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Mozilla The Internet Operating Systems Software

Thunderbird and Firefox Ported to SkyOS 236

Posted by samzenpus from the growing-everyday dept.
Proph3t writes "The up and coming operating system, SkyOS has just announced the ports of Thunderbird and Firefox, both in their 1.0 stable versions. Moreover, they will be releasing a 30-page guide on how to port these two excellent Mozilla applications to alternative operating systems soon."
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Thunderbird and Firefox Ported to SkyOS More

Thunderbird and Firefox Ported to SkyOS

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  • SkyOS (Score:4, Funny)

    by conteXXt ( 249905 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @08:03AM (#11167086)
    dollars to doughnuts it will be plagued with viruses as soon as they hook it up to SKYNET.

    We are all doomed.

  • I tried going to SkyOS to find out WTF it is, down already? Anyone else care to tell me why this OS is of any relevance?

    Kjella

    • Re:Slashdotted in the mysterious future? (Score:5, Informative)

      by NetNifty ( 796376 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @08:06AM (#11167104) Homepage
      Mirror here. [mirrordot.org]
      • Unfortunately, their main page doesn't tell much about what SkyOS actually is. And of course none of the links from their main page have been cached.

        So again, WTF is SkyOS anyhow? Is it just another Linux distro or what?

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • I agree... what the world doesn't need now is another closed-source, proprietary (in the sense of "not designed to be compatible with anything else"), desktop operating system. Windows NT is the last one that had any chance, and even that was designed with some compatibility with an already existing operating system. OS/2 and BeOS died in the desert. Apple tried multiple times to make a successor to MacOS: Pink/Taligent, PowerOpen, and Copeland. Only a reverse takeover by NeXT giving them a Unix-based O
          • too bad Commodore went bust before the whole "If we're dying we'll try a last minute boost and make our software open source" craze kicked in) in the formative years of my programming life, but YMMV.

            Another one like me. :) Could you imagine if Commodore had open sourced AmiDOS and the Workbench? Apple would have had a real preemptive multitasking operating system that ran on a 68xxx based CPU.

            It's amazing that a little computer company from West Chester, PA could do what Apple took 2 decades to figu
        • I found this interview [techimo.com] with its developers. The motivation seems to be, "Windows is too bloated and unreliable, Linux isn't sufficiently GUI-centric." The unspoken assumption is that there's no third choice because nobody's bothered to write one.

          Which ignores a lot of history: we've seen QNX, BeOS, NEXT, and a lot of others. If you want to justify SkyOS, you don't compare it Windows or Linux -- you compare it to all the OSs that have failed to penetrate the x86 user base, and explain why SkyOS can succeed

    • Anyone else care to tell me why this OS is of any relevance?

      Simple answer:

      It isn't.

    • Re:Slashdotted in the mysterious future? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Daniel Ellard ( 799842 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @08:12AM (#11167131)
      I tried going to SkyOS to find out WTF it is, down already?

      Search engines are your friends...

      Anyone else care to tell me why this OS is of any relevance?

      Because someone has the gumption to put together their own OS. This is how linux got started. Maybe it's irrelevant, or maybe it's not, but you've got to respect the attempt.

    • Apparently they need to port Apache as well

    • From the FAQ on the skyOS.org site:

      1. What is SkyOS?
      The Sky Operating System, or SkyOS, is an operating system written for x86-based personal computers. SkyOS was created in 1996 by Robert Szeleney as a small bootloader. In the past 8 years, SkyOS has evolved into a full-featured, modern operating system, with a goal to be the easiest to use desktop operating system available for the average computer user. The development staff has also increased to include business, software, and graphics developers.
    • Here's a really good cache of the "About" page that gives a great overview of SkyOS. It's enough to make me want to try it - I wonder if there's a live CD in the works.
      -N

  • Pretty amazing stuff (Score:2, Insightful)

    by sowdog81 ( 739008 )
    the os has come quite far. Supposedly done mainly by 1 guy. I'd hug myself if i could write something that boots up.
    • What's even more amazing is that I saw it progressing from its infancy. I remember first hearing about it from the guy who wrote it on the now defunct os-dev.isa.net.au message board. It wasn't much to begin with, but even at the time I was always impressed by how much they had accomplished. It's been a long time since I've checked its progress and I can say with some certainty that I would never have expected it to progress as far as it has.
    • With all respect to the guy, if he's the type that actually would write a whole OS by himself, then I suspect he does, in fact, "hug" himself quite a bit.

      Ain't no time for socializin' when you're debugging kernel spinlocks.

  • 30 pages? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CrackedButter ( 646746 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @08:06AM (#11167101) Homepage Journal
    Holy shit! Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I couldn't work out how the blurb was trying to spin it.
    • I couldn't work out how the blurb was trying to spin it.

      Maybe slashdot reported a fact and didn't spin it either way?

      ... nah, I'm sure we're just missing something ...

