OS News Archive

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.

"I recently had the opportunity to interview Andrew S. Tanenbaum, creator of the extremely secure Unix-like operating sytem MINIX 3. Andrew is also the author of Operating Systems Design and Implementation, the must-have book on programming and designing operating systems, and the man whose work inspired Linus Torvalds to create Linux. He has published over 120 works on computers (that's including manuals, second and third editions, and translations), and his works are known all over the world, being translated into a variety of different languages for educational use universally. He is currently a professor of computer science at Vrije University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands."

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.'

At the heart of every networking device is an operating system that enables traffic flow. In the case of networking vendor Juniper, that operating system for the past ten years has been JUNOS, a network operating system with its roots in the open source FreeBSD operating system.Juniper has updated JUNOS every 90 days since 1998.

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.

We'd like to formally welcome Quentin Hartman, Tony Steidler-Dennison, and Amjith Ramanujam to the OSNews team. We had a huge response to our recent call for contributors, and if you were one of the people who contacted us, we're not done with you yet. Whether you're interested in contributing daily news or writing articles, we'll be contacting you soon, and these new editors are specifically tasked with helping to marshall the efforts of the other contributors. These new editors join Thom Holwerda, who's taking a sabbatical while trying to recover from RSI, David Adams, our Publisher and business manager, Adam Scheinberg, our webmaster and back-end guru, and Eugenia Loli-Queru, who is still occasionally lured out of retirement until the trolls and platform zealots earnest advocates remind her why she found it less stressful to take up videography. Welcome, n00bs!

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.

InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy reviews Hyper-V RC1, and though he finds the Windows Server hypervisor lacking the sophistication of VI3, the company's try and try-again attitude might help the company in gain an advantage over VMware. "For many shops, Hyper-V will prove to be plenty good enough, allowing Microsoft to begin eating away at VMware's market share while preparing the next-generation product for the final assault that topples the leader."

The partitioning 'live' CD known as Partition Logic, which is a specially-configured version of the alternative operating system Visopsys, has been chosen as one of PC World magazine's "The 100 Best Products of 2008". Okay, so it's only at number 96, but it's still an honour.

OSNews is looking for editors and writers to help with posting daily news, writing feature articles, research and investigative journalism, doing interviews, covering events and conferences, writing product and book reviews, doing editorials, and all around increasing the amount of original content published at OSNews. If you are an OS enthusiast and have experience in journalism, blogging, editing, or other writing, please contact David Adams.

A feature at OSNews for many years, the OS Resources page has been a popular reference for OS enthusiasts, but it hasn't been tended very much over the past couple of years, and it's in need of an update. While the OSNews staff will be working on making our own updates, we wanted to involve the readers, so we've set up an OS Resources Wiki to help with collaboration. Please "read more" if you'd like to help out.

There are quite a few operating systems which have moved beyond the simple hobby operating system stage, onto a more lasting plane of existence. AROS, ReactOS, SkyOS, Syllable, Haiku; they're no longer basement products, coded by a single programer - they are now projects in which a lot of people have invested time, and possibly money too. They won't go away any time soon. The last few days have seen news on three of these systems: ReactOS, SkyOS, and Syllable.

The latest version of Whitix, V0.1, has been released for download. "Whitix is a simple open-source operating system for your PC. It offers a range of applications, so you can do what you want without worrying about instability or poor performance. How often have you wondered why modern software is too complicated, too buggy or just too unclear? Whitix is a return to the ideal of simple software that works the way you want it to. Although the software itself is still in its early days, our vision is well established."

Regular OSNews readers will notice we've had a drop-off in original articles over the past year or so. That's something we'd like to change. We'd like to encourage OSNews readers to submit articles by staging a contest wherein the best articles will be judged by OSNews staff and readers, and the winners will receive valuable prizes. All submitted articles that meet our submission guidelines will be published at OSNews. In addition to wanting articles to publish, this is also a talent search of sorts. We're hoping to identify talented OSNews readers to fill the ranks as editors and regular contributors. If you think you have the skills and desire to be a part of OSNews, please enter the contest, or just contact us. Read more for details on the contest.