[openbeos] Re: Cosmoe is back (and I'm glad its here!)

> Michael Phipps wrote:
> 
> I have to admit - I kind of wondered, for a moment, why 
> Cosmoe if you have a fully functional Haiku (which we don't, 
> yet, but we will). Then it hit me (and I wondered why I missed it).
> 
> Servers.

This was my first thought when I learned of Cosmoe's existence
yesterday! The second was 'forking linux' (I know, linux is only the
kernel) in the sense of abandoning X11!

Haiku is progressing very nicely, but its early focus is to be a BeOS R5
'clone' with improvements, from my understanding.

> BeOS was never really meant to be a server OS. Nor, really, 
> is our kernel meant for the types of things that servers do. 
> Could it be? Sure. But we have a lot more desktop focus than, 
> say, Linux.

While I don't understand Bill Hayden's focus yet (I haven't looked into
Cosmoe), I think many people would be interested in a Haiku/Be API
running on top of the linux kernel.

I mean, look what you can strip linux down to:
http://www.minimalinux.org/ttylinux/showpage.php?pid=1

Cosmoe could become a truly fascinating linux distro that maintains
feature parity with Haiku. Perhaps it can become a resource for the
'Glass Elevator', building on time-tested strengths of the
unix/bsd/linux architecture. Encouraging development of the Haiku kernel
where the 'steering committee' (do we have one? hope so...) sees fit.
There are a lot of possibilities!

Personally, I would be interested in the primary Haiku devs opinion on
letting some #ifdef commits into the Haiku tree so Cosmoe doesn't have
to maintain a separate tree. You could clear them all out with a simple
script if you want them gone later...

X11/Gnome/KDE are ok for some people, but I think people with a 'Be'
mindset regarding usability and clean, consistent functionality will
develop an environment more appealing to the public/sane over time.
Package management, installation, inconsistency are well known problems
in the linux world and have been for over a decade. 'We' have the
advantage of a fairly clean slate and a known framework that sparks our
imaginations.

> Please, everyone, let's be nice. I think that we should be 
> nice for the sake of the community, but, if nothing else, 
> Bill has been a big help in making our code build for GCC 3 
> and he deserves a ton of respect for his coding and 
> development skills.

Well said. If you want to run Cosmoe to run under BSD, commit some code
to Mr. Hayden's project. Anyone who can take a lofty goal and code it
into reality should be applauded in my book.

Cheers all and keep up the good work!

Brian
















Other related posts: