eyeOS Blog

Site status - update

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:13:48 -0700

During some hours yesterday and this morning some users reported problems accessing the eyeOS Network (on the Main eyeOS Website, Free Server and Professional Services websites).

All these problems are now solved and we apologize for the problems that the not planned downtime, specially on the public server, may have caused. We changed the DNS system in the whole eyeOS Network and this kind of problems (that have affected in different servers at once) should not happen again.

We are now rebuilding some indexes. If you had an @eyeos.org mail account, please test it’s working and if not, please contact us at team@eyeos.org.

Thanks for all the reports and support!

What’s coming next?

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 04:11:36 -0700

What will be the next version? - eyeOS 1.7 or eyeOS 2.0?
When will the next version be released?
What features are coming next?

Many users asked us such questions. At the forums, via Email, via IRC, via any other way of communication. Now we planned further steps and want to share them with you.

eyeOS 1.6 will be continued as most stable eyeOS branch. Updates will be released every month.

eyeOS 1.7 will be our next production version. It is based on eyeOS 1.6, but will introduce many new features: It will be completely translatable and themable and you will be able to define system administrators and system maintainers. For a complete list please visit this page.

eyeOS 2.0 will be our next system, which will introduce a new toolkit, a new base design with a new concept of Web Desktop usage and many new features and base applications. Note that eyeOS 2.x will be compatible with eyeOS 1.x: Applications from eyeOS 1.x will also work with eyeOS 2.x! We will publish more information about eyeOS 2.0 soon.

Hopefully this article answered many questions!

eyeOS is 3!

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:11:21 -0700

One day like today, back in 2005, we made public an idea about what the next step in working at Internet should be from our point of view. We called it “eyeOS“, because we wanted to create something visual and intuitive (eye), and similar to a traditional Operating System (OS) for the end user, taking advantage of the latest web technologies and sharing capabilities.

It’s really difficult for us to specify key moments in this three years. Competence has appeared, and sometimes eventually disappeared. We have seen how a market we started without knowing we were doing it has been growing and growing, and there are now more than 50 web operating systems out there. We have given more than 35 conferences about this concept and eyeOS recives about 250.000 unique visits per month now.

Of course, there have been problems during this three years. But all those problems have had a common point: They have been solved thanks to the community behind eyeOS. eyeOS has grown with its community, and some of the members that were there since the first days are today the people who mantains the eyeOS Websites Network, forums, blog, wiki, mailing lists, and even creates some parts of the eyeOS main code.

This is why eyeOS survived in some difficult moments and this is why today eyeOS in the de facto web desktop.

Today, eyeOS is celebrating his third birthday. Thanks to every one of you.

Who are we?

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:04:10 -0700

Do you know, who is developing eyeOS and who translated it?

Many users contacted us to know more about us and about what everyone is doing. Finally we decided to create some new pages at eyeos.org. We finished them some days ago.

At http://eyeos.org/?section=team you can find more information about the people behind eyeOS.
If you go to the downloads page and select “Translations” you now have a list with all available translations. We also create one single package including all available translations.
You can now find all available translations of the website at the top of it in a select box. Simply choose a translation and the site reloads.
The forum is updated, too! We edited the theme of it and added the eyeOS header. Now the forums are directly integrated into the eyeOS websites and you can easily choose your forums language.
We also updated the community section and removed old data from it.

If you have any idea or comment concerning the eyeOS websites or the translations, please contact Lars Knickrehm. You can find more information about how to translate eyeOS at this wiki page.

How eyeOS is most likely to change the world (by Matt Hartley)

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:58:49 -0700

Mat Harley, writer at Datamation has written a great article about the finalists at the Most Likely to Change the World SourceForge award. It analyzes one by one all the finalists to see why they are most likely to change the world.

From the article,

[...] EyeOS, if developed to the point where users can quite literally take their desktops with them anywhere, could prove to be invaluable. There are instances where bringing along a notebook, assuming it is in sync with the files on your desktop, can prove to be more of a hassle than a benefit. [...] (by Matt Hartley)

Read the full article!

Congratulations Linux!

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 08:53:59 -0700

Some hours ago SourceForge.net published the winners of the “Community Choice Awards 2008“. eyeOS has been a finalist of the category “Most Likely to Change the World”.

The eyeOS project has been founded nearly 3 years ago and our community is growing hard since eyeOS 1.0 has been released. We are surprised, that so many people use eyeOS!

