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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Miscellaneous => Topic started by: quetz on September 03, 2004, 01:27:54 PM
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Athene 2004 an OS with faster 2d graphics (thanks to Snap) and an option for "omega workbench" as skin ,for x86.
Picture:
http://www.linux.com/blob.pl?id=069085472fdd825dffa83467571973a8
Article:
http://distributions.linux.com/article.pl?sid=04/09/01/1735216&tid=26&tid=97
Commercial it seems:
http://www.rocklyte.com/athene/index.html
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These guys have been around forever, but if you look closely, this does seem to be news...
First off, they seem to have 'quietly' become a full Linux distro, instead of a Window Manager ++. (If I recall, they used to be an 'OS' in the sense that, like Windows 3.x, you could load their system under Linux/X11 or Windows and run programs targeting the Athene API.*)
Secondly, the Athene component would now seem to be a full X11 replacement, built in a more 'conventional' sense (along the lines of Y or otherwise 'normal' systems, where the widget library comes built into the display server), using SNAP for accelleration, and implementing what sounds like a headless X server beneath... a-la Quartz or whatever Apple's calling it these days. [This is at first glance, so as caveat: If they simply took XFree86 or X.org and bunged SNAP onto it to take advantage of SciTech's optimized driver set, they could claim what they're claiming without having done anything especially sexy. In fact, it's not really clear what they're doing, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, whatever they *did* do, they could've achieved similar performance implementing Athene as an extension to X, which would easily guarantee the backwards compatibility... but hey, religious wars, commercial product, and if they actually took the time to implement and debug a completely new display server, maybe it really will be more 'user-friendly.'**]
*They've never been particularly clear about what they're doing, but taking a quick skim of the marketing, it (still) sounds pretty much like the Qt/KDE split... But reversed; Pandora seems to be about providing a minimal form of the conveniences and abstractions you'd get from things like KDE or Gnome libs ('media' support - just sound for now?, compression, some data type abstractions for clean coding?), while more of the Qt/GTK-style graphics calls and widgetry reside with the display server itself. [For that matter, my apologies if they were actually offering a full distro since 1998 or whenever they first showed up.]
**The 'problem' is, they're doing the old Trolltech business model one worse; not only is it less-than-open, but it costs the end-user money to become a convert. That'd be cool if you look at this as a commercial X server -- plenty of people pay upwards of $30 for the convenience of getting their graphics cards working when they can't figure out XFree86 or X.org -- but it's more than that; they're trying to push a whole new API here, so they'd stand to do much better making the whole Athene server free (so every user on the planet can become a potential target for developers licensing the SDK). But it's a DE-style catch-22; now that they've taken advantage of SNAP, they need to pay for it... and while I expect SciTech have brains and offer flat-fee licensing, how much do you want to bet that Rocklyte either cut a per-unit royalty deal, or feel the need to price that way just to recoup the expenditure (to avoid having to price the SDK out of the market, if most of their existing customers are likely to be 'embedded' shops pushing custom apps to relatively small numbers of desktops)?
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its getting better all the time .
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Long time since I've last seen this.. But I seem to remember a custom kernel, not based on Linux..
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I remember downloading this and it runs inside a browser...???? ActiveX perhaps. You can select all these little pretty desktop themes, that really do nothing for you but look pretty.
You know, has anyone ever used this?
My impressions of it was that it was a fake. Just a pretty front end with nothing but your underlying OS underneath it. Hardly an OS in its own right. I know it sounds bizzare, but could this report be fake? Can anyone substantiate that any of the claims these guys are making are true? I mean, its only their own window manager that sits on top of another OS. Anyone can write one of those. It runs Linux Executables through a windows manager with the same theme. I don't even think it runs its own executables but interprets its own XML presentation language called DML which is like HTML. It wouldn't surprise me if the whole thing is running in a browser and written in javascript.
It doesn't really do anything for anyone does it?
Why would someone want to use this?
I could just as easily write a similar windows manager and make all these outrageous technical claims and you would be none the wiser. You'd be on forums like this trying to figure it out, thinking it was cool, when it does nothing but push some predefined windows around with some basic functionality to make you think its interactive. Give me a break. If it didn't mention Amiga you wouldn't have noticed this at all.
And that Amiga like OS, is merely a graphical theme called Omega. Wow NOT!!!
I could be wrong, in which case, feel free to correct me. However, just consider for a moment if I am right and this whole product is a hoax. How would you know? Its not like you're going to go out and buy it to find out. Even the review is flawed to the point of maintaining its technical obscurity.
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@BigBen,
Nah, think you`ve got your knickers in a twist.
I remember that explorer thing that looked like Workbench, I`ve still got it on a backup somewhere, definately not the Athene this thread is about though.
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@ Doobrey
Errr....I'm pretty sure it is!!! Its almost exactly as they described, unless you're saying it was an earlier version, which it probably is.....but still I'm talking about the same thing.
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Then maybe I`m the one who`s got them twisted;)
The amiga-like explorer I tried out wasn`t a 10MB download that`s for sure.
BTW, is this related to AtheOS? That had an amiga like skin, but had it`s own kernel AFAIK.
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I think some of you are confusing Athene with AtheOS.
Athene was always a Linux application. AtheOS is a stand alone OS with its own kernel.