After such a long time without any official updates at all I think we all deserve a bit of news. So, let's roll it out:
1) Most of the work regarding PE->ELF is done already. There are problems only with Firefox/Thunderbird/Nvu/GTK applications.
2) Robert will eventually port a new version of GTK (2.8.17 or simply newest at the time).
Should our blogs only contain SkyOS specific posts or should we treat them as ordinary personal blogs?
In my opinion they should be normal, everyday life blogs. There's not many people who actually have blogger access level (about five) and all of them are mature enough not to discredit SkyOS.org with their silly entries.
I'm sure you'd like to see a real blog of Robert Szeleney, where he throws his two cents to the recently revived microkernel vs. monolithic kernel discussion.
I'm certain you'd like see Matt ranting about another geeky programming language or about the immaturity of some of our guests at #skyos, Peter describing his latest projects, Chris revealing secrets of cooking ;) and so on, so forth.
We're testing SkyOS Beta10 Development Snapshot Five.
After yesterday's discussion on IRC and a bit of moaning Robert decided to implement a simple global installation progress bar. The one implemented earlier just showed the installation progress of single packages.
Speaking of installation. It takes longer due to package format change (in VMware it takes about 20-24 minutes now), especially while installing natively and with debugging enabled (though Robert removed a symbol or two to speed it up a bit). Remember that SkyOS disables DMA, when it will be enabled again, the installation will be *a lot* faster.
Things are picking up pace once again. Highlights:
1) Snapshot 4 released
- annoying fontconfig issue fixed
- several other bugfixes
- improved factory
- SSE/SSE2/MMX/FXSR support
- new CPU detection code
2) Recent changes
- some memory leaks fixed
- default package compression format changed to .tar.gz - this does make the installation longer, but allows proper symlinks, change transparent to users
- Archiver - to quote Robert: "This tool is plugin based, so as soon as someone writes a plugin for a new format, just drop it into the plugin directory, and every SkyOS application can immediately make use of it". Note: preliminary, "ugly" version.
"My goodness, how long must we wait?" - the inevitable question hangs in the air. RobertSz joins #skyos. Everyone holds their breath, you can actually see the windows bending inwards. "Commence question attack!" Rafael shouts. The battle is on, Matt and Peter fighting hand in hand, but the defence is strong and impenetrable. Adam whimpers in the end and puts his Radeon 9600 weapon down. But wait! The Legendary Warrior Patrick of Scribis shows up with his questions, stinging like a wild swarm of hornets.
[19:53] RobertSz: I give up
An epic Q&A session, nearly every evening Central European Time.
