OS News Archive

If you haven't been to our OS Resources page lately, you haven't missed much action, because like many online resource pages, a lot of effort went into it long ago when it was launched, but it's been lacking attention since, with only occasional updates. Alas, thus is the sorrow of Web 1.0. We'd like to drag OS Resources into the participatory web, and let the OSNews community help keep it up to date. Wiki seems like an obvious solution. So I'd like to ask, dear readers, is there a Wiki system that you think would be especially good for a small-but-growing OS Resource guide? There's Mediawiki, of course, but it seems a bit heavyweight and user-unfriendly for something small and simple. I've had good experience with Mindtouch Deki, but thought I should examine other options before picking it. So what do you think? Is Wiki the way to go, if so, which one? And what would you like to see in our new OS Resources?

It's time for another "OSNews asks" item. This time, I want to focus on something that I've been wanting to talk about with you all before, but never found the time for. The question is simple: which feature(s) from other operating systems would you like to see in your own main operating system?

Captain, we've encountered another one. FreeNOS is a microkernel-based operating system written for learning purposes. "The system is very experimental, yet it currently supports virtual memory, simple task scheduling, and interprocess communication (IPC). It currently contains support for a few devices, including VGA, keyboard, i8250 serial, and PCI host controllers. FreeNOS has an experimental implementation of several filesystems, such as the virtual file system, procfs, tmpfs, and ext2fs. Current application libraries include libposix, libc, libteken (terminal emulation), and libexec (executable formats). All source code has been documented with Doxygen tags."

When I read this item in the backend submission queue, I must admit that I thought it was a fake, and I must say that I'm still not confident enough about this one. A Korean company held a press event today during which it launched its Tmax Window operating system. Built on in-house technology, they claim it has 100% compatibility with Windows software. Update: A lot more information in this article.

Today's a slow news day, so I thought it would be a good day to bring up an idea I've been incubating. I've been contemplating launching an OSNews-like site on the topic of Enterprise Computing. Obviously, OSNews covers the OS-related aspects of heavy-duty business, scientific, and academic computing already, and sometimes news on databases, app servers, cloud computing and other related topics too, but a lot of the kind of news that is useful to enterprise IT people falls outside of OSNews' purview, and it's appropriate to keep it that way. But I think that the enterprise IT world could use an OSNews-like site to aggregate and examine the latest news in that sphere. So my question to you, dear OSNews readers, is this: Do you agree? Would you be interested in reading and participating in a site on that topic? Would you be interested in being involved? If so, I'd like to recruit a few editors to help me launch it. Read on for more details. Update: Are there any native Korean speakers who read OSNews? If you are one, and you'd be willing to help me out with a short project, please contact me.

While traversing about the web this afternoon, I came across a rather funny subject title for a forum post. The person asked if any "normal" people use Linux, but went on to ask forgiveness for the lack of a better word than "normal." He wonders if anyone who isn't an open source, uber-geeky, stay-up-until-dawn-exploring-code fanatic actually uses Linux. Though the congregation here at OSNews is (obviously) comprised of very many of the aforementioned fanatics (in a sense; wear the title with pride), I also believe there to be many readers who are more or less "normal," for the lack of a better word, and plenty who may fall in between both spectrums of nerdiness.

MS-DOS is an old piece of work, a long line of operating systems dating back to the early '80s. First a stand-alone operating system, it would later work as a base for Windows, and starting with Windows 95, it became integrated with Windows and was no longer developed as a stand-alone operating system. To fill the gap the end of MS-DOS left behind, the FreeDOS project was started. Today, FreeDOS turned 15.

Contiki 2.3 has just been released. Contiki is an operating system for networked embedded systems that provides low-power IP networking even for the smallest of systems, and includes the world's smallest IPv6 stack. Among other things the 2.3 release includes a new IPv6 routing architecture, a set of new shell commands, and a Twitter client.

Software moves on at a break-neck pace these days--version numbers clock up ever quicker as vendors try to market their apps as the latest and greatest. Software generally ages badly, falling into a state of looking grossly out of date, lacking new functionality that we've come to depend upon as well as compatibility problems. Dear OSNews readers, what old software (5+ years) do you still use, why, and what problems do you come across in sticking with it? Read More for my own contribution to the list

We've had an interesting week, with lots of news on web browsers, phones, and ARM netbooks. For instance, Opera launched Unite, Microsoft started a "Get the facts" campaign for Internet Explorer 8, NVIDIA talked about Windows CE, and much, much more.

Due to a total lack of time on my end, we didn't have a Week in Review last week, but now I'm back, ready to summarise the news of the past week. Obviously, the week was dominated by Apple's WWDC and Microsoft's announcement regarding Internet Explorer, but in between all that, we had a lot of news on alternative operating systems.

With the growing "mobile, mobile, mobile!" craze, many groups have been working strenuously to develop slimmer, easier to use mobile operating systems and applications. At the forefront of these innovating developments are various Linux branches, Android quite possibly one of the most popular and most hoped to come preinstalled on netbooks. In the humble shadows, however, a new mobile OS is emerging and just may have the viability to cover some hefty ground in the market. Meet "Xenon," the new mobile OS.

Discerning techies probably know of the the programming language occam, designed for the Inmos Transputer highly parallel processor from the 1980s. It's not so widely-known that occam is still around and available for the x86 in the form of the Kent Retargetable occam Compiler, KRoC - nor that there's an entire PC OS, complete with GUI, written in occam-pi: RMoX.

Yes, it's been one busy week here at OSNews. We published a guide on how to build a computer that can run Mac OS X using an unaltered retail disc, and this guide became one of the most often-visited stories in a matter of days. On top of that, we had countless interesting and insightful discussions about Mono and Moonlight, the Linux Unified Kernel, switching to Mac OS X, the future of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, and lots of other interesting stuff. Due to me being engulfed in university work, there is - again - no My Take this week. It might take a few weeks before I can get My Take back into the game - my apologies for that.