OS News Archive

Here at OSNews, we use a moderation system where your peers rate your comments, and where the OSNews staff rarely intervene. This system was put in place after realising that the editorial moderation was failing miserably; it had become too much work. Sifting through ten reported comments a day is one thing, sifting through 100 of them each day is another. The result was that editorial moderation had become willy-nilly, which led to understandable user frustration, and pointless email rants back and forth between users and staff members (mea culpa). The answer to this problem turned out to be a two-step process: banning anonymous commenting, and our peer moderation system. While the moderation system has its flaws, it has exceeded all of our expectations in making sure that our comments' sections are free of spam, and relatively fun to read. Still, we realise problems exist, but we also see a lot of misinformation floating around. The treat we have in store for you today will help in fixing some of that.

A new version of MikeOS, a simple 16-bit assembly operating system designed to teach basic OS design and implementation, is now available. It features FAT12 file writing, a new mouse driver, a C library and other changes. As always, the Handbook provides copious info on the OS and how to start OS development yourself.

SqueakNOS is an old idea that has gotten the kiss of life again. Squeak is a Smalltalk system built by Alan Kay and SqueakNOS is an attempt to remove the OS underneath Squeak. You can download a VMWare playable image from their sourceforge website or you can get an iso and more details about SqueakNOS from here.

"This post is about the desktop operating systems that fly under the radar of most people. We are definitely not talking about Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, or even BSD or Solaris. There are much less mainstream options out there for the OS-curious." Though the article doesn't go into much detail about the OSes, it is a good round up of some of the interesting candidates.

Microsoft and Novell have made good on their 2006 interoperability pact. Microsoft and Novell jointly announced that Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise has been optimized to run as an "enlightened" guest on Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor platform. Windows Server 2008 customers have been able to run as a virtualized guest on SUSE since last June, when SUSE became the first member of Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program, which Novell has helped to fine-tune. Now SUSE is optimized to run on Microsoft's Hyper-V as well.

Paul Venezia offers an in-depth review of Citrix XenDesktop 2.0, touching on the growing importance Virtual Desktop Infrastructure as a whole. 'Citrix has married VDI to its existing stable of application and desktop delivery mechanisms, and it continues to leverage the stellar ICA protocol to assist in speed, user experience, and manageability,' Venezia writes. 'If the company can continue to improve XenServer, XenDesktop could become the showcase VDI implementation. As it stands now, coupling XenDesktop with VMware VI3 is probably the best of both worlds.'

Facing increased pressure from rivals Microsoft and Citrix Systems, VMware will announce what it calls a 'virtual datacenter operating system' at VMworld this week to extend virtualization beyond servers and into all corners of the datacenter, including storage and network equipment. The products are scheduled for release in 2009. The 'VDC OS' is not a product but a set of capabilities that will appear in VMware Infrastructure 3 updates and other products.

Version 2.2.1 of the Contiki operating system has just been released. The Contiki operating system is designed for wireless deeply embedded systems that have memory on the order of a few kilobytes and a power consumption on the order of a few milliwatt. Within these severe resource constraints, Contiki provides a low-power multi-hop TCP/IP stack, a command-line interface, a flash-based file system, and loadable modules. Release 2.2.1 improves network performance, reduces power consumption, and fixes a number of bugs from previous releases.

The Genode OS framework, the reference implementation of the Genode operating system architecture, has seen its first release. "Genode is a novel operating-system architecture that enables dynamic workload while retaining security and robustness. The fundamental difference of Genode compared to other OS architectures is its strict organizational structure, which allows the execution of sensitive applications with a trusted computing base of a few thousand lines of code beside high-complexity workload. With its organizational approach, the architecture facilitates a clean separation of policies and mechanisms, and enables the definition and application of system policies in a natural and distributed fashion." The Genode OS Framework runs on Linux via libSDL, or on real hardware on top of the L4/Fiasco microkernel.

Peter Wayner takes a deep look at four cloud computing services: Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, GoGrid, and AppNexus, each of which simplifies your workload but forces you into a 'ball-and-chain-computing' routine you may not like. Although the services do let you pull CPU cycles from thin air when you need it, they can't solve the deepest problems that make it hard for applications to scale gracefully, Wayner writes. Overall, Wayner finds the 'clouds' rife with potential but 'far from clear winners over traditional shared Web hosting.'

A new Ubuntu-based Linux distribution has arrived, aimed at both Linux newbies and content creators. Boasting "out of the box" multimedia codecs, the freely downloadable PC/OS incorporates the lightweight XFCE desktop, and is said to offer a similar layout to the groundbreaking, but ultimately doomed BeOS.

On January 7, 2008, gOS released the beta version of Space - their latest iteration of gOS. It's different for sure. It's like OS X with an added bit of fun. gOS Space is truly a social network fan's dream come true. But what exactly makes this operating system special? Let's take a look at some of the bits that cause Space to stand out.

Convicted killer Hans Reiser led police on Monday to what he said was the body of his wife in the Oakland hills, just two days before he was to be sentenced for first-degree murder, authorities said.

Over the years, we've had many people ask if they could join a mailing list that would give them a digest of news from the OSNews site. Though we have made extensive use of RSS that makes it easy for RSS addicts to get their OSNews fix, a lot of people find it more convenient to be reminded of the latest topics by email. We've resisted so far only because we have always had other things higher on the priority list. But wait no more! We now have two lists: one for all OSNews postings, and one only for original feature articles. Currently, the mailing is set to be generated every night. If you have any feedback, suggestions, or requests for the new mailing list service, please post them in the comments. Signup for: Main List or Features-only List.