OS News Archive

Ask OSNews is apparently quite popular among you guys; the questions just keep on coming in. Since David took on the first two, we decided to let me handle this one - it's an area I've personally covered before on OSNews: file system layouts. One of our readers, a Linux veteran, studied the GoboLinux effort to introduce a new filesystem layout, and wondered: "Why not adopt the more sensible file system from GoboLinux as the new LSB standard?"

There's been a new release of DOSBox, version 0.73. It's got support for more graphics modes and cards, improved Vista support, new OPL emulation cores, sound fixes and improvements for Mac OS X, lots of compatibility fixes, lots of CD-ROM detection improvements, lots of memory (EMS/XMS) improvements, various fixes and enhancements for the recompiling core, and much more.

The Genode project has released the version 9.05 of their operating-system framework. The highlights as detailed in the release notes are the support of the OKL4 kernel as base platform, the introduction of basic USB support, the integration of Qt4 into the main-line source tree, and 64-bit support.

In our latest "Ask OSNews" installment, a reader asks: "Do you think Apple will ever have a standalone Windows version of their email app so that us Window users can download and use it? My family and I currently use Incredimail and occasionally Thunderbird."

Even though it was a relatively easy-going week when it comes to the news, we still had some interesting items worth revisiting. A company called Vmedia is trying to push a video version of MiniDisc, Apple did an epic Java fail, Google released Chrome 2.0, and more.

InfoWorld's Paul Venezia reviews VMware vSphere 4, what the company has billed its 'virtual data center OS.' The bottom line: "VMware vSphere 4.0 touches on almost every aspect of managing a virtual infrastructure, from ESX host provisioning to virtual network management to backup and recovery of virtual machines. Time will tell whether these features are as solid as they need to be in this release, but their presence is a substantial step forward for virtual environments."

With the rise of microblogging services like Twitter and Identi.ca, the length of URLs has been the subject of much discussion. Some research has even suggested that long URLs cost us significant dollars, and that by shortening URLs, one could realize significant cost savings in bandwidth. As such, today, we're unveiling OSNe.ws, our own short URL service. OSNe.ws links are currently peppered throughout the site: you can view them by hovering over any news item, any conversation, or at the end of any story via the "Tweet this!" link. Note that these links are 301 redirected to the appropriate OSNews.com page, there is no actual content living on OSNe.ws. We hope you enjoy this new service and that it encourages you to share our links more readily. Update by AS: Because everyone seems to be so focused on the "bandwidth savings" of links, let me be very clear: the new URLs are only for your convenience and saving characters in sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Identica where you're limited on characters.

As you may know, the global economic depression has hit the media hard, due in large part to the fact that ad rates are in the toilet. OSNews is in the same boat. Despite the fact that we still have good advertisers, our income from advertising this year will only be a fraction of what it was last year. We probably won't make enough to cover our costs. Other news sites, as they've seen revenue decrease, have responded with more, and more intrusive, advertising. We don' t want to do that. We feel we have a covenant with our readers. If you'll be respectful of our need to run ads, we'll be respectful of your need to read the site without having ads shoved down your throat. Please read on, for more discussion of our ad "covenant," and a plea for help, including a plea to all Adblock users to please unblock OSNews.

As a teaser for the upcoming release of the Genode OS Framework 9.05, the newly added support for the OKL4 kernel has been released to the project's subversion repository. Genode is a framework for building custom microkernel-based operating systems using a capability-based architecture geared towards high security and robustness. Among the features of Genode are a custom GUI, a device driver kit, and native Qt4 support. From the ground up, it was laid out to be highly portable among different kernels.

Tony Tebby, the author of the Sinclair QL's operating system QDOS, added a long semi-autobiographical essay to the Wikipedia page on QDOS' successor SMSQ/E. However, a Wikipedia moderator deleted it - sad, but fair, since it was not directly relevant to an encyclopaedia entry. Someone has extracted the story and placed it on a Geocities page, unformatted. But as Geocities is closing down, soon that too will disappear - so read it while it's still up! The original, deleted history remains visible in Wikipedia's history, here.

"Operating system vendors face this problem once or twice a decade: They need to migrate their user base from their old operating system to their very different new one, or they need to switch from one CPU architecture to another one, and they want to enable users to run old applications unmodified, and help developers port their applications to the new OS. Let us look at how this has been done in the last 3 decades, looking at DOS/Windows, Macintosh, Amiga and Palm."

BeRTOS is a real time operating system suitable for embedded platforms. It runs on many microprocessors and microcontrollers, ranging from 8-bit to 32-bit CPUs and even PCs. It's free and open source, licensed under the GPLv2.

We had an interesting week here over at OSNews. We had lots of talk about the Windows worm Conficker, information regarding computer sales figures, a sentence in the Pirate Bay case, and much, much more. This week's My Take is about the irony of copyright law.

The weeks just keep flying by, don't they? It's time for another Week in Review, and this time, we actually have a few interesting things to review. Microsoft is going on the full assault against Apple and Linux on netbooks, Canonical retaliates, the IBM-Sun deal is still the talk of the week, and we did a podcast. This week's My Take isn't a happy one, but it is an important one.