Syllable Desktop
Syllable Desktop is a discontinued free and open-source lightweight hobbyist operating system for Pentium and compatible processors. Its purpose was to create an easy-to-use desktop operating system for the home and small office user. Its development began in 2002 as a fork of AtheOS.
The same group produced Syllable Server, for server computers, based on Linux core.
History
Syllable Desktop is a fork of AtheOS, a free and open source operating system that was discontinued. AtheOS was originally developed to be an Amiga clone for x86 processors, and also took inspiration from BeOS for the file system it used. Syllable was started around July 2002 because the sole developer of AtheOS went inactive for nine months. Syllable Desktop aimed to be a successor to AtheOS and expand on it, such as adding additional hardware support. Further development aimed at porting additional software and libraries. The last source code commit was in 2012, but the developer is working on restarting the project according to information on the website.Features
Syllable Desktop has a native Webkit-based web browser named Webster, an email client named Whisper, a media player, an IDE, and other applications.Features according to the official website include:
- Native 64-bit journaled file system, the AtheOS File System
- C++ oriented API
- Object-oriented graphical desktop environment on a native GUI architecture
- Mostly POSIX compliant
- Software ports, including Vim, Perl, Python, Apache, others.
- GNU toolchain
- Preemptive multitasking with multithreading
- Symmetric multiprocessing support
- Device drivers for most common hardware
- File system drivers for FAT, NTFS, and ext2
- Rebol as system scripting language