OS News Archive
While last week was a tad bit uneventful, this week made up for it. Not only did we get the long-awaited release of KDE 4.2, we also gained more insight into the whole Palm/Apple thing, NVIDIA's CEO said a few funny things, and we got an important sit-rep on SkyOS straight from Robert Szeleney himself. This week's My Take is about life, death, and resurrection.
This week wasn't marked by any breaking news items, but there were a few tends to be spotted. This may be have been a new week, but netbooks were still all the rage, with several items on our front page. We also had lots of news on Windows 7, and OSNews' very first game review. An uneventful week, but some interesting discussion nonetheless. This week's My Take is about the upcoming KDE 4.2 release.
The past week wasn't as packed with events and shows as the previous one, but luckily for us, that didn't mean there wasn't enough to report on. This week focussed on netbooks, Steve Jobs' health, and KDE/Qt. This week's My Take is a shameless plug for one of the best television shows we've seen in a while.
This week, we start with a new regular occurence on OSNews: the imaginatively named Week in Review, where we do a quick rundown of the preceding week's most important news, and maybe add in a few new items that didn't make the cut earlier in the week. We will close off each of them with My Take, a short random musing about whatever subject we please. This week, the news was dominated by MacWorld, Windows 7, and Palm.
Submitted by Matthew Whitworth
2009-01-06
OS News
Despite what the project name's suffix might imply, Whitix is in fact not a Linux distribution. Whitix is a new operating system, written from scratch, and aims to combine the stability of UNIX with the user friendliness of other platforms.
"It will offer a consistent, clear interface and a new way to navigate the desktop while basing the fundamentals on proven system technology updated for the twenty-first century." The project
released version 0.2 today.
Information Week released what they deem the top ten stories dealing with open source for the year of 2008 earlier this month.
Reminisce all of the happy memories we've had of open source throughout this past year: nestle with netbooks, gallop with Google, frolic with Fedora, cuddle with copyrights, and even get your hands on a juicy murder mystery.
The internet, and much of the real world as well, is currently in list mode. Just about any possible list that can be made up regarding 2008 will be made up somewhere, so we decided not to reinvent the wheel and look forward instead of backward. Since we like to leave the guessing predicting to the analysts, we just limited ourselves to what tech-related matters we would like to see in 2009. Read on for our lists, and of course, post your own in the comments. And lest we forget: a very happy 2009 from the OSNews crew!
Consider the following a little Christmas gift. Some of you may have already noticed, but for a few months already OSNews has seen a shift in content. Not necessarily in the subjects we cover, but more in the way we present our news. We've experimented for long enough now - we have settled on a definitive change in our content type. Read on for the details.
A new version of
MikeOS has been released. MikeOS is aiming to be the best documented hobby OS project; three Handbooks explain how to run the OS, write software for it and modify the internals, providing an easy entry point for those interested in OS development.
Sometimes it seems that every new OS that comes out these days is ultimately and altogether quite similar. "It's all been done before," we sigh as new system after system is released with only eye-candy the apparent difference for most users. This new OS, named
"g-speak" by its creators, will give one a run for his money. Using special gloves, a user of the system gestures his way about the OS on several wall-sized displays that interact with one another. The makers of g-speak call it "the first major step in computer interface since 1984." Perhaps they are right.See the neat video
here. You can even go so far as to dust off your Tom Cruise Minority Report action figure to better savor the future with.
Good OS, a company well-known for it gOS linux distribution and their $199 Walmart computers has announced a new OS called "Cloud". Good OS described their new Operating System in a
press release "Cloud uniquely integrates a web browser with a compressed Linux operating system kernel for immediate access to Internet, integration of browser and rich client applications, and full control of the computer from inside the browser."
Linux distributions come and go by the dozens almost every day, and most of them live and die an unknown, irrelevant life, mostly because no, changing three icons and adding the suffix '-nix' to any random word doesn't make it different from Ubuntu. Anyway, sometimes, a new distribution is started that brings something new to the table. One such "distribution" is
Glendix, which aims to combine the Linux kernel with the userpsace tools from Plan 9. Distribution is probably not the right term for this project.
Submitted by Norman Feske
2008-11-21
OS News
The Genode OS framework
has seen another release.
"We are pleased to announce the release 8.11 of the Genode OS Framework introducing a new device-driver API, a C runtime, support for asynchronous notifications, and many improvements of the base API. With the new release 8.11, we are aiming at enabling Genode for real-world applications that require custom device drivers and the reuse of existing code. Among the major improvements are a new device driver API that eases the reuse of existing device drivers and a C runtime that facilitates the reuse of a wealth of existing C library code on Genode. Furthermore, we extended the base API by a number of exciting feature such as support for asynchronous notifications, capability typification, and managed dataspaces."
"An alpha version of
64-bit Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux operating systems was released on 11/17/2008 and is available for download. This offers easier, native installation on 64-bit Linux distributions and removes the need for 32-bit emulation." The pre-release can be downloaded from
Adobe Lab Downloads.
Submitted by Adam Dunkels
2008-11-17
OS News
Contiki is an operating system for networked embedded systems such as radio-equipped networked sensors that have 8-bit CPUs with a few kilobytes of memory and a few milliwatts of power budget. Within these constraints, Contiki provides full IP networking, multi-hop radio routing, a web server, a telnet server, and a networked command-line shell. The
2.2.2 release contains
uIPv6, the world's smallest fully compliant IPv6 stack,
SICSlowpan IPv6-over-802.15.4 header compression, and command line tools for HTTP interaction: wget and httpd.
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.
New features include: Major kernel refactoring, several new peripheral drivers, new PID controller algorithm, new configuration infrastructure, new testing harness, new logging infrastructure, and a first experimental embedded filesystem (BattFs).
As you may have noticed by now, we've introduced a little something called 'page 2' (look to your right). We added this feature because we felt we needed a way to 'tier' the news we publish on OSNews, because a regular (and valid) complaint has been that people felt that interesting, one-of-a-kind items were being drowned out by run-of-the-mill items like software releases, short distribution reviews, and so on. Read on for a little more insight into this one.
As part of our ongoing series, "Building the Wired Home," we've been experimenting with what could be a sea-change in the whole concept of a home computer. Home computers, of course, have long ago become commonplace, and computers have even taken on some roles that used to be delegated to standalone consumer electronics, such as audio and video storage and playback. They've gone from being
exotic oddities to ever-more-useful home appliances. Interestingly, though, as our home computers have become more powerful, sophisticated, and useful, they have also become decentralized and have, in most inefficient fashion, been chopped up and redistributed around the house. "Read more" to learn how our experiment worked out.
Submitted by Adam Dunkels
2008-10-22
OS News
A week ago the Contiki embedded operating system announced
uIPv6, the world's smallest compliant IPv6 stack, developed by
Cisco,
Atmel, and
SICS. Contiki now
releases the first snapshot release that contains uIPv6, released under a 3-clause BSD-style license.
Submitted by Norman Feske
2008-10-22
OS News
Genode is a new OS architecture that is able to align high security, robustness, and deterministic system behaviour with dynamic application workload. The project has now released its first
ready-to-boot Live CD that demonstrates the key ideas of the architecture in an interactive fashion using a custom GUI and a number of example applications. It runs on Qemu, VirtualBox, and a range of native PC hardware.
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