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Anime Operating Systems BSD

Anime + FreeBSD = LainOS 70

Posted by timothy from the takes-all-kinds dept.
Chris Gilbert writes: "This Thursday, a new *BSD OS project went online which is entitled 'LainOS.' LainOS is for the most part a heavily recoded version of FreeBSD 4.5 made to eventually resemble Lain's Navi from the anime 'Serial Experiments Lain.' It sports an animated splash screen, a more fully integrated X server, and a custom graphical login interface, amoung several other improvments over FreeBSD and Linux. You can check the homepage out at http://www.lainos.org ."
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Anime + FreeBSD = LainOS More

Anime + FreeBSD = LainOS

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  • OS? (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by Picass0 ( 147474 )

    It's just a sawfish theme.

    If you like it, that's nice. but it's not an OS.
    • You know what? For most users, the os *is* the pretty graphics. If these people want to make a xBSD with graphical integration of all the elements and distributed separately under a different name, that's great. It's a good experiment for BSD desktops.
  • Or a BSD project? the only thing i could find to download was a sawfish theme...
    This looks like a webpage-in-a-minute site with nuke and no serious content?!

    perhaps i'm blind ...
  • I call it "Lain98". What I did was I heavily recoded significant portions of the background image on my Windows98 machine.

  • My goodness... (Score:1, Troll)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 )
    This is probably the most doomed pipe-dream OS I've ever seen.

    First of all, their screenshot is a picture of gnome with an ugly color scheme and lots of stolen anime graphics.

    Second, their website is uuugggggly. To make anyone care about a "cool" OS (or even window manager theme, if that's what they're actually doing), they're going to need it to look good, and that means having a graphic artist.

    Third, anime.

    Goooood luck...

  • Hype. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Picass0 ( 147474 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @05:22PM (#3174481) Homepage Journal
    The more I think of it, the more this bugs me.

    If you go to the LainOS ebscite, you see this is nothing but a brand new project with a Sawfish theme as it's sole finished component.

    So all they needed to do to make the front page of /. is write and say "Hey guess what we're doing?"

    How many good pieces of software come out that never get decent coverage on Slashdot? Buttloads. But these lamers put out a FILE and there they are. Frontpage of Slashdot.

    Makes ya wonder who you have to blow around here.

    • I wonder if the submitter is also a subscriber?
      • For your information, I've frequented Slashdot for quite a while. On another note, it's not my fault that noone else has got on slashdot.org. Hell, if they want me to I'll submit a artile to slashdot for them. If there was such a issue with this, then the moderator shouldn't have posted it. Why others don't do the same as I did is their descision, not mine, and I hold no accountibility for it.

    • That'll be the day, and today is the day where I for the first time saw a banner advertizement for Microsoft Visual Studio .net in the header.

      Todays headlines..

      Microsoft sponsors SlashDot
      SlashDot is marketing Microsoft

      an existing OS + a theme + a dream is called a new OS.

      ..mozilla rocks!

  • Ok... This is quite fustrating... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Neovanglist ( 566939 ) on Saturday March 16, 2002 @07:26PM (#3174947)
    Ok... I need to clear a few things up right this moment. This IS a OS. The theme is there because I got the site up just a few days ago, and that was my frist attempt at giving you some content to play with for the time being. I know that that file is a sawfish theme. Hell I made the theme so I should know that. However, LainOS is a Operating System. I have not yet released a distribution of it, thus your inability to download it at the moment. Keep in mind, LainOS 1.1 is already mostly completed, and the distribution will be coming to the public within a few months (considering things go accondingly)

    About your Lain98 comment... this peveed me. Ok, how many Linux spinoffs are there? Are you calling them Linux98 to be spitefull? No. This is a OS using FreeBSD as a base. Not BSD with a sawfish theme, there are REAL kernel and X level rewrites in LainOS.

    The site will have more content soon, but as I said, it's been up for THREE DAYS. And about your insult for me using PHPNuke... look around sourceforge. How many websites do you see that are single page simple crappy HTML? A perfect example is the GNU page. If my using PHPNuke has offended you so much, then I apologize for making a attempt at giving you some cool functionality to play with.

    I hope this cleared things up.

    Regards,
    Neovanglist (Chris Gilbert)
    • So, anyone going to reply? (intelligently)
    • I think I speak for many of the frustrated users when I say, this isn't even worth my time. I mean all you have up there is a pretty generic sawmill theme...

      I just gotta say to the slashdot team .. please please please check this shit out before you put it on the front page. This deserves to be so far off the radar screen it isn't even funny. It reminds me of the quake mod scene with a billion web pages and no fucking results.

