Syllable

This release focuses on maturing existing functionality, improving security, ongoing system restructuring, and making the system a suitable base for third-party package managers. About half the packages in the system were upgraded. The latest development version of the Cheyenne Web server is included, providing a new WebSockets framework for advanced persistent, full-duplex communication with the latest Web browsers. The super user account has been renamed from "root" to "system". Logging in to this account has been disabled: there is a new account named "administrator" to manage the system.

Many bugs were fixed, including several regressions from earlier releases. The window decorators don't destabilize the system anymore. The installation procedure is greatly enhanced, with options to fix hardware support problems. The native Web browser is replaced with Webster, based on a newer version of the WebKit engine. Many enhancements were made to standards support leading, among others, to the ability to run QEmu, so now you can run virtual machines. The documentation was improved and several translations were added.

This release is important because it focused on
making the system usable as a server. Several
popular servers and several innovative REBOL
software stacks were added. Out of the box,
Syllable Server can now accept remote SSH logins
over the network, run a Web server on the Cheyenne
REBOL server, run an FTP server, and more. Special
attention has been paid to programming, with
support for Model-View-Controller Web applications
in QuarterMaster and network applications with the
REBOL/Services Service Oriented Architecture. The
Genode Nitpicker windowing system is also
included.

Support for scanners has been added with the inclusion of the SANE scanner package. There are new drivers for the D-Link DL2000 Gigabit network card and S3 DeltaChrome video card. There have been a number of improvements and fixes to the network stack which gives significantly better network performance. Development files such as headers and static libraries have also been split off from the base installation. SimpleBurn and cdrtools are now part of the base installation, making it easy to create and burn CDs with Syllable.

A versioned package pool was added, to facilitate shipping older versions of libraries to maintain backward compatibility for applications. Terminal initialisation and printing were fixed. GLibC, CoreUtils, BASh, ORCA, the printing packages, and others were updated. IPTables is included, so Syllable Server can be used to build a firewall. The wireless tools are included for configuring wireless networks. The ALSA userspace library and tools were added to provide full access to the audio system. All separate binary packages for Server 0.1 are still valid on Server 0.2.