[Syllable-announce] Syllable 0.6.1 released

[Kristian V. D. V. <va...@li...>]

It's been a long time coming, but here it is at last: Syllable 0.6.1!

The list of changes is attached below, but the highlights of this release a=
re:

o Initial ACPI support and better PCI resource management
o New application Events API, with preliminary support in the Desktop, Dock
   and Media applications
o Support for the GDB debugger
o Driver updates for the GeForceFX, Radeon and Savage video drivers
o Updates for the 3c59x network driver, with support for new chipsets and
    laptop "Tornado" chipsets
o A bunch of ATA driver fixes, so Syllable should boot on most machines now!
o Various fixes for AFS, including suport for ftruncate()
o A whole bunch of Appserver and Libsyllable fixes and updates
o New versions of ABrowse and Whisper

We've also spent a lot of time fixing POSIX bugs, which means Samba 3 runs =
on=20
Syllable, and so does CUPS!  If you have a USB or network attached printer=
=20
supported by Gutenprint, you can now print from Syllable.  You'll need to=20
download the seperate Printing package from Sourceforge, and be sure to rea=
d=20
the README!  This is very early work so far, so watch out for further updat=
es=20
as we integrate CUPS and the print system into Syllable properly.

This is also the first version of Syllable to ship with Orca, an open sourc=
e=20
implementation of the REBOL language.  REBOL has been selected as our syste=
m=20
scripting language, so you might want to hit http://www.rebol.org/ to find=
=20
out more about REBOL!  Again, watch out for further updates as we integrate=
=20
Orca into Syllable.

We've also finally droped the old Glibc 2.1.2 libraries from Syllable.  If =
you=20
have older versions of software installed and they no longer work, upgrade!=
 =20
Let us know if you rely on a piece of software we havn't yet released a new=
=20
binary for.

=46inally, a note for those of you who are upgrading from 0.6.0a.  You'll n=
eed=20
to add the ACPI bus manager module to your GRUB configuration.  Open your=20
GRUB configuration (/boot/boot/grub/menu.lst) in AEdit and add

module /atheos/sys/drivers/bus/acpi

between the kernel.cfg and PCI bus manager.  An example GRUB configuration =
for=20
Syllable is:

     title  Syllable
     root   (hd0,1)
     kernel /atheos/sys/kernel.so root=3D/dev/disk/ata/hda/1
     module /atheos/sys/config/kernel.cfg
     module /atheos/sys/drivers/bus/acpi
     module /atheos/sys/drivers/bus/pci
     module /atheos/sys/drivers/bus/ata
     module /atheos/sys/drivers/dev/hcd/ata_pci
     module /atheos/sys/drivers/fs/afs

We've also upgraded GRUB to version 0.9.7 from 0.9.5, but everything will=20
continue to work without needing to re-install GRUB.

=2D-
Changes for Syllable 0.6.1

Drivers
	o Synched the 3c59x driver with a more recent Linux version.  Adds suport =
for
            the following cards:
		o 3c982 Hydra Dual Port A
		o 3c982 Hydra Dual Port B
		o 3c905B-T4
		o 3c920B-EMB-WNM Tornado
	o 3Com 3c59x driver now works on "Tornado" laptop chipsets=20
	o Fixed memory detection on Radeon IGP cards
	o PCI busmanager correctly handles multifunction devices
	o Updated the Savage driver
		o Support "old" streams engine (overlays)
		o Fix overlays in 16bit mode with "new" streams
		o Support for off-screen bitmaps based on an early X.org EXA patch.
	o Synced geforcefx driver with X driver.
	o Added a Maestro 1/2[E] driver.  Ported from the Linux 2.6 OSS driver.
	o Added a USB printer driver.  The driver is a re-write of the Linux usblp
           driver and has been tested with an EPSON Stylus Color 900 with C=
UPS
           and the Gutenprint raster driver
	o The ATA drivers now use lock()/unlock() to wait for ATA DMA completion.
           This fixes DMA on controllers & drives which raise an IRQ early
           during DMA
	o Updated the net & sound drivers to use a single, system-provided
            linux_compat.h header
	o ftruncate() support for AFS.  Patch from Daniel Gryniewicz.

