OS News Archive

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.

There are a lot of people who believe that program and application management is currently as good as it gets. Because the three major platforms - Windows, Linux, Mac OS X - all have quite differing methods of application management, advocates of these platforms are generally unwilling to admit that their methods might be flawed, leading to this weird situation where over the past, say, 20 years, we've barely seen any progress in this area. And here we are, with yet another article submitted to our backend about how, supposedly, Linux' repository method sucks or rules.

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.

Just like last week, we feature another open source microkernel today. Jari OS is an open source microkernel operating system, licensed under the GPL. The actual microkernel is called muString, and packed on top are isolated core and system services as well as device drivers, just like you'd expect from a proper microkernel implementation. Version 0.0.1 alpha was released earlier this month.

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.

It really is the week of back-to-core news for OSNews, as we've had news on various smaller operating systems and new projects. Forget Windows 7 and Snow Leopard; in the end this is what we're all here for. Anyway, B Labs has recently announced that version 0.1 of their Codezero microkernel has been released.

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.

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?"

StreamOS 2.0-RC1 has been released. "I've just released first release candidate of 0.21. It's connected with two final improvements: new locking subsystem, that seems to work great, and new keys handler, that doesn't eat CPU anymore, which has made StreamOS faster and more responsive." StreamOS is 32-bit operating system written in Object Pascal using Free Pascal Compiler.

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.

Over the years, we've occasionally run an "Ask OSNews" feature, wherein a reader asks us a question and we answer it publicly. Lately I've really been enjoying Slate's Dear Prudence advice column and the ever-interesting Straight Dope, and I thought we should see if we can get more OSNews readers to submit questions, and turn Ask OSNews into a more-regular thing. If your question falls outside of our domain expertise, we'll try to track down an expert to help out. And of course, our responses will always be supplemented by further advice from OSNews readers in the comments. Questions are welcome on any topic ranging from OSes and computing to science and geek culture. Contact us with your questions. (Please include "Ask OSNews" in the subject). Today's question is from a young student in Hungary who's seduced by the faraway siren song of Apple's marketing and wonders, "should I switch?"

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.

As you're going to see hear in tomorrow's OSNews podcast, there was a lot of interesting stuff going on on OSNews this week. We've had some serious talks about advertising on the web, Intel getting a serious slap on the wrist, we've talked about what to do with RAM, a mind-boggling security issue in Windows 7, and much more. This week's My Take is about Two And A Half Men.

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.