Sculpt OS 19.07 released Jul 29, 2019

Sculpt OS 19.07 features a smoother user experience and the ability to copy and paste text between virtual machines, terminals, and graphical applications.

Sculpt OS is our custom general-purpose operating system we develop as a showcase for the flexibility of the Genode OS framework. The release of Sculpt OS 19.07 at the beginning of July wraps up its extensive design-exploration story.

The story began in May 2018 with the release of Sculpt OS for Early Adopters (EA), which featured the interactive system composition using a text-based user interface as a visual overlay. At this point, it was geared to die-hard Genode enthusiasts only. The second step followed in June in the form of Sculpt for The Curious (TC), which introduced a graphical user interface for common tasks like the management of storage and networking. It was followed by Sculpt with Visual Composition (VC) in September, which extended the graphical user interface with an interactive component graph. The final step - Sculpt as a community experience (CE) - followed in March 2019, which introduced our unique federated way of installing and safely deploying software from trusted and untrusted sources.

After this rapid and intensive design-exploration ride, Sculpt OS enters a calmer phase of steady evolution. In this spirit, the new version 19.07 improves the overall performance thanks to the massive infrastructure improvements that came with Genode 19.05. The most prominent new user-visible feature is the ability of copy and paste text between terminals, graphical applications, and virtual machines. Our unique take on this feature is described in a dedicated article.

The new release can be obtained from the Sculpt download page and is accompanied by updated documentation.