Networking software giant Novell Inc does not have any plans to change anything in the Linux operating system from its recently-acquired SuSE AG ... at least, not in the medium term. "SuSE will continue (to operate) as a business unit of its own," said John Phillips, Novell's corporate technology strategist for the Asia Pacific region.

Progress looks to have been picking up for the Unununium OS, where dietlibc has been ported and much work has continued in all areas including the file system, thread engine, memory manager, graphic device support, network stack as well as the build and documentation system. A new release is 'imminent'.

This article discusses how to get your FreeBSD system to act as a NetFlow probe exporting records to a collector. Elsewhere, FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long says that at the September DevSummit, Peter Wemm proposed changing the device driver API so that interrupt routines return an INT instead of a VOID, while FreeBSD's Greg Lehey discusses the future of Vinum and GEOM on FreeBSD. Greg says that with the advent of GEOM, there may be some overlap with the features and functionality offered by Vinum. On the other hand, GEOM and Vinum do some things not only differently but in an incompatible manner.

RadiOS is a microkernel-based operating system written entirely in the i386 assembly language (NASM). It uses many ideas and implementation techniques from VSTa and QNX.

Metrowerks Senior Software Engineer and veteran real-time programmer Bernhard Kuhn has created a Linux kernel patch that he claims enables hard, real-time performance in the Linux kernel by adding priorities to interrupts and spinlocks. Kuhn believes his approach to be more "natural" and akin to traditional real-time operating systems (RTOSs) than the dual-kernel approach taken by real-time projects such as RTAI and RTLinux, and he is hopeful that his patch might one day win enough interest and support to become part of the official Linux kernel tree.

Devices will be size of a handheld, have a hard drive, Wi-Fi and VGA display, vendor claims. A new type of mobile device that is barely larger than a standard handheld but runs Windows XP on an i86 processor was unveiled this week at the CES. Vendors said the device, which they are dubbing the ultra-personal computer (UPC), will be available in the second half of this year. Development of the device is being encouraged by Transmeta, which has a line of i86-compatible processors that is small enough and has sufficient heat dissipation to be put into devices without cooling fans.