OS News Archive

Good OS, a company well-known for it gOS linux distribution and their $199 Walmart computers has announced a new OS called "Cloud". Good OS described their new Operating System in a press release "Cloud uniquely integrates a web browser with a compressed Linux operating system kernel for immediate access to Internet, integration of browser and rich client applications, and full control of the computer from inside the browser."

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.

"An alpha version of 64-bit Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux operating systems was released on 11/17/2008 and is available for download. This offers easier, native installation on 64-bit Linux distributions and removes the need for 32-bit emulation." The pre-release can be downloaded from Adobe Lab Downloads.

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.

As you may have noticed by now, we've introduced a little something called 'page 2' (look to your right). We added this feature because we felt we needed a way to 'tier' the news we publish on OSNews, because a regular (and valid) complaint has been that people felt that interesting, one-of-a-kind items were being drowned out by run-of-the-mill items like software releases, short distribution reviews, and so on. Read on for a little more insight into this one.

As part of our ongoing series, "Building the Wired Home," we've been experimenting with what could be a sea-change in the whole concept of a home computer. Home computers, of course, have long ago become commonplace, and computers have even taken on some roles that used to be delegated to standalone consumer electronics, such as audio and video storage and playback. They've gone from being exotic oddities to ever-more-useful home appliances. Interestingly, though, as our home computers have become more powerful, sophisticated, and useful, they have also become decentralized and have, in most inefficient fashion, been chopped up and redistributed around the house. "Read more" to learn how our experiment worked out.

Genode is a new OS architecture that is able to align high security, robustness, and deterministic system behaviour with dynamic application workload. The project has now released its first ready-to-boot Live CD that demonstrates the key ideas of the architecture in an interactive fashion using a custom GUI and a number of example applications. It runs on Qemu, VirtualBox, and a range of native PC hardware.

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.

HP has released a roadmap outlining future development of OpenVMS, the operating system that commercialized many features that are now considered standard requirements for any high-end server operating system. (Such as Integrated networking, Symmetrical, asymmetrical, and NUMA multiprocessing, including clustering, distributed file system (Files-11), Integrated database features, support for multiple computer programming languages, hardware partitioning of multiprocessors, etc). With over 30 years of development, OpenVMS has stood the test of time and has continued to evolve as one of the most secure and trusted mission critical OS's of our time.

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.

Logan Harbaugh examines five products for ensuring high availability and performing disaster recovery in complex virtual environments. 'HADR is fraught with complexity, due to the intricacies of virtualization itself,' Harbaugh writes. 'Just as there is no single solution for HADR in general, there is no single solution within virtualization: Different products address different areas, including backups, failover, deployment, and storage virtualization.' Harbaugh's comprehensive article helps sort out the complexities of achieving 'always-on virtualization.'

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.

"VMWare has released Fusion 2.0, which is a free upgrade for 1.x owners, new features / improvements of the Intel Mac virtualization software include: Multiple Snapshots & AutoProtect, Shared Folder, Improvements & Mirrored Folders, URL Handling, Application Sharing, True Multiple Display Support, Unity Improvements, Graphics Improvements. For details on all the above and more visit the Fusion website for the release notes."

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.