OS News Archive

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.

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.

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.

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."