OS News Archive
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.
Submitted by Norman Feske
2009-02-26
OS News
The Genode project has released the version 9.02 of their
Genode OS Framework. This open-source framework allows for creating custom microkernel-based operating systems for executing dynamic application workload while maintaining high security. In addition to the already supported base platforms 32-bit Linux and L4/Fiasco, this release introduces support for the L4ka::Pistachio microkernel. This high-performance kernel implements the latest L4 kernel API and supports a number of advanced features such as multi-processor support and virtualization support. By bringing Genode to this base platform, we will be able to leverage these features in the future. On the functional side, the new release brings two major additions, a basic networking facility and the native port of the Qt4 application framework.
Read on about the new features described in the release notes, and
download the release 9.02 of the Genode OS Framework.
This week had some interesting things in it. In Sweden, they think they can stop piracy by sending The Pirate Bay to court, Apple faced its first Mac sales slow down in like forever but they're still high on customer satisfaction, and we wondered if a cat an agree to an EULA. This week's my take is from Jordan "weildish" Spencer Cunningham, and is about winter.
It was a fun week for OSNews, with many interesting debates on polarising subjects such as the global menubar in GNOME, Chrome using Gtk+ on Linux, and Cuba moving to Linux. We also took a look at Haiku, talked to Nicki Clyne and the CEO of Lunascape, and reported on a few releases of small operating systems. This week's My Take is about the economic crisis.
Submitted by Jakub Jermar
2009-02-14
OS News
A new version of the experimental
HelenOS operating system has been released. Version 0.4.0 features a simple user command line interface, FAT file system support, application loader and tracer, improved hardware support for ia64, ppc32 and sparc64, and many other improvements over the previous release. Get it from
their download page.
IanOS is an experimental 64-bit operating system written from scratch as a learning experience. The source code is available online and the creator of the OS has made some detailed documentation available to go with the source code. This is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to venture into writing a 64-bit OS. The author makes his intention about this OS clear
"I never had any intention of producing a true OS. There are plenty of those about and it would be a very foolish, or vain, person who thought that they could compete with the likes of FreeBSD and Linux. But my interest in computers isn't practical; I just find programming them, particularly at this level, to be a supremely satisfying intellectual pursuit".
There are many contenders to the desktop crown, and a relative newcomer in that area is Whitix, an operating system which, despite what the name suggests, is not based on Linux. It comes with a fully pre-emptive multitasking kernel as well as ports of GCC, Python, and Mono. A
bugfix release has just been posted on the website.