Archive

Introduction to MINIX 3

Guest post by Andy Tanenbaum 2006-09-25 OS News 45 Comments

How often have you rebooted your TV set in the past year? Probably a lot less than you have rebooted your computer. Of course there are many "reasons" for this, but increasingly, nontechnical users don't want to hear them. They just want their computer to work perfectly all the time and never crash. MINIX 3 is a project to develop an operating system as reliable as a TV set, for embedded systems and mission critical applications, but also for future $50 single-chip laptops and general desktop use. The focus is being small, simple, and reliable. Note: This is the last entry for the Alternative OS Contest.

Review: FiWin SS28S WiFi VoIP SIP/Skype Phone

Guest post by Zachary McGrew 2006-09-21 Wireless 7 Comments

There is a lot of noise about VoIP lately, especially because it can help you avoid a major part of your cellphone bill. The first VoIP handsets released were all USB-based, but now cordless, Bluetooth and WiFi handsets are springing one by one in the market. The most affordable WiFi handset in the market right now, selling for just $150, is the FiWin SS28S that was released at the beginning of the summer by FiWin. Geeks.com sent us in a unit for the purposes of this review.

Guest post by Robert Escue 2006-09-20 Solaris 31 Comments

Sun Microsystems makes new releases of Solaris about every four to six months, in many cases all the new release contains is bug fixes and some changes in functionality. More often than not most releases go by without a great deal of fanfare. Just as Solaris 10 3/05 broke new ground with Zones, Dtrace and the Service Management Facility. Solaris 10 6/06 introduces ZFS or Zettabyte File System and the SATA framework and Xorg 6.9, which will be the primary focus of this review.

AROS: Onboard the Last Train to Amiga Neverland

Guest post by Dmitar Butrovski 2006-09-13 Amiga & AROS 25 Comments

It was 1997 and in these dark ages of the Amiga history, a few brave ones have embarked on a seemingly impossible journey. It is difficult to start from a clean slab, but complete rewrite of the AmigaOS Application Programming Interface (API), in open source domain, was the only option for Amiga community to gain control over destiny of the beloved platform. The Amiga Research Operating System (AROS) was born. Under, at times slow but steadfast progress, the vision is nearly complete. Not only is AROS almost feature-for-feature complete when compared to AmigaOS 3.x, but it has excelled many of the original design specifications.

Introduction to TUD:OS

Guest post by Michael Voigt 2006-09-12 OS News 4 Comments

If you are in Germany, the country of Sauerkraut and Beethoven, and you move far to the east, you might arrive at the town of Dresden. In this city, the Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden) is located, which’s operating systems group has developed a C++ implementation of Jochen Liedtkes well-known L4 µ-kernel interface. This microkernel, ironically called Fiasco, is the center of all the different projects of the TU Dresden Operating System (TUD:OS) research group.

Why Desktop Linux Will Not Take off, and Why You Don’t Want It to

Guest post by Martin Girard 2006-09-12 Linux 165 Comments

You must remember the period where various electronic devices, from phones to radios, were available in transparent cases. You may have found them utterly cool. Yet the simple fact that you can't find these things on the shelves anymore (except for do-it-yourself PC cases) means the crowd doesn't find them nearly that cool. While you may not see the link yet, this is exactly why the Linux desktop will never be popular.

The Slightly Strange World of RISC OS

Guest post by Chris Wraight 2006-09-11 RISC OS 19 Comments

Being a RISC OS user is an odd experience. It's normally baffling to non-believers why so many (mostly British) computer users persist with the eccentric beast. It's easy to list reasons why no self-respecting geek would trouble with it: many old or under-developed applications, poor streaming media support, lack of compatibility with key standards and technologies, limited hardware support, and there are many more. For most, RISC OS is a thing of the past, a curio, a once-promising minority OS trampled on by the juggernauts of Windows, MacOS and Linux.

FreeDOS 9 Review

Guest post by Marti van Lin 2006-09-07 OS News 14 Comments

The FreeDOS kernel originally produced by Pat Villani and what we consider today to be the full featured operating system "FreeDOS" by Jim Hall and is currently maintained by the FreeDOS team, including many third party contributors. It's first goal was to create a full featured MS DOS clone but it has extended beyond this with features like "out of the box" networking support.

A Look at Syllable 0.6.1

Guest post by Daniel W. Steinbrook 2006-09-07 Syllable, AtheOS 22 Comments

Syllable 0.6.1 is the latest incarnation of the operating system that "will be a reliable and easy-to-use GPLed operating system for the home and small office user" as their website states. That's quite a noble cause most other alternative operating systems never claim to be able to market to non-technical audience one day. Even getting Syllable up and running is pretty easy: fully-working VMWare images and a LiveCD images are provided for free download. Apparently, Danes are the primary downloader of the Syllable LiveCD, given the primary language in which the LiveCD page is by default.