    • Query: Why did you submit a story to Slashdot about your amazing breakthough technology when all you had available was a theme?
    • I applaud your choice to use FreeBSD as a base. (Hehe look at my ./ name) I think your site looks quite nice. I am especially intrigued by your choice of voice control. Would it be possible to get information on how this works? I wish you luck with your project!
    • About your Lain98 comment... this peveed me. Ok, how many Linux spinoffs are there?

      There is a difference between an OS and a distribution. There is GNU/Linux operating system and several distributions. Now, FreeBSD is FreeBSD whether you repack it or not.. to be a real OS, there would have to be something like a new, or modified, kernel, that would (hopefully) add some value.

      Ok, I admit that these days OS can also mean a new GUI+API framework or something, but still there is a difference between an OS and OS distribution.

  • Man, cut him some slack! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EricLivingston ( 162103 ) <ericNO@SPAMthelivingstons.org> on Saturday March 16, 2002 @10:58PM (#3175622) Homepage
    I agree this came out too early on Slashdot - I'd think a new OS distro that makes its way to the front page of Slashdot really ought to have an iso image to try out, or at least some interesting kernel patches, etc.

    However, all that said, I think the fact that he's going for it shows initiative and the kind of creative drive that keeps this entire community alive and created it in the first place. I think it's a neat idea and I'll fire up a VMWare machine to try the distro out when/if it's available, because some of his ideas seem interesting. It's certainly worth that much just to support folks who are willing to take on that kind of project for the love of it - without folks like this, trying out new ideas and seeing what flies, how can the *BSD/Linux world move ahead? It's all about individuals having the drive and the energy to take on these types of projects. And, frankly, the fact that he can go off and pursue a vision of his, building off of the BSD base, is just another great example of how cool Open Source is! Imagine if someone wanted to do a similar project with Windows - not gonna happen.

    When someone actually makes good on the promise of Open Source and attempts to extend something in ways not tried before (or simply in ways unique to his own vision), I'd think the correct response would be "Way to go! Good luck!" - Not "You're full of shit - it'll never fly - the security sucks, etc". Man, what a bunch of wet blankets we have on Slashdot. It's a damn shame.

    So, while it's probably a bit under-done for a premiere spot on Slashdot, his project should not be ridiculed in my opinion and I wish him the best of luck.

    • Thanks, it's refreshing to see some more open-minded people. Also, check your e-mail, as I have sent you a message.

      Thanks agian,
      Neovanglist
  • Actually I like the idea of an interesting looking animated splash screen. I wonder if this could be an option somehow merged into the main FreeBSD tree? I don't think I'd actually trust any strange distro that forks from the base system...
    • IIRC Neovangelist said he was going to work up that bit as something that could be submitted to the main FreeBSD-CURRENT branch. So, the answer to your question is yes. :)
  • The first kernel "hacker" to use Gedit [sourceforge.net]

    I have a sudden urge to laaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuuugh AAHAHAHA.

  • What a piece of shit (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    • Draw some kewl 'skinz'
    • Get a page at sourceforge with all the other "no files available yet!" 0.0.0 release software
    • Get story at slashdot
    Kids, playing with the Gimp does not make you an OS designer. SKINZ do not make you a coder. Go back to masturbating.

  • This is an out and out lie. (Score:1, Troll)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was curious about this. It sounded too ambitious to be real, so I pulled the FreeBSD 4.5 source and the Lain source.

    I was surprised to find that there were indeed differences between the current LainOS and the current FreeBSD distribution. My surprise was short-lived however, as I found that the reason for the differences were that they had stopped applying patches! Many exploits discovered in 4.4 and 4.3 still haven't been patched!

    Apart from this, the only difference is the addition of a few ports of anime graphics, Sawfish as the default window manager, and a bunch of packages REMOVED. There's no apache or ssh, and telnet-ssl is broken. It's IMPOSSIBLE to make a secure Lain system!

    If you really want in on this, get FreeBSD 4.5, get their few ports of copyright-violation anime bitmaps, and for god's sakes -- DON'T TOUCH the rest!

    I'm afraid of burning my karma by speaking out against what -sounds- like a neat project, so I'm posting this anonymously. :/

  • Lain's navi sure looks a lot like Gnome [sourceforge.net]!
  • From visiting your SourceForge project page, it says your license is the GPL. While I have nothing against the GPL, I'm confused on how you plan to relicense all the code from FreeBSD.
    Please so explain. =)
    • http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/copyright.html

      Let's see:
      The FreeBSD Copyright:
      Copyright 1994-2002 FreeBSD, Inc. All rights reserved.

      Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
      1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
      2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.


      The BSD Copyright:

      Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
      1. Redistributions of source code must retain the abovecopyright notice, this list of conditions and the followingdisclaimer.
      2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
      3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement:
        This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors.
      4. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.


