OS News Archive

The center of gravity is shifting away from the traditional, massive operating systems of the past, as even the major OSes are slimming their footprint to make code bases easier to manage and secure, and to increase the variety of devices on which they can run, InfoWorld reports. Microsoft, for one, is cutting down the number of services that run at boot to ensure Windows 7 will run across a spectrum of hardware. Linux distros such as Ubuntu are stripping out functionality, including MySQL, CUPS, and LDAP, to cut footprints in half. And Apple appears headed for a slimmed-down OS X that will enable future iPhones or tablet devices to run the same OS as the Mac. Though these developments don't necessarily mean that the browser will supplant the OS, they do show that OS vendors realize they must adapt as virtualization, cloud computing, netbooks, and power concerns drive business users toward smaller, less costly, more efficient operating environments.

No major events of announcements this week, but that doesn't mean we didn't have any interesting content the past 7 days. The steady stream of news about Windows 7 continues to flow, while the netbook stream dried up a bit. We also some very interesting releases this week, such as the latest ReactOS and a new JNode release. Linus Torvalds made headline news once again because of his comments about having multiple Linux distributions, and it became clear SGI is in trouble yet again. This week's My Take is about working on a dream.

The team behind KolibriOS has released a new version, KolibriOS 0.7.5.0. This operating system is written entirely in assembly language and fits on a single floppy disk. Sadly, there is no information available on what exactly has changed between this version and the last one, so all I can do is point you towards the downloads section.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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."

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).