The category “Most Likely to Change the World” counts eleven projects. Three of them are traditional Operating Systems: Linux and its distribution Ubuntu and the ReactOS project, which develops a system with compatibility to Microsoft Windows. That fact tells us that eyeOS is in the right way for the future: Not just because of being one of the eleven projects Most Likely to Change the World, but also to be there with traditional Operating Systems.

We want to thank everyone who voted for us!

We will publish information about the next versions soon. Please stay tuned!

Welcome, Lars!

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 07:53:23 -0700

This is just a small note to tell that Lars Knickrehm, who is the most active user in the eyeOS Forums, manages the official eyeOS websites and programs some of the base applicatios (and grea plug-ins, such the Translations one), is now officially posting on the eyeOS Blog.

It’s a pleasure for us to be able to introduce members from the eyeOS community to post here in the blog, to mantain and discuss the most hot points inside the eyeOS community.

So, just a couple of minutes before the first Lars’ post, we just want to say, in name of the whole team:

Welcome, Lars!

eyeOS on Clubic (FR)

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:58:51 -0700

As the eyeOS French Blog already posted, the great French publication at Internet about technology, Clubic, has written a review of the Web Operating Systems panorama, and which is a very good read.

The article is called “OS en ligne : découverte de trois bureaux virtuels” or “OS online: discovery of three virtual desktops“, and you can read the original article in french here and a english translation from Google here.

Thanks, Clubic!

Resources for Developers

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:54:30 -0700

The eyeOS Developers Community has been evolving since the first days at eyeOS. Nowadays, a developer that discovers eyeOS has a wide variety of resources to get introduced to the eyeOS applications development, communicate with other developers, publish ideas and bugs, etc.

Today, a new user asked for help in the Spanish forum about what should he/she do to start programming new applications for eyeOS, and Jose Carlos Norte answered with a small but great summary of almost everything available for new developers:

The eyeOS Developers Community Start-Page. The initial point for every developer, with a summary of all available resources. Available in many different languages (talk with Lars K. if you would like to translate the websites to your language!). Direct links to the eyeOS Developer Manual, the Getting Started guide…

The eyeOS Documentation Center. For those developers who have already read the Developer Manual and are already programming or starting to program eyeOS Applications. It’s really useful when you need to know which parameters should be passed to a widget, how to use a library or service…

The eyeOS Developers Mailing List, specially good when help is needed or when we’re stacked programming some application. Also useful for suggestions inside the eyeOS code, how to prepare new releases…

Finally, the Launchpad Resources. Mainly: Bugs and Blueprints. Useful to report and track open bugs that could be solved (some developers send patches to the mailing list with possible solutions or workarounds for open bugs), and to see or send new ideas about eyeOS and applications that could be developed.

As you can see, there is no reason for not starting today to program eyeOS Applications

100 posts: 2 years of blog, another step

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 09:47:33 -0700

It has been more than two years since that first post, where we announced that eyeOS had 5.000 users. That was amazing.

Today there are more than 265.000 users in the eyeOS Free Server, and more than 300.000 downloads in almost 3 years of project (we’ll be celebrating eyeOS 3rd anniversary in August 1st, 2008). And this is more amazing than ever.

During the first months of the blog, we used it as a tool to spread the new releases. Now we are starting a new step to spread the eyeOS Community creations and inventions, reviews of eyeOS Applications, discussions about the roadmaps and polls to discover what should the next eyeOS versions focus on.

So, if you have not done it before, subscribe to the eyeOS blog and stay tunned for something cool every week around your favorite Web Operating System

We hope you will be there for the next 100 posts.

[HOWTO] Diskless thinclient for eyeOS

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 03:44:57 -0700

Mathieu Terrasson (mterrasson in the forums) has started a serie of posts explaining, step by step, how to build and prepare a diskless thinclient for eyeOS.

In 4 different posts, the author explains how to prepare the environment, the pre-build time, the build time and some last considerations, being a great guide for those who would like to use just eyeOS in a network.

As the author says in the post,

I’ve worked on an OpenSource project that aims to create thinclient that should be used to access LAN or WAN eyeOS server. The thinclient will automaticaly run a firefox browser that will open a full screen page on a Eyeos url.

If you have any questions, suggestions or improvements you can use the topic with the tutorial to discuss it with its author.

