Real-life Internet Operating system aviable.

drag

Elite Member
Jul 4, 2002
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Sorta.

It's a web-based operating system. Currently very beta.. more of a proof of concept right now then anything else. But it has games and apps and such.

Based around a Apache mini-server, PHP, and some other stuff. Flash and the like. You can access it directly online, or download it and run on your desktop or from your system on another system. Open source and eventually they are thinking about releasing a stand alone version based on a mini linux system. Eventually they want to move completely to AJAX-style setup for multiple window handing and a more flexible/faster interface.

Something like that.

I don't think much of the concept myself, but this is interesting non-the-less. Especially with all the nonsense of a google os and Sun releasing web version of oo.org etc etc. At least this is something that is usabl e now.

http://www.eyeos.org/

For best results probably open your firefox window to 'full screen' and hide taskbars and such.
 

RelaxTheMind

Platinum Member
Oct 15, 2002
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Interesting yet I like my remote desktop better... Im iffy about how full featured a full eyeos would be...
 

Seeruk

Senior member
Nov 16, 2003
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Awesome start. Will be interesting to see what sort of apps they can develop for it.
 

drag

Elite Member
Jul 4, 2002
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Ya. Right now they have a browser, a bulleten board system, calendering application, text editor, and email. Among other things.

You can find this as a demo on their website. You can log into it with 'demo5' username and password and play around with it if you want.

If you install one to play around with they have all these little java/flash games and other things that aren't in the Demo.. I beleive. although I haven't tried it yet myself.


edit:
also keep in mind that they are moving to ajax and eventually Mozilla-based browsers and applications will have vector-based graphics (which should be able to have complex graphics without as much bandwidth overhead as bitmapped stuff) and hardware opengl acceleration to help speed things up.

So there is a lot of potential.

Although I like my X windows right now. I can even do 3d apps like Blender3d over the network (although in a unaccelerated software-rendered form right now).
 

ProviaFan

Lifer
Mar 17, 2001
14,993
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Interesting stuff. I'm not sure what I would use it for, but the concept seems nice (except for that issue of remote data storage).
 

phisrow

Golden Member
Sep 6, 2004
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For the easily amused, your patience seems to be the only limit to how deeply you can nest instances by using the Browser app inside EyeOS to enter the EyeOS demo.
 

kamper

Diamond Member
Mar 18, 2003
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Originally posted by: phisrow
For the easily amused, your patience seems to be the only limit to how deeply you can nest instances by using the Browser app inside EyeOS to enter the EyeOS demo.
Well, I'm not going to try it, but your post amused me :p
 

xtknight

Elite Member
Oct 15, 2004
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Hmm. I'm not really convinced. Call me skeptical, but what couldn't you do with a local OS that you could do with this? And um, what is the point of it in general? HTML and Javascript is no substitute for an operating system... To be honest I think it's the stupidest thing ever invented, but that's of course my uninformed opinion.
 

drag

Elite Member
Jul 4, 2002
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I donno. People built entire operating systms out of Lisp and it was popular for a while until they got beaten out by the 'low cost unix'.

People have made built distributed file systems using perl.

All sorts of weird stuff.

The way your firefox browser is designed is that it renders itself (the menus, task bars and such) with the same engine that renders websites. Thunderbird the email client is the same way and rendered with the same engine. They could easily be webbased with just the renderer installed on the computer. People are working on stuff like that.. for instance Xulrunner. It's a runtime enviroment for the gecko rendering engine. It'll replace the browser for running Xul applications. (aka Firefox, Thunderbird, etc etc) there are developer versions aviable, but it'll be due out for production in the beginning of 2007 and with coincide with the release of Firefox 3.x series. (or at least that is the idea).

There are all sorts of odd possiblities and directions this could take. Javascript applications can be very complex. Flash applications also. Mozilla-related stuff can be web based and be vector-based OpenGL rendered using the same technology that will be used to get opengl rendering working for the Linux desktop. (glitz, cairo) All potentionally can be web-based. Run your apps from a OS X, Windows, Linux, whatever.

Or even just a 512meg USB key ring with a Linux kernel, xulrunner, and flash support.

On your phone, your desktop, a koisk. Aviable instantly anywere in the world. Look at any Linux desktop. Any of those apps, weither 3d or multimedia can be remotely accessed. I've quite happily have run entire entire desktops on one computer on another. Identical look and feel irregardless of what computer I am using. Play apps from my x86 desktop on my PowerPC laptop is no problem. The only real issues are bandwidth and lack of hardware acceleration.. and those are technical hurdles, not show-stoppers.

With Xen I can boot up a Linux or NetBSD operating system in a DomU (non-direct hardware access) ring in a virtualized machine.. run it. It'll run it a 90-98% the same speed as if it ran directly on the hardware itself. I can take that OS _while_it_is_running_ and migrate it completely from one machine to another. Just as long as it's files are aviable on both machines and there is enough ram to hold it. Then shutdown the original machine I started it on.

You could be logged in via telnet or ssh or whatever during the migration typing away and wouldn't notice anything happenned. Complete and total hardware abstraction. All software is divorced from dependance on one machine to another to run and only with a tiny slowdown over running directly on the machine.

At a local LUG a guy gave a speach describing how he moved a entire 500 machine datacenter to a different geographical location to avoid the hurricanes from last year... With no downtime.

All these various technologies.. Linux, Xen, X windows, Xul, Ajax, distributed file systems, the internet, 3d desktops, and many other things. They are looking for a convergence, a end point were it would end up all making sense. Were it ends up nobody knows.

I don't think that eyeOS will eventually lead directly to anything realy earth shattering., but they may learn lots of stuff that can be applied to many different situations. A miniture apache web server, with just enough software to run a basic windows 95 style desktop. There has to be interesting things that they are figuring out.
 

drag

Elite Member
Jul 4, 2002
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Originally posted by: RelaxTheMind
Will it run F.E.A.R?

