StormOS Hardy Hail Beta 2

The StormOS Hardy Hail Beta 2 is now available for download here.

StormOS is the first desktop distribution based on Nexenta Core Platform 2 which combines the power of the Solaris kernel with the ease of use of Ubuntu. It aims to be a lightweight OS with everything the average user would want out-of-the-box.

The project was started due to my dissatisfaction with OpenSolaris and IPS.

Features:

* Polished Xfce 4 Desktop enviroment
* Abiword word processor
* Gnumeric spreadsheet
* Gimp – GNU Image Manipulation Program
* Rhythmbox Music Player with support for iPod + iTunes sharing and Last.fm
* Risretto image viewer
* Fast and customizable Firefox 3 web browser
* Easy package management with Synaptic Package Manager and gdebi
* Transmission bittorrent client
* Evince PDF viewer
* File-roller archive manager with Thunar integration

New in Beta 2:

* Updated packages
* Faster installer that installs in around 5 mins
* Better VM support, now works in 32-bit VirtualBox and VMware
* Live CD + Install CD are now part of a single ISO
* Bug fixes all ’round

Know issues:

* Live Session wont work in VMware but it will work fine once installed
* Still have GNOME icon in GDM theme

I welcome feedback on the forums or IRC channel (#stormos on irc.freenode.net).

using concurrency primitives

Everything we’ve learned about sequential programming is still true
for concurrent programming. All we have to do is to add the following
primitives:

Pid = spawn(Fun)
Pid ! Message
receive … end

Pid = spawn(Fun)

Creates a new concurrent process that evaluates Fun. The new
process runs in parallel with the caller. spawn returns a Pid (short
for process identifier). You can use Pid to send messages to the
process.

Pid ! Message

Sends Message to the process with identifier Pid. Message sending
is asynchronous. The sender does not wait but continues with
what it was doing. ! is called the send operator.
Pid ! M is defined to be M—the message sending primitive ! returns
the message itself. Because of this, Pid1 ! Pid2 ! … ! M means send
the message M to all the processes Pid1, Pid2, and so on.

receive … end

Receives a message that has been sent to a process. It has the following skeleton :

receive
_ ->
ok
end.

To be continue with simple example …