SkyOS Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
SkyOS is a commercial hobbyist operating system developed by Robert Szeleney. It has existed since 1996, and its current release is 4.0a, although 5.0 is in advanced closed beta stages. It was free in its early stages, although it is now commercial. A LiveCD release has been promised for the near future.
It features SMP support, and a number of features reminiscent of BeOS - integrating media subsytem, 64-bit filesystem, etc. Its filesystem is in fact a modified version of OpenBFS, though recent changes in SkyFS make it incompatible with the original.
Like a number of alternative operating systems, it is mostly POSIX compliant, and comes with the majority of the GNU tools, including GCC. Due to its POSIX compliance and port of the GTK toolkit, many Linux or other UNIX applications have been ported, including AbiWord, GAIM and VideoLAN, as well as a number of games, such as OpenTTD and Quake.
As of 2004, SkyOS has drivers for a wide enough range of hardware to run on most PCs. Some types of devices are not supported, such as printerss, CD burners and firewire devices. Although SkyOS has good support for most 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 SkyOS developers have asked these companies to consider writing 3D accelerated drivers or releasing specifications so that drivers may be written; but at this stage neither company considers SkyOS to have enough marketshare for that to be financially viable.
SkyOS has applications for most common desktop computing tasks, a full office suite being a notable exception. Recently, Mozilla Firefox has been ported. The availability of niche applications is limited in comparison to other operating systems such as Windows or Linux.
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