Monday

So whats up with the name Sunergos anyway?(Pt.2)

I mentioned in part one that Sunergos was supposed to be an operating system. That's not completely true, but we'll stick with that for now. I didn't describe exactly what Sunergos was meant to be, and there is one reason for that: Mission Creep. It is the bane of all project leaders, even when that project is naught but vaporware.

Initially, Sunergos was born on windows, when I worked for a tech support company and nearly every application I used was web based. At this point, I'd had almost five years of web development under my belt. After setting the windows shell to use Internet explorer, I set about creating an interface for all of the resources I used for my day to day work. With that an idea borne of a bit of ambition, normally absent from my psyche, reared it's ugly head: A browser-based desktop. Not a new idea, I know. but in that idealistic turn of the century, it was certainly something I had never seen.

Working on a windows based platform (first 98, and later 2000) posed some serious stumbling blocks, not the least of which was the availability of free information. While I was far from an expert with *nix, my experience with Openbsd and later Mandrake 7.2 led me to the (correct) assumption that the open source community was the ideal outlet for this nearly all consuming idea. With an open source operating system as a base I could customize the entire environment, tuning everything to my purpose, and distribute the whole thing.

This put me at a serious disadvantage, though. As I have previously indicated, I had limited experience with this environment. However, that great electronic oracle-- the Internet-- could provide all that I needed and I set myself to achieving a state of complete saturation with my newly adopted obsession. Unfortunately, during my journey toward enlightenment, to a zen like oneness withTeh Source, the infamous bubble did it's infamous bursting. Instead of using my new-found free time to advance my cause, I took more of a chicken little approach and started stockpiling rice, beans, and 12 gauge ammunition...

Hmm, starting to get flashbacks here. I'm going to go and make some plywood squares to mount over my windows, clean my guns, and check the canned food stocks. But, I promise to be back soon for another exciting installment of "What the Hell is Sunergos." Now that the history is essentially explained, I can cover some of the stolen inovative ideas that, when combined, would have made Sunergos "The Best OS Ever"