The open-source Syllable operating system is extremely fast, and is starting to gain enough desktop applications to be usable, writes Jeff Park in a review posted at NewsForge. Despite a primitive installer and some unstable applications, Park comes away impressed with Syllable's raw speed.

Park says Syllable booted in about 8 seconds on a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 system with 512MB of RAM. And, the graphical desktop environment and simple HTML/CSS browser respond much faster than the components found in other OSes, such as Linux and Windows, on the same hardware, he says.

On the downside, Park reports trouble with application stability, and with the network configuration system.

Park's review can be found here.

Syllable, which is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), is a fork of AtheOS, another alternative x86 OS. AtheOS was written by Norwegian Kurt Skauen, but is no longer maintained.

Syllable is available as a VMWare image, or bootable ISO CD image. A rudimentary software repository also exists for the OS.

 
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