Kernel
	o Added the ACPI busmanager
	o Support for ACPI IRQ routing in the PCI busmanager
	o Some swap code related work (But it is still broken)
	o Improved block cache allocator code
	o Automatically reload drivers when they have been changed
	o Implemented the AREA_CONTIGUOUS flag
	o Fixed mtrr support in non-APIC mode
	o Added a working ioremap() implementation to linux_compat.h
	o Moved PGDIR_XXX macros from atheos/areas.h to a private kernel header
	o Removed protect_phys_pages() call
	o atheos/bitops.h: New file, from Linux.
	o atheos/linux_compat.h: New file.  Single, standardised version of the
            various linuxcomp.h header that is used by a lot of ported
            drivers.
	o posix/ioctl.h: Define Linux-compatable names for the ioctl macros E.g.
            _IOW, _IOR etc.
	o atheos/tld.h: The TLD range from 512 to 1024 is now reserved for use by
           Glibc
	o Vastly reduced runtime syscalls to get_tld_addr()
	o The kernel now uses software task switching
	o Working ptrace() implementation and full support for GDB, all done by
	  Jan L. Hauffa <ha...@in...>

Appserver
	o "Minimize All" functionality.
	o Added code to fallback from backbuffered to singlebuffered rendering for=
 a
            window
	o Avoid recalculating the visible areas of the layers if this is not
            necessary
	o Updated window selector to show previews of the Windows

Libsyllable
	o Added a new method SetTextShadowColor() in the IconView class
	o Don't walk off the end of the list in ListView::InsertRow.  Fix from Jon=
as
            Jarvoll
	o Delete the message queue object in the Looper class
	o Do not call Flush() after every M_PAINT message
	o Added Desktop::MinimizeAll to Desktop class
	o Fixed Menu drawing when Menu was disabled and had a Shortcut.
	o ProgressBar now draws with icon_selected default color and a black outli=
ne
           around the frame.
	o Added new InputBox class to aide getting input from a user
	o Added NO_ALPHA_CHANNEL flag to the Bitmap class
	o Added WID_FULL_UPDATE_ON_RESIZE flag to some widgets
	o The SameWidth()/SameHeight() methods of the LayoutNode class can now res=
et
           the width/height rings.
	o Added DTF_WRAP_SOFT & DTF_UNDERLINES flags to DrawText() & GetTextExtent=
()
		o Patched libsyllable classes to use DTF_UNDERLINES as required.
	o New Event class for interprocess communication
	o Small fixes in the dynamic layout system
	o Added the method GetToken() to the Handler class
	o Updated Mulvane decorator

Media
	o Switched the Coldfish Dock plugin to the new event system
	o Small updates for the Media Player and Coldfish
	o Moved media plugins to the extensions folder

Applications
	o Updated Screen preferences
	o Switched the Dock and the Desktop to the new event system
	o Patch for the Clock Dock plugin by Andreas Benzler
	o Added 'Clipper', a dock plugin that holds the text of the clipboard for =
10
           clips
	o Support for a text shadow color in the desktop
	o The Dock and Desktop cannot be closed with alt-w
	o Added battery Dock plugin
	o ABrowse Alpha 3
	o Whisper Alpha 4

Misc
	o A large bunch of keymaps from Maritimus.
	o Updated Danish, Icelandic and Faroese keymaps, from Flemming S=F8rensen.
	o Added objcopy from BinUtils to the base distribution, because it's needed
           by rescopy.
	o Rearranged the system initialization scripts:
		o Introduced an early-init directory for packages, to allow scripts to run
                    before user login, specifically to allow setting variab=
les
                    in the user's environment.
		o Introduced user-early-init.sh.
		o Renamed net_init.sh and user_init.sh to network-init.sh and user-init.sh
	o Updated to Glibc 2.3.6 with additional functions supported on Syllable

=2D-=20
Vanders
http://www.syllable.org
http://www.liqwyd.com