SkyOS
| File:SkyOS logo.png | |
| SkyOS SkyOS desktop screenshot (build 6669). | |
| Developer | Robert Szeleney |
|---|---|
| OS family | POSIX-compliant |
| Working state | Beta |
| Source model | Closed source |
| Latest release | Build 6814 / November 25, 2007 |
| Platforms | x86 architecture |
| Kernel type | Extendable Kernel |
| Default user interface | SkyGI |
| License | Proprietary |
| Official website | http://www.skyos.org |
SkyOS is a proprietary operating system for the x86 architecture that is currently in production. SkyOS is mostly POSIX compliant, and comes with the core of the free and open source GNU tools, including GCC. Due to its level of POSIX compliance and port of the GTK+ widget toolkit, many Linux or other UNIX applications have been ported, including AbiWord, Pidgin, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Thunderbird, as well as a few games, such as Quake. Additionally, a handful of third-party developers have created a number of native applications and games for SkyOS.
As of 2007, SkyOS has limited hardware support due to a lack of available device drivers. It is often run on a virtual machine to account for this. However, many common devices are currently supported, including a number of network ethernet cards, sound adapters, storage devices, touchscreens and a number of peripherals, such as USB keyboards, mice, flash drives and printers. The current beta build (build 6763) includes a USB stack, DMA and ACPI support, and a port of CUPS to allow printing support to a large number of local and network printing devices. Although SkyOS has support for graphics cards in 2D accelerated or VESA modes, it lacks the ability to take advantage of the 3D hardware found on modern graphics cards like nVidia's GeForce and ATI's Radeon range. The installation procedure can be started from a Live CD session that also allows for read/write operations, by saving the changes (diffs) to a ramdisk (memory filesystem) using BranchFS.
Features of SkyOS
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Mouse Gestures
SkyOS features mouse gestures built-in to the system, that allow certain windowing operations (e.g. minimize/show all windows) or running an external program, by holding the middle mouse button and "painting" a shape that a user has already configured. This only works with straight lines.
SkyFS
The basic SkyOS filesystem, called SkyFS, is a modified openbfs filesystem, that also supports content indexing. As an openbfs derived filesystem, it supports 64bit file sizes, database-like attributes for each file, queries that update themselves automatically (B+Tree nodes), fast searching for files, and ability to specify search criteria based on those attributes.
Indexing
The indexing service attempts to automatically extract available information from files, and add this information as attributes, for example, id3 tags from mp3 files, or dimensions and color depth for images. These attributes then appear in directories and queries.
ISS - the integrated streaming system
http://www.skyos.org/?q=node/416
Efficient GUI Compositing
http://www.skyos.org/?q=node/534
DCS and notifications
http://www.skyos.org/?q=node/570
General Concepts in SkyOS
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- Services throughout the system
- Translators and Codecs
- searching and filtering is integrated into the gui
- Notifications make it easy for applications to inter-operate based on events.
The examples above demonstrate the concepts of functionality for-free, code reuse (components) and that the operating system, by providing a common base allows the applications to integrate and talk amongst themselves through the provided abstractions. In addition, they use the same API, this is intended to make the system run in a coherent manner. It is also intended to make different applications function in a similar way, to make them more predictable to users.
External links
- SkyOS Home Page — Main site of SkyOS
- News about SkyOS at OSNews.com
- SkyOS Build Numbers