Probably not right now. But give it a few years to mature a bit. Although it's going to be tough to run a windows game in a non-windows system.

More likely Quake3 and it's mods though, since that is open source. Not right now, of course.
 

silverpig

Lifer
Jul 29, 2001
27,703
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Well it's a neat idea, especially considering how a family could set up a dual athlon x2 box with 4 gigs of ram and 2 TB of raid 5, put eyeOS on it and then have a nice distributed computing network at home where everyone can log in to the main server.

I mean, I guess you can already do that with linux, but still...
 

xtknight

Elite Member
Oct 15, 2004
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Originally posted by: drag
I donno. People built entire operating systms out of Lisp and it was popular for a while until they got beaten out by the 'low cost unix'.

People have made built distributed file systems using perl.

All sorts of weird stuff.

The way your firefox browser is designed is that it renders itself (the menus, task bars and such) with the same engine that renders websites. Thunderbird the email client is the same way and rendered with the same engine. They could easily be webbased with just the renderer installed on the computer. People are working on stuff like that.. for instance Xulrunner. It's a runtime enviroment for the gecko rendering engine. It'll replace the browser for running Xul applications. (aka Firefox, Thunderbird, etc etc) there are developer versions aviable, but it'll be due out for production in the beginning of 2007 and with coincide with the release of Firefox 3.x series. (or at least that is the idea).

But, why would I want the user interface rendered by a web engine, slower and much more complicated than just doing it with the native API? I guess maybe for dynamic updating objects it would be fine, but the idea of the whole operating system being a web browser based system just freaks me out. Security holes galore? Active Desktop is already bad enough as it is. If Microsoft gets their hands dirty making some web operating system...oh boy...I better run for cover. ;)

It's cool, but what I'm worried about is performance. My PC is already slow enough as it is.

Why don't I just render that OpenGL through the native interface? Platform-independence? That's what Java is for, right? I think Java would be faster than anything that had to be stored on a remote server.

What did Mozilla gain by making the menus be rendered by the web engine vs. using owner-drawn native API menus?

On your phone, your desktop, a koisk. Aviable instantly anywere in the world. Look at any Linux desktop. Any of those apps, weither 3d or multimedia can be remotely accessed. I've quite happily have run entire entire desktops on one computer on another. Identical look and feel irregardless of what computer I am using. Play apps from my x86 desktop on my PowerPC laptop is no problem. The only real issues are bandwidth and lack of hardware acceleration.. and those are technical hurdles, not show-stoppers.

I can already do that with Netmeeting/Remote Desktop/PCAnywhere/VNC/ssh. :) I agree it needs to be easier for novices though.

All these various technologies.. Linux, Xen, X windows, Xul, Ajax, distributed file systems, the internet, 3d desktops, and many other things. They are looking for a convergence, a end point were it would end up all making sense. Were it ends up nobody knows.

Yeah, who knows is right. I just hope it doesn't make everything more complicated and slow than it is. I just don't see the advantages, at least for regular users anyhow.
 

CTho9305

Elite Member
Jul 26, 2000
9,214
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I prefer CXDE (requires a very recent nightly build of Firefox or SeaMonkey, otherwise the windows overlap incorrectly). :)
 

CTho9305

Elite Member
Jul 26, 2000
9,214
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What did Mozilla gain by making the menus be rendered by the web engine vs. using owner-drawn native API menus?
Rapid cross-platform deployment. Imagine adding a menu item in a "normal" application - you add a bit of code somewhere for the Windows version, a little more for Linux, and in a third place for Mac OS. The way they do it, they have their own framework - port the framework to an OS, and you get SeaMonkey, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc all working just right. If you don't like the menu example, consider tab drag-drop. Drag and drop handling is different on all platforms (and probably different on different *nix toolkits like GTK2 and Qt), so supporting it would have required a lot of platform-specific code. By using the engine for tabs, and not native widgets, it was implemented in a completely platform-independent way. If the developer wrote it on Linux, it would still work on the other platforms.
 

n0cmonkey

Elite Member
Jun 10, 2001
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Originally posted by: xtknight
Yeah, who knows is right. I just hope it doesn't make everything more complicated and slow than it is. I just don't see the advantages, at least for regular users anyhow.

I think it's perfect for regular users. 90% of the computing world doesn't need the ghz, hardware accelerated, blah blah. They need a browser and a word processor. Hell, I'm guessing most people use webmail these days.

Thin clients are great. I love'em. I wish I could invest in some hardware and software from Sun to enjoy theirs. Or the time/space/money to setup my OpenBSD netboot machines again. ;)

EDIT: With things like SSL VPNs this could probably be a great way to provide more than just access to road warriors. Think about logging into your work account, seeing your desktop, from anywhere. Without remote desktop or other such programs. It'd be neat. Especially if EyeOS can save sessions...
 

Seeruk

Senior member
Nov 16, 2003
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Originally posted by: phisrow
For the easily amused, your patience seems to be the only limit to how deeply you can nest instances by using the Browser app inside EyeOS to enter the EyeOS demo.


Hehe - was the 1st thing I tried for some strange reason ;) File me in the easily amused box I guess ...
 

gsellis

Diamond Member
Dec 4, 2003
6,061
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Ah, just what I want... An OS that is dependent on the reliability of Charter Comm. cable and that thinks that color green makes an attractive website :p

That adds some emphasis on the R in RIPL though... Probably would be a great feature for a virtual machine to have it run like that.

Confessing - will read more when I have time.
 

doan

Golden Member
Dec 17, 2000
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76
Interesting....I logged into the demo, I could not get the calc app to work. I tried both with Sun Java and Microsoft VM Java.