Review: The h3o applications

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 02:44:32 -0700

At May 28th a post in a personal blog appeared announcing a new application for eyeOS. Less than two monts after that, the h3o eyeOS Apps have been growing and we can enjoy now 10 eyeOS Applications from Thorsten Zoerner, the creator of h3o.

h3oWiki (to have a lightweight wiki inside your eyeOS), h3oEyeAppsInstaller (to directly install apps from eyeOS-Apps.org), h3oSSH (to connect to servers through SSH) and h3oUpload (to upload files directly from your OS Desktop with drag and drop) are some examples of the eyeOS Applications created by h3o.

We recently read that there have been more than 1.000 downloads of the h3o apps, and we would like to encourage every eyeOS sysadmin to download and install some of the apps in their systems, and to keep an eye on the h3o blog for the future ones.

eyeOS 1.6.0.3 released

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:52:24 -0700

The third mantainance release for eyeOS 1.6 has been released, and can be downloaded from the eyeOS Downloads Page. For those users using the eyeOS Free Server, it’s already running the new version, so just log in!

This new version includes full compatibility with Firefox 3.0 and many minor bug fixes in services, libraries and applications. It does not include any security fix, but it’s recommended to all eyeOS system administrators.

Once again, we must thank the eyeOS Development Community, which is getting involucrated into every new eyeOS release, mainly through the eyeOS Development Mailing List, which is becoming more active every day.

To see the full change log, please continue reading.

Changes since 1.6.0.2:

[Add] Kernel aliases eyeCalendar library now has an alias.
[Change] eyeManageApps eyeManageApps now shows the group's icon along with its name.
[Fix] eyeCalendar   Corrected bug that permitted the creation of events with an ending time previous to its start time.
[Fix] eyeContacts   Fixed bug that showed a confirmation dialog when trying to delete a contact without selecting one.
[Fix] eyeSessions   Fixed duration of the cookie set due to a problem with its handling in PHP.
[Fix] miniActions   Fixed bug that made it open two instances of the application.
[Fix] Tab widget    The Tab widget now uses a positive default width and height values.
[Fix] eyeWidgets    Fix on the unserialization of a widget.
[Fix] eyeSessions   Fixed bug that can take place when a long request is made.
[Fix] mmap+Kernel   Now mmap uses the function json_encode to pass an array to the JavaScript code. This change allows to pass an array correctly under Firefox 3.
[Fix] eyeX          Long requests made to the server work perfect under Firefox 3.
[Fix] eyeDesk       Fixed the duplicated contextual menus under Firefox 3.
[Fix] eyeManageApps eyeManageApps now lists the groups and applications icon's.
[Fix] eyeManageApps Improved presentation under IE6.
[Fix] mmap   Fixed problem in service_mmap_array2jsArg() with null-like values

Review: eyeShow, creating presentations from eyeOS

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:53:16 -0700

As the first post of a new serie (Applications from Community) we want to review eyeShow, a great application created by Edouard Daubin and using Slimey, to create and view presentations in eyeOS.

This application is fully integrated with the eyeOS Filesystem and dialogs and will let you load and save your presentations from inside eyeOS.

From its website:

eyeShow is a presentation application where you can make slides, with texts, colorize your text, change the size, the font, the style. You can add cliparts form an external repository or form eyeOS, add lists, bring front, bring back …The Clipart Repository is based on a xml feed, the Clipart application can must customized to offer clipart to eyeDocs and more.

eyeShow has a post in the eyeOS Forums where you can make suggestions and discuss the application here.

eyeOS 1.6.0.3: working great in Firefox 3!

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 09:52:05 -0700

Few weeks after the release of Firefox 3, we are happy to announce that the next version of eyeOS will feature full support for this browser, after solving some bugs in certain parts of the system that prevented eyeOS from showing well.

Some of these bugs were reported by users of our community in our Launchpad platform, and we want to thank them for helping us detecting and solving the bugs: thank you very much!

This maintenance version, eyeOS 1.6.0.3, will fully support Firefox 3, as well as fixing other bugs in the system, making this version more and more stable.

We must remember that we want to keep the eyeOS 1.6 version as solid and stable as possible, and we will be releasing a maintenance release about every month. Stay tuned to download this release soon!

eyeOS, most likely to change the world!

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:52:49 -0700

We are really proud to be this year again in the SourceForge Community Choice Awards finalists, in the Most Like to Change the World project category.

Once again, and we will never get tired of saying this, thanks to everybody who makes this possible. Voting is open, with both a Sourceforge account or an OpenID account, and everybody can take part and decide who will be the project most likely to change the world!

