OS News Archive
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Our identities online are becoming ever more valuable to the companies that we entrust them to. What happens though when a company just ups and closes shop (Pownce, for example) and deletes your stuff? Sure, the individual files you'll have on your computer anyway, you won't have lost anything as far as bits and bytes are concerned--but what about friendships you've built up with people who you only know through the service. Your data should be portable so that you can take it to any service and not lose those relationships that you've built up in one walled-garden when it collapses, or you decide to move on. OpenID tries to solve this brand-centric problem by placing you at the centre of your data and allowing the sites you trust access through a single sign-on. OSnews is contemplating implementing OpenID and would like your feedback, but there are a few questions to consider--please read on for details
We didn't have a Week in Review last week, and I'm sorry for that - I was swamped with other things (hence no podcast either last week, we did record one today). This past week saw news items on a wide variety of topics, ranging from Google fixing Internet Explorer to Linus calling Linux bloated.
"BeRTOS is a real time operating system (RTOS) suitable for embedded platforms. It runs on many microprocessors and microcontrollers, ranging from 8-bit to 32-bit CPUs and even PCs." Version 2.2.0 has been released.
And yet another Week in Review, number 42 to be exact, so I guess this week is pretty important, you know, with life, the universe, and everything and all that stuff. It wasn't a particularly strong week or anything, but we still got some interesting stuff to look back upon.
This was a bit of a weird week for OSNews. Monday and Tuesday I was unable to reach OSNews and its related domains from home; we still don't know why, but the end result was that I could not work on OSNews, meaning very few items. For the rest, it was a very quiet and relaxed week, with little going on.
Submitted by Stefan Kalkowski
2009-09-02
OS News
The
Genode project has published its second
ready-to-boot Live CD featuring a bunch of graphical demonstrations such as Qt4 applications and Linux running on top of Genode. Immediatly after the
latest release of the Genode OS framework the new Live CD demonstrates some of the framework's features. The Qt4 demo utilizes the freshly integrated dynamic linker in order to reduce the size of applications. Another scenario demonstrates Genode's ability to launch Linux. Beside these new features, the portability properties of Genode are demonstrated by an application scenario that can be executed on top of different microkernels, namely OKL4, Pistachio, and Fiasco.
It's time for another week in review. This was decidedly the Snow Leopard week, but we also talked a lot about Linux, Psystar, and even SCO resurrected from the dead to continue its litigation about UNIX.
Submitted by Mirko
2009-08-28
OS News
"
Newmium is currently developing iXRIOS, a
high-speed, multi-processor, multi-operative, real-time operating system based on the workstation-server model. Users log on to a specific machine on which their operatives execute by default. They can request remote execution of their operatives via automatic and transparent load balancing of operatives and processors. Coupled with transparent load balancing, the iXRIOS system is loading only required services and drivers. iXRIOS is going to be restricted to commercial USA corporations. All government and non-profits are excluded from the program."
Another week has passed, so it's time for another Week in Review. It was a very Apple-ish week this week; their legal battle with Psystar, their loving relationship with Palm, and the FCC investigation. We also talked about openSUSE picking KDE as a default, and, of course, the biggest news of the week: Haiku has set a release date for the alpha!
Submitted by Rohan Pearce
2009-08-19
OS News
MenuetOS is an operating system written entirely in assembly language. As a result it's extremely quick and compact (it can even fit on a floppy disk, despite having a GUI). It can run Quake. Two of the developers behind MenuetOS
took time out to talk to GoodGearGuide about what inspired them to undertake the daunting task of writing the operating system, the current state of the OS and future plans for it.
Following the three-months release schedule, version 9.08 of the
Genode Operating-System Framework has been released, bringing improvements all over the code base and introducing new features such as a dynamic linker, and long desired support for super pages and write-combined I/O access. As described in the
release notes, the overall theme of this release had been refinement, resulting in much improved implementations for key parts of the framework. In particular, Genode's synchronization primitives such as locks and signals had received much attention, and the central timer service have been replaced by a much improved implementation.
The
MIT Technology Review, one of the world's first technology magazines still around, has named
Adam Dunkels, author of the
Contiki embedded open source
OS, as one of this year's
top 35 young innovators.
Finally, a week with a bit more news going on. We've talked about a lot of things this week, but there really weren't any overarching themes or whatever dominating the front page. This is the first Week in Review in a simpler format: a listing of the teasers of the more interesting stories (as opposed to a forced-colloquial recollection). They're in chronological order for your convenience.
Submitted by Inkslinger
2009-08-13
OS News
Australian research organisation NICTA claims to be the world's first to develop a formal machine-checked proof of a general-purpose operating system kernel, the Secure Embedded L4 (seL4). The organisation "beat" several other larger and better funded organisations to claim this achievement,
according to a spokesperson.
We had a remarkably short week this past week, so this will probably be the shortest Week in Review yet. We talked about Apple's hardware design, GNOME's decision to drop icons from menus and buttons, KDE 4.3 was released, and more.
A friend of OSNews asks: "You might have heard of our
Open-PC project. The idea is to collaboratively build a completely open PC, with free software and free drivers. We prepare an operating system image, do online services and support and choose the hardware. Then we work together with hardware manufacturers who build and sell the PC. We already have one manufacturer in Germany who committed to work with us. We will sell the first version of the Open-PC this fall. The problem is that it is expensive to ship the PC from Germany to the United States, so we are looking for a second manufacturing partner in the US. Can you recommend a company? I think the ideal would be a mid-size PC manufacturer who has experience with assembling custom PCs, experience with Linux and is able to ship the PC economically within North America." This seems like a great candidate for crowdsourcing. So, OSNews readers, can you give our friend any leads?
A new version of the
HelenOS operating system was released last night. It comes with improved support of several hardware platforms, file system and block device drivers enhancements, and user interface changes such as console inheritance or multibyte character support. Check the 0.4.1
release notes for more details or
download it here.
An eventful little week this was, but mostly because Apple grabbed the spotlight in various different ways. For the rest, we focussed on Microsoft's proposed browser ballot screen, we took a look at KDE 4.3RC3, and Microsoft and Yahoo finally got to do their thing.
We skipped a week with the Week in Review due to a lack of time, but we're back now - and yes, it was a really interesting week. It really focussed on two major themes: Microsoft's code contribution to the Linux kernel, and various stories around Apple - both positive as well as negative.
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