OS News Archive
The folks at WineHQ
have released the second major stable version of Wine: "This release represents two years of development effort and over 23,000 changes. The main highlights are the support for 64-bit applications, and the new graphics based on the Tango standard. It also contains a lot of improvements across the board, and over 3,000 bug fixes."
Fiasco is a preemptible real-time kernel supporting hard priorities. It uses non-blocking synchronization for its kernel objects. This guarantees priority inheritance and makes sure that runnable high-priority processes never block waiting for lower-priority processes. Is it the Java of operating systems?
BareMetal is an open source 64-bit OS for x86-64 based computers. It is written in Assembly, and applications can be written in Assembly or C/C++. It's aimed at three target segments (High Performance Computing, Embedded Applications, and Education). It's also designed to be simple, and it's really small. Under 16Kb small. Version 0.4.8
was released recently, which includes updates to the C application library, updated documentation, and better support for SMP. It's good to see some innovation in the startup/hobbyist OS space. We wish them well!
Spotify has made a (Qt-based, but with extra gnome-support package) Linux client
available for download. The client is available only to premium subscribers - reported to be because they haven't found a reliable way to show ads yet. It also doesn't support local file playback yet, but then this port was built "during hack days and late nights".
Submitted by Mark
2010-07-12
OS News
The non-profit NeoSmart Technologies
has just released EasyBCD 2.0. The new version of the free bootloader utility supports ext4fs, GRUB2, Windows 7, booting from ISO images, Virtual Harddisk VHDs, network devices, and USBs. It also has tools to create bootable external media and can be used to set up 1-click dual-boots with the most popular operating sytems.
Screenshots. And the icing on the cake is that the installer is 1337 KB, and they claim that was merely coincidence.
I was lucky enough to receive an invitation to the HP Technology Forum 2010 via OSNews and just spent most of this last week in Las Vegas with five thousand other nerds of varying caliber. The tech forum is focused more on enterprise technology than that of the consumer, and-- let's face it-- even if any of us could afford a $30,000 rack of servers, most of us have little idea of what we'd do with so many resources except brag. Despite the focus on an area not quite as natural to OSNews and many of its readers, there was a plenitude of good and interesting information shared-- aside from that, the forum was simply fun. There were a few subjects that were especially eye-catching, though many of them not necessarily comprehensive enough to base an entire article on; thus this overview.
BeRTOS 2.5 has been released: "This is a major stable release, and provide a brand new support for Cortex-M3 (and many new CPUs), one-click support for many different development boards (Arduino included!), new project examples to bootstrap your development with BeRTOS even faster than before! Don't forget that we have a shiny new preemptive kernel with real time scheduler and really fast
context switching!"
Starting next week, Thom Holwerda will be beginning a seven week internship at a Netherlands-based translation firm, so he'll be cutting his OSNews efforts back, and the rest of the OSNews team is going to need to fill in. We've been talking forever about how we need to recruit new editors to freshen up the viewpoints here at OSNews, and I guess there's nothing like a crisis to force everybody to do what they should have done a long time ago. So if you think you have something to contribute to the OSNews effort, read on.
Hobbies. Where would the computer industry be without them? Arguably, there wouldn't be a computer industry had it not been for hobbyists in the first place. The ineffable need to scratch an itch does still percolate even in this closed down world of big mainstream technology from big companies opposed to the little guy innovating. OSNews asks, what are you working on? We want to hear from you about your hobby projects (technology related or otherwise) to get a sense of what the community is cooking up for love of it, rather than because you're paid to do so. Share and enjoy!
Now this is interesting. We only
briefly touched upon
Qubes two months ago, and now, the team behind the project have announced a very interesting feature:
disposable virtual machines. The idea here is that you can tell your operating system to launch an application in a virtual machine that gets created specifically for opening that application. If you close the application, the VM is destroyed automatically - and this all in under one second.
With the just
released version 10.05, the Genode OS Framework reaches out to new application areas by providing a solution for subjecting all processes to mandatory access control, and adding the infrastructure needed for high-quality audio processing. On the way towards running general-purpose OS workloads, the port of the Webkit-based Arora web browser running as a native Genode process marks a pivotal point for the project.
EyeOS
has released version 2.0 Beta. "After several months of hard work we're happy to announce the immediate availability of the official release of eyeOS 2.0 Beta. And even more: the new release doesn't come alone but with the brand new eyeOS.org website, which has not ben redesigned for the last 2 years now. eyeOS 2.0 Beta can be downloaded from the new downloads page and tested from a Beta test server in eyeOS.info."
The folks at WineHQ are
gearing up for the second release of Wine. "The 64-bit support is now more or less complete, and we have most of the fancy new icons, so it's time to think about the next stable release. Unless some major problems come up, 1.1.44 will be the last of the 1.1.x series. The next release will be 1.2-rc1, which will mark the beginning of the code freeze. This should result in a 1.2 final sometime in June."
This article falls under the category of emulation. The venerable
DOSBox emulator has been incremented to version 0.74. DOSBox emulates an IBM compatible PC computer running MS-DOS and is great for all you retro gamers or those wishing to run legacy applications. Personally I would love to relive the past with all the great games of yore. There is an extensive change log listing all the improvements, so head on over to the official website to peruse them.
There's one complaint we here at OSNews get thrown in our faces quite often: what's up with the lack of, you know, operating system news on OSNews? Why so much mobile phone news? Why so much talk of H264, HTML5, and Flash? Where's the juicy news on tomorrow's operating systems? Since it's weekend, I might as well explain why things are the way they are. Hint: it has nothing to do with a lack of willingness.
Hello all. Over time we have had every imaginable claim of bias levied against us. We are routinely called pro-Apple, anti-Apple as well as pro-Microsoft and anti-Microsoft (even within the same discussion thread!). OSNews is an editorial site where the content is selected by a core team of volunteers who either write up news articles themselves, or take links or submissions from users on the site. Read More for the full statement.
Submitted by midnight
2010-04-19
OS News
RT-Thread RTOS is an open source real-time operating system for 16-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers, with components which include a hard real-time kernel, a command line shell, a device virtual file system, and a graphic user interface. RT-Thread RTOS 0.4.x series will be licensed under the Apache License v2.
"In 2007, OSNews ran an
article about OPIUM, showing how to cast apt-get installation problems (choosing which of several possible dependencies to install) as a set of pseudo-boolean constraints which could then be solved mathematically to give the optimal solution. We have recently
adapted this technique to Zero Install, addressing some problems experienced by the Sugar environment (One Laptop Per Child) and allowing better integration with distribution packages."
Dan Hon makes a thought-provoking assertion in his blog: remember all the ridiculous, unrealistic computer interfaces that Hollywood characters are always using, showing "hackers" infiltrating systems by flying through virtual reality worlds of strange codes, and cutesy animations accompanying every task? Hon's point is that instead of ridiculing these unrealistic interfaces, maybe we should
try to emulate them. He makes a pretty good case.
"Joanna Rutkowska, a security researcher known for her work on virtualization security and low-level rootkits, has released a new open-source operating system meant to
provide isolation of the OS's components for better security. The OS, called Qubes, is based on Xen, X and Linux and is in a basic, alpha stage right now. Qubes relies on virtualization to separate applications running on the OS and also places many of the system-level components in sandboxes to prevent them from affecting each other."
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