Announcing a partnership with GMV

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:12:24 -0700

We’re happy to announce a new partnership with GMV, which will deliver new and exciting projects based on the Open Knowledge, by joining the experience and expertise from GMV and the Open Source eyeOS Web Desktop Platform to provide enterprise-ready Web Desktop Solutions, expanding the eyeOS usage worldwide.

GMV is a technological enterprise group with an international presence which operates in nine large sectors: Aeronautics, Space, Defense, Health, Security, Transportation, Telecommunications and Information Technologies for public and private organizations. You can read more about GMV in this document [PDF, 1.5MB, 24p].

We would like to thank the whole GMV team (with a special effort on the SGI -Global Internet Solutions- part of the company) who has trusted the eyeOS platform since its begginings and is now entering a new step in the Web Desktop Solutions, with our team.

All the benefits derived from this new partnership will be noticeable from the eyeOS Open Source Platform and the eyeOS Community, starting with some public events late 2008 that will be announced this summer.

eyeOS events during June 2008 (in Spain)

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 12:49:46 -0700

If you are in Spain during June, you will have some opportunities to discover eyeOS and the eyeOS Team point of view concerning Web Operating Systems and Open Source software in the following (free) events/conferences:

-Suscipe Enterpeneurs Forum (in Madrid), on June 4th, to present the project, its history and future. You can confirm the assistance in this page.

-The Coffee Break 2008 (in Cáceres) on June 13th and 14th.

And possibly, another one on June 26th in Ourense (still to be confirmed). We’ll soon confirm this last one and publish some other events during July, in Spain.

If you are interested in the eyeOS Team to give a conference in your University/Forum/Company, please contact at team @ eyeos.org.

eyeOS 1.6.0.1 released / 300.000 downloads!

Tue, 27 May 2008 04:22:34 -0700

One month after the eyeOS 1.6 release, we are happy to announce the immediate availability of the first maintenance release to the 1.6 branch: eyeOS 1.6.0.1.

This particular release doesn’t contain any security fix, but it’s recommended to all eyeOS system administrators to update, since it contains important bugfixes and small new features, such as the Internet Explorer 6 support, the import and export (with OPML format) in eyeFeeds or the new session language selection in the Login Screen.

You can download the new release from the downloads page and view the full changelog in the Developer’s center.

On the other hand, the eyeOS Project reached yesterday 300.000 downloads from the SourceForge servers. This is a good moment to say thanks to SourceForge for the great service they provide to eyeOS and more than 170.000 other projects.

eyeSync for Windows released!

Thu, 15 May 2008 11:25:34 -0700

We are proud to announce the availability of eyeSync, the eyeOS Synchronization Tool, for Microsoft Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP and Vista.

It’s a portable application, and all you need to do to get it running is to uncompress it somewhere in your system (or even inside a Pendrive) and launch eyeSync. The first time you launch it, it will ask you to configure your account (from Preferences). If you want to use it with the Public Server, just put www.eyeos.info in the Server field, and your username/password in the other fields.

You can download it from here and from the Downloads page.

You can add folders form your system to keep synchronized with your eyeOS by pressing Add Folder and choosing the local folder you want to keep synchronized with your eyeOS, and the eyeOS folder you want the contents to go to. Please note that the eyeOS folder must exist, and it must be empty.

When you add a folder, its content will start to synchronize and you can open your eyeOS session and check that your local contents are being imported. Note that the system will detect every change you do on the synchronized folders (such as file edits).

It’s an early version and feedback will be appreciated on the eyeOS Forums.

Introducing the eyeLIMS project

Mon, 05 May 2008 09:18:59 -0700

To see eyeOS widely used by scientists all around the world, a group of eyeOS users and developers, leaded by Alexandre Mejat, has initiated the eyeLIMS project. eyeLIMS is a community-driven project which aims at providing a Free Open Source Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) powered by eyeOS.

The eyeLIMS community will develop new eyeOS applications or port to eyeOS existing free open source applications specifically dedicated to molecular and cellular biology.

The eyeLIMS Software Suite will include a set of eyeOS applications dedicated to common activities in research laboratories such as managing samples or reagents (eyeStorage), managing bibliographic references (eyeBiblio) or manipulating data (eyeJmol).

The whole project is Free and Open Source and will be released under GNU Affero GPL v.3 license (the same as eyeOS). If you would like to collaborate with the project or you are interested in following its development, you can check the project’s homepage and its discussion board.