OS News Archive
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.
And another week passes us by. This week we were informed about two projects replacing some GNU software with alternatives, FreeBSD, KDE, OpenOffice.org, and Windows 7 did new releases, Psystar replied to Apple's allegations (and the Apple world completely ignored it), and Chrome users were the most up-to-date with their browsers. This week's my take is a prelude to the one for next week.
Submitted by Norman Feske
2009-05-06
OS News
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.
It's Sunday! Sunday! What does this mean! Yes! Another week has passed us by! We're all one week closer to inevitable death! This also means it's time for another week in review. This past week we saw a lot of Windows and Apple news, we had some items on various truly alternative operating systems, and Linux reached a milestone. I don't know what this week's My Take will be about. Maybe, once I'm done with the Week in Review, I'll have thought of something.
"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.
The past week has actually seen a whole lot of interesting news items. We've seen financial figures from major software companies, Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, we found out about Windows XP Mode, Ubuntu 9.04 was released, and it was revealed that the judge in the Pirate Bay case was anything but impartial. This week's My Take is about Jericho, the short-lived TV series.
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.
En weer een week voorbij, dus weer tijd voor een
weekoverzicht. This week saw some interesting developments, mostly around Conficker and GNOME, but we also had some browser news, Shuttleworth on Windows 7, and more details on the Palm Pre. This week's My Take is about Firefly.
The past week ranks pretty high on the uninteresting weeks list, with few things of note happening in the tech industry. Still, we learned when the release candidate for Windows 7 will be arriving, the Ubuntu 9.04 beta arrived, the RIAA got a smiling nod of approval from the Obama administration, and, well, that's about it. This week's My Take is about The Cardigans.
Contiki
released their newest version of the Contiki OS, 2.2.3. Contiki is an open source OS that is generally used to run very portable, networked embedded systems and wireless sensor networks. The typical RAM and ROM footprint of a Contiki configuration is two kilobytes and 40 kilobytes, respectively; if that's not 'highly portable,' I don't know what is. New features in 2.2.3 include checkpointing, which stores the complete execution state of a system in a single file; per-packet power profiling, which allows fine-grained breakdown of power consumption; announcements, which make neighbor and route announcements protocol-independent; and Deluge, a bulk data dissemination protocol. New ports to the Meshnetics ZigBit and Sentilla JCreate modules were also released.
And yet another week passes. This week has been characterised by lots of new about browsers, from Chrome to Safari to Internet Explorer. Apple published information on the third revision of the iPhone operating system, IBM wants to buy Sun, and GNOME released a new version. This week's My Take is about The Streets.
Recently we've had a couple of articles and discussions on OSNews about browser statistics. Every now and then someone in the comments will ask what OSNews statitstics are like, and what browsers and operating systems our readers are running. Well, recently we installed a fancy new web site analytics program,
Mint. I figured I might as well put it to good use by showing some of the browser and platform statistics we've gathered over the past month.
And the weeks just keep on coming, don't they? Another one has passed, so it's time for a
Week in Review. This week wasn't particularly eventful, and was mostly dominated by various newsbits about Apple, but none of them were particularly earth shattering. The usual suspects like netbooks and Windows 7 also showed their faces. My Take is about yet another icy sport.
PolishLinux has an
editorial on program installation on Linux systems, and even though it's a bit hard to wade through (the author's native language sure isn't English) it does make a number of very good points in favour of the way most Linux systems handle things. Still, as always in the discussion on program installation, it always feels a bit like listening to a discussion between a deaf and a blind man about whose condition is the easiest to live with.
Another week, another
Week in Review, number 9 already. The past week won't go down in memory as a memorable one, but despite that, we did get lots of new Macs, an LGPL'd Qt 4.5, a sort-of optional Internet Explorer, and some more details on Snow Leopard - among other things, of course. This week's my take is about a sport most countries aren't really interested in - long-track speed skating.
A new version of
ScorchOS has been released. ScorchOS (formerly known as ApolloOS) is still in the pre-alpha stage but aims soon to provide a minimal GUI-based operating environment which others can improve, extend and learn from. Don't expect to be using your latest productivity tools on it however for a good long while! This is a hobbyist operating kernel based on bkerndev and inspired by the MikeOS project. At the moment it shows the next step you can take with the kind of tutorials you may find on
osdev.org.
Yet another week has passed, so it's time for another
week in review - the 8th instalment already. This week was marked by the realisation that Qemu and DOSBox on mobile phones are cool, that Apple is working hard on Safari 4, and that Microsoft appears to be more concerned about Linux than about Apple. And, of course, Haiku got Flash. This week's My Take is about zombies.
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