      What kind of problem would there be? The BSD licenses are far less restrictive than the GPL license.
  • This project is a combination of all of the above. Lain OS, believe it or not is an OS. The sawfish theme is the only public aspect of the project (as of now!). I have been one of the luckily few to actually view and use the real Lain OS. It will be all that has been promised. If you don't like the anime look, don't worry. Like all real OS's you will be able to use different themes. The default theme will be, of course, will be the Lain OS, from the anime. Voice recognition and other features are just that features, they can be turned on and off. The whole point of the project is to recreate the OS from the anime and improve the BSD environment and X server etc. I understand why most people are under informed about this topic, that's simply because it (publicly) has been around a month or so. With as much traffic it has obtained, calculated right or not, is still a lot. Lain OS is one of the things that will help the Unix community grow with strength, that's as long as people who are under informed try to kill it and mock it.

  • Okayokayokay. How many of you went to the site and said, "Oh, this is supposed to be a new OS, but all there is is a Sawfish skin. Therefore, this loser thinks he can recreate an OS by skinning GNOME, this is fuck stupid, QED."

    Go read the site again. All the way through. This being Slashdot doesn't excuse you -_^ This is supposed to be basically a rewrite of FreeBSD to integrate X and (eventually) provide some really snazzy features. Sure, it's ambitious. But what new OS project isn't? True, he doesn't have a distribution available yet. But he's admitted that it probably wouldn't run on most people's machine yet either. Even so, this isn't entirely useless info. It's attracting attention of potential developers. These things take time, and the project is only just begun. To the naysayers, I make this challenge. Go home, take your favorite free Unix kernel, and rewrite it. Integrate X. Add voice recognition. Rewrite the desktop layer. Now, do this all by yourself and see how long it takes.

    Then again, you could also try remembering that slashdot doesn't exist for your own personal gratification, so there may occasionally pop up headlines that you just don't want to read about. Do us all a favor and skip over them instead of flaming. This may be /., but let's not turn it into alt.* USENET. Try showing a little maturity for once.

    Personally, I'm very interested in this, seriously. It's making me figure out how to fit in a FreeBSD partition on my box. I'm not particularly talented in any hackish area, I think it'd be really cool to work on this once I got up to speed ...

    • who the fuck are these dumbass that are posting these ideas of what they think the os is but aren't reading everything through on the sight. He stated that it isn't a sawfish theme, thats all he has out get a life and bitch about something else already some of you all ready hve 6 to 8 posts. Give it a chance for christ sake, obviously none of you can think up a better idea so your critsizing his

      fuck off
  • Dear Trolls, Oh look, you can criticize something because yer jeleous that this guy actually has the talent to do something you probably can't do. Instead of bashing it maybe we should encourage him to work on it more, if and when it comes out if it can do what he claims then it's going to be pretty awesome. So before we pass judgement, why don't we wait until a real version of the OS is out. Thank you.
  • If anyone can create a spin-off version of FreeBSD that is always 100% compatiable with all recent versions of FreeBSD, keeps all ports up to date, and has good X integration right from the beginning with Xfree86 version 4 as the default. Then I will go with it.
    If they can get full nvidia geforce2 support as an install option by the time the first release ISO comes out then I will do more than just go with it!
    If they can make a LOKI patch so that all my Linux Loki games will run on it then I there is no saying how far I will go to make their life pleasurable!!
    If they can provide all of this and get Loki back on track or create something better than Loki well....... :P
  • I was thinking of this, too... Well, I was thinking to make a themable animated login system... with the animation being done with some kind of vector drawing libraries.

    Hmm. Perhaps I can contribute. At the very least, give pretty pictures to them to code to...

    Personally, I would start with the login and work from there. And maybe draw the whole thing on the framebuffer, to reduce flicker from animations.

    Guess I should go contribute!

    certron
  • I like the idea of LainOS. I haven't seen a truly futuristic interface that can be used in real life yet. But, I have a feeling it'll be abandoned by its creators.

    Anyway, I used to love anime, because I was deprived of it, but after watching a lot of episodes of various serieses (The last one is Mahoromatic) I decided it's simply not satisfying.

    The things that bugged me are:

    • Plots that start interesting but gets screwed or start to be boring - happens in most of the Gainax serieses: Envagelion, Kare-kano and Mahoromatic.
    • Long, boring moments of silence - like in Lain.
    • Dumb characters - like Yuki [jasms.de] from Fushigi Yuugi.
    • Characters that you hate and you wish they'd die already - like that blonde girl from Noir whose name I forgot.
    If only they could do something as smart as Simpsons, Futurama, Daria or even Dilbert.. Now when I think of it, I find out what's the problem. There's no good anime for grown-ups!

  • "In other news, we are now over 41,000 page views! Thanks so much to all the sites that have linked us."

    How you like us now? ;)

    (as the roaring tide of a slashdotting gathers momentum)

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