OS News Archive

Embedding Linux can apparently become a bit messy. This is set to change. With the support of Intel, the Linux Foundation has recently launched the "Yocto Project" This project is not a linux distribution or platform but a complete embedded Linux development environment with tools, metadata, and documentation. The project currently targets four architectures: ARM, MIPS, PowerPC and x86 (32 and 64 Bit). Intel's support for the project can best be summarized from its own press release: "Intel is supporting the Yocto Project with code and resources to help provide high-quality developer tools assisting companies with the creation of custom Linux-based systems for embedded products on any hardware architecture."

ChibiOS/RT 2.0.6 has been released. This new stable release fixes some minor bugs in the 2.0.x branch and brings performance improvements in the threads creation benchmark.
This efficient embedded RTOS supports multiple architectures like ARM7, ARM Cortex-M0, ARM Cortex-M3, MegaAVR, MSP430, Power Architecture, STM8 and others. A matrix of all the implemented features is available here.
ChibiOS/RT is licensed under the GPL with a linking exception allowing commercial applications.

This is a painful article to write. I've been a longtime fan and user of what is affectionately known as PC/GEOS over the years. However, I'm fearing we're nearing the end of GEOS.

Yesterday MenuetOS released a kernel update that includes Fourier transform, sinc and resampling. Fourier transform is significant in that it allow for more efficient computation and is essential for high speed computing.

BareMetal OS v0.4.9 has been released. Newest features are network communication via Ethernet as well as Memory allocation/free functions. BareMetal is an open source 64bit operating system for x86-64 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). The kernel binary is still under 16 KiB as well!

Today, the Genode OS Framework has seen another feature-rich release, introducing support for hardware-accelerated graphics by the means of Gallium3D, wireless networking via the MadWifi communication stack, a new block-device infrastructure, and Qt4 version 4.6.3. Genode is a modular framework for building special-purpose operating systems, currently supporting 6 different kernels. With the new release, its device-driver coverage reaches a new level and brings the project one step closer towards the goal of shaping Genode to a general-purpose OS.

Yesterday, Jolicloud released the much anticipated final version of Jolicloud OS 1.0, a web-based operating system built with netbooks in mind. The new release has been rebuilt from the ground up using Google's Chromium OS codebase in place of Mozilla's Prism backend. We got a chance to test the latest version of Jolicloud on Dell Mini 9 netbook, and were thoroughly impressed with what the OS has to offer. Here's what we found.

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."

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".

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!"

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.