OS News Archive

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synchronization primitives such as locks and signals had received much attention, and the central timer service have been replaced by a much improved implementation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Even though news has been slow the entire week due to the fact that it's summer and people are more interested in vacation than in technology news, we still had a lot of interesting stuff this week. Google obviously captured the headlines with its Chrome OS, but we also talked about Mono, Richard Stallman, and many other things.

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."

Time for another Week in Review. We had a fairly regular week this week, with the focus somehow being Mac cloners, The Pirate Bay, Mono, and Browsers were also in the spotlight this week with the release of Firefox 3.5, disagreements on the video tag codec, and talking about KHTML.

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.

And yet another week has flown by. Nothing particularly exciting happened this week, but we did have some interesting conversations about old software, some phone news, Microsoft revealed the pricing information for Windows 7, and we talked about netbook customer satisfaction.

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.