Three months ago, in March of 2002, Bill Hayden announced that he was forking AtheOS [earlier story], porting it to run on top of the Linux kernel and providing wrappers for the BeOS API and Carbon API. The project is now officially named Cosmoe, the Compatible Open-Source Multi Operating-system.

Bill recently released version 0.5.2 of Cosmoe, saying:

"Cosmoe 0.5.2, the 'if only this had been the first release' release, is now available for download on www.cosmoe.com. If you've had trouble compiling Cosmoe in the past, check this release out."

This release solves numerous earlier compilation problems. Find a screenshot of Cosmoe running on a Linux 2.4.18 kernel here. Also of interest is this earlier OSNews interview with Bill. For the full release announcement, read on.

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From: Bill Hayden
To: Cosmoe Developer List
Subject: Cosmoe 0.5.2 released
Date: Jun 19, 2002 23:06 PDT

Cosmoe 0.5.2, the "if only this had been the first release" release, is now
available for download on www.cosmoe.com. If you've had trouble compiling
Cosmoe in the past, check this release out.

This release has massive improvements in just getting the darn thing to
compile. I didn't realize how specially tweaked my two development machines
were until I tried to compile and install Cosmoe on a virgin Athlon XP1800+
machine I just put together. My apologies to all of you who tried to
compile before (and probably gave up). This release should be a much more
out-of-the-box experience (though README reading is still required).

Improvements:

1. Fixes dozens of include problems
2. Works around a segfault in gcc 2.96 in layoutview.cpp
3. Fixed an install problem that would revert the decorator binaries
   to previous versions (breaking Cosmoe in the process)
4. Changed the API to conform to my new Atheos auto-source-converter
5. BeOS window decorator upgraded to the latest version, thanks to #4

As for #4, I am working on a massive sed script which will take Atheos
source code and Cosmoe-fy it. I had started to re-port the latest version
of AEdit and realized that I was doing the same tedious conversions for the
4534534th time. The script doesn't do all the work, but it easily chops 50%
or more off the time it take to do a port. Using the script, the Be
decorator came over in about 5 minutes with virtually no manual changes
except the Makefile. I haven't had time to finish the AEdit 0.6 port yet,
so this tarball still has AEdit 0.5.1. The converter script is not included
either.

Enjoy!

Bill Hayden