Review: Rockbox – The Open Source Jukebox Firmware

Guest post by Vladyslav Mukherjee 2006-09-01 Multimedia, AV 8 Comments

Rockbox is a replacement firmware for various audio players, that opens up new features and fixes devices shortcomings. We don't think of these devices as personal computers, but they are; and Rockbox is an alternative operating system. This review focuses on Rockbox as a replacement "OS" for the iRiver player.

Another Quickie: ReactOS

Guest post by Jeff Rollin 2006-08-31 ReactOS 32 Comments

I downloaded a few VMware images for use in VMware player. The mouse (a PS/2 type) did not work either in ReactOS or in Syllable, but did work in PC-BSD (all in VMware Player). Later, I downloaded the install-cd iso of ReactOS and burned it to a CD. The image is a tiny download (19MB uncompressed), so it didn't take long. I intended to install ReactOS on a laptop and desktop.

Guest post by Leroy 2006-08-30 ReactOS 18 Comments

In the past, I've installed ReactOS to show my students a Microsoft alternative. The performance was slow and there was not much to do. This latest revision offers more! For my review, I used the freeware VMWare Player since I was using the company server. I'm the only one who knows how to use it.

Guest post by Kroc 2006-08-24 OS News 44 Comments

GEOS managed to offer nearly all the functionality of the original Mac in a 1 MHz computer with 64 Kilobytes of RAM. It wasn't an OS written to run on a generic x86 chip on a moving hardware platform. It was written using immense knowledge of the hardware and the tricks one could use to maximise speed. Note: After a small break, here is another one of the articles for the Alternative OS contest.

Guest post by JBQ 2006-07-31 Graphics 23 Comments

Geeks.com, as usual a great source of Kodak digital cameras, sent us a Kodak P850 for review. The P850 is a current camera in the Kodak lineup, announced exactly a year ago. It's the lower model in Kodak's "performance" P range (the other ranges are the entry-level C cameras, super-zoom Z cameras, and pocket V cameras). As a member of the P range, the P850 has a few features that are only found in some high-end point-and-shoots and in DSLRs, e.g. the ability to record raw files, or to use an external flash via a hot shoe. Note: OSNews is a broad tech site (and has been for years), such non-software reviews are welcome here even if our focus remains towards "system software".

Guest post by JBQ 2006-07-30 Open Source 31 Comments

Red Hat's Havoc Pennington wrote a very interesting article on his blog about open source, services and GPLv3. In the piece Havoc argues that sometimes having open and unrestricted services is more important than having the actual source code. He raises the question about how the open source community can move towards a model of open services; he specifically wonders how to finance the associated deployment and maintainance costs. Havoc believes that the GPLv3 fails to address the issue of data access and focuses too much on source access, which he thinks becomes somewhat irrelevant in the growing "software as a service" world.

What Is QNX?

Guest post by James Ingraham 2006-07-24 QNX 47 Comments

In today's entry in our Alternative OS Contest, James Ingraham takes a close look at QNX, the operating system based on the Neutrino microkernel. He concludes that "While you can probably find solutions for just about all of your desktop computing needs using the QNX RTOS, that is not QNX's strong suit. Its focus is real-time, embedded, and mission critical applications." Read on for the whole article.

Investigating the Plan 9 Operating System

Guest post by Andrew Hudson 2006-07-19 OS News 31 Comments

Plan 9 is an operating system designed by the same people who created the original UNIX. Its development began in the late 1980's and it was a research project intended to address a variety of system scalability issues that the UNIX and LINUX kernels don't do particularly well, namely, distributed computing, distributed name spaces, and distributed file systems. Plan 9 is open source and its current and fourth major release was in 2002. It is available as an install or LiveCD and it can be downloaded here. Note: This is an entry to our Alternative OS Contest.

OpenVMS – a System of Structure

Guest post by Robert Gezelter 2006-07-18 OS News 68 Comments

In its initial concept, OpenVMS (then VAX/VMS) sought to provide the functionality and capabilities of a mainframe-class system at a small fraction of the size and cost, while at the same time providing higher levels of reliability and integrity. These goals were achieved by what has become OpenVMS' hallmark, an emphasis on integrity and architectural leverage. Note: This is an entry to our OS Contest.

MorphOS: The Lightning OS

Guest post by Fulvio Peruggi 2006-07-17 Morphos 56 Comments

The latest article in our OSNews OS contest: Learn about MorphOS, the heir to the Amiga legacy. This article chronicles its bumpy history, its still-compelling features, and the current state of MorphOS development.

A Developer’s Insight Into DROPS

Guest post by Steffen Liebergeld 2006-07-13 OS News 10 Comments

DROPS is the educational operating system of the Dresden University of Technology, Germany (TU-Dresden). Its name is an acronym for Dresden Real-Time Operating System, which reveals its strongest feature, it is real-time capable and it is designed with security in mind. Its homepage can be found here. Note: This is the 4th entry to our Alternative OS Contest which runs through 14th July!