we want it to go)
Hey guys just like to share with you a bit of news on the OS’s web browser Tidal. Currently in early stages of development as of now, it uses html5, CSS3 and JS (nothing else) . More detailed info can be found here. http://p-quinn.com/entries/announcement/announcement-tidal-web-browser
It seems to me that the most significant objective is to make a new display system. X11 is inefficient and lacks widgets so a replacement is much needed. I have heard of two private xhtml-based display systems and both developers passed through Goldsmiths (London University).
The significant problem is that good native performance demands extending the xhtml standards, which paves the way for internal disputes. This might be problematic in a democracy.
A secondary problem is that new apps need to be developed to avoid the use of X11. Without a complete suite of apps (my emphasis), there is no immediate incentive for consumers to migrate.
Both of the above concerns were resolved at Apple when they planned a new display system (which is both different and comparable).
Regardless of how the rest of the OS turns out, I speculate that any great display system would be quickly scraped off and bundled with larger *nix distros.
Hey, each to their own. The only reason that Linux is being used as the base is because of desktop hardware support. I would personally love to use Haiku as the base of the OS but it dosnt have anywhere near enough hardware support and its no where near as matured as Linux is. We where on the fence for a while between BSD and Linux and we are kinda of back on that fence at the moment. I would love it if you made some positive contribution to this discussion instead of just saying ‘its another distro’ , because its really not. The desktop environment is what makes it special not whats beneath it and while yes there will be a better display system it wont epitomize the OS. Sadly consumers dont share your views on it being AOSTULK, they just dont care. They care about a system that work well, they care about user experience and, if we do this right, they wont even know that its linux at all.
@stormbind and his much more constructive comment, Developers who wish to make applications wont have to deal with that sort of thing because they will basically be coding (very fancy) web applications. Secondly, there will be a full suite of applications shipped with the OS . Applications that are coded from scratch. We are also working on getting Software vendors aboard a partnership scheme and there will also be a simple to use yet extensive SDK.
Although i personally love answering questions on the platform, i dont like needlessly defending it like this, so in future could you go down the stormbind path and give me alternatives and options instead just straight negativity.
You need to realize that people come here because they are specifically interested in Haiku, and that by proselytizing another project which could be even perceived as having a conflict of interest with Haiku, you obviously expose yourself to at least some negative reactions (if there weren’t more, it’s because we are a nice bunch).
I don’t speak for the project, but personally I think this is not the place for this sort of topic. So while I wish you the best of luck with your project, I hope you can be more sensitive to our community members and take this discussion elsewhere.
You touched the point. For you, Linux == More Hardware == More users. But for us, linux is a piece of junk that attracts more junk, and then form a bloated OS. So, RevLin(ux) destiny will not be different from any Linux Distribution (no offenses here). Ubuntu turned Linux simple… but not polished. I remember that Michael Phipps (former Haiku founder) said in the past that “You can put in a pig a dress, but it continues being a pig”.
Anyway, you are welcome for write drivers and makes Haiku more and more usable.
Tip: Makes more sense for you use NetBSD kernel, have many drivers there too.
Thanks for that comment. We are not leaving the kernel as is, we are rewriting chunks of the kernel removing a large section of bloat optimizing the kernel framebuffer. We are taking a release of the linux kernel, sitting down, identifying its both fundamental and lesser weaknesses and sorting them out. If i had my way it would be freeBSD or Haiku with a giant computability layer trown in. Sure NetBSD has a load of drivers but thats not for things like peripherals, i had a conversation with the FreeBSD community about this and they seem to agree with me.
So what we will now do is create two new development platforms, one based on Haiku and one based on NetBSD. We will then compare pros and con and raw performance data and i will then get back to you.
I will release RevLin_Core-Haiku here for users to test (Seeing as this is the Haiku Forum and all)
I Just dont want to see our project flounder because of the lack of hardware support available, god knows we alone cant keep up with it.
This is not just a project, its a passion and when you have dedicated this much time and effort into it you want to see something worthwhile come of it.