  • Getting the userbase (Score:2, Insightful)

    by KiloByte ( 825081 )
    Well, for the ordinary granny-type user, a web browser and a mail client is all what's important. So, this very move gave them a non-negligible piece of usability.

  • 30 'pages' (Score:4, Funny)

    by Leffe ( 686621 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @08:10AM (#11167120)
    A 30-page guide on avoiding Slashdotting would be more helpful I think.

    http://www.skyos.org.nyud.net:8090/

    Hehe, they used Slashdot in the Firefox screenshots, it's like they are asking for it :)
    • Hehe, they used Slashdot in the Firefox screenshots, it's like they are asking for it :)

      ...I think they were asking for it. SunOS has been a hobby OS from 1.0 to 4.9, the first commercial version is about to be released, you can join the beta now for $$$. Slashvertising anyone?

      Kjella

  • Hate to say this and all, but... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Atrax ( 249401 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @08:13AM (#11167135) Homepage Journal
    How many new Firefox users is this really going to contribute to the global pool, in the long run?

    Good for SkyOS, possibly, rather a non-event from a Firefox perspective, at least numbers-wise.

    Forgive me oh Stallman, I know not what I speak!

  • Why is this significant? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Agret ( 752467 ) <alias.zero2097@g ... om minus painter> on Thursday December 23, 2004 @08:14AM (#11167139) Homepage Journal
    Beacuse it is showing that it is not difficult to port Mozilla Thunderbird & Firefox to your Operating System of choice. It also adds more to the user base beacuse the OS is shipping with a good browser rather than a hopeless one (You all know what I mean!)
    • Yeah, especially if "your Operating System of choice" is one you wrote yourself. The guy to wrote SkyOS is the same person who ported Firefox and Thunderbird.

      Considering the OS appears to be BeOS/UNIX/BSD-like in nature, probably uses open-source libraries and such, and the person porting the application knows the OS intimately, I think it would be relatively trivial to port just about anything that runs on Linux.

  • Mirrored files (Score:3, Informative)

    by GrAfFiT ( 802657 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @08:19AM (#11167165) Homepage
    A Firefox screenshot [nerim.net].
    A Thunderbird screenshot [nerim.net].
    And the about page of SkyOS [nerim.net].
  • This is the real advantage of Open Source Software. It is there for everyone to use. It allows people to choose their OS (Open Source or Not) and Still run their favorite Open Source App. No Commercial Enterprise has the resources to port their commercial apps to all the different apps the OSS can be ported to. Lets use IE Sure it runs on Windows and It was ported to Mac, and Some Unix (I tell you the truth there was a Solaris Version of IE, it was damn slow though), Netscape was ported to more platforms
  • When I see it ported to DOS
  • It's awful to complain about what are obviously volunteer efforts, but in the spirit of the season I'm going to be Ebeneezer Scrooge. What's the point in mirroring just the first page of a web page, particularly when the first page is just fluff?

    A click on the "about" button on any of these mirrors is a pretty good test of their usefulness, or lack thereof: you're not doing anybody any good if all the links go back to the slashdotted site. Anybody got a mirror which passes that simple test?

  • Xbox port? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by the_riaa ( 669835 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @10:00AM (#11167846) Homepage
    So, when is somebody gonna port Firefox for the Xbox? Those of us who use all the other wonderful user built apps and homebrews on the Xbox only have one choice at the moment for web browsing: Linksbox. While decent, I'd love to have Firefox on there. Would be useful for those times where I'm too lazy to get up and use the computer. Any takers?
  • "Moreover, they will be releasing a 30-page guide on how to port these two excellent Mozilla applications to alternative operating systems soon."

    Excellent. From what I've heard lately, the Syllable community for some reason seems to be having a lot more difficulty porting Firefox to their OS. The document mentioned above might be very useful to them indeed.

    With all due respect to the (very impressive) work by the very few people working on SkyOS, the fact that it is a commercial project makes me quite sk
    • I'm looking forward to reading the HOWTO. It should be useful. I wasn't really involved in the discussion on porting Firefox to Syllable but the information from various people on the mailing lists, which in turn came from the various documentation available from the Mozilla guys, was that in order to port FF we would have to port the entire Mozilla codebase, starting at XPCOM and working up. That is obviously not the case; Robert has ported FF directly to SkyOS, so we must have taken a wrong turn at som
  • If this were ported to Syllable [syllable.org], I'd be a lot more enthusiastic.
  • I'm on the betatesters team and additionally I'm on the translators team at SkyOS.org which is working terribly slowly at the moment, we've underestimated the slashdot effect I'm afraid. Still we're happy with the publicity SkyOS gets. It's becoming a great alternative OS for the home desktop users. For $30 dollars you can be a betatester, you'll receive all the betas and the final product when it comes out. You can get it here http://www.skyos.org/getskyos.php (when the slashdot storm is over).

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