OS News Archive

Today, VMware announced that it has released a majority of its VMware Tools as open source software (GPLv2), part of the project Open Virtual Machine Tools. "The Open Virtual Machine Tools (open-vm-tools) are the open source implementation of VMware Tools. They are a set of guest operating system virtualization components that enhance performance and user experience of virtual machines."

EasyBCD, the freeware tool used for dual-booting Windows Vista with Linux, BSD, OS X, and Unix (using Vista's own bootloader), has been updated to version 1.7. This new release of EasyBCD features a rewritten NeoGrub for installing and managing GRUB from within Windows and a new feature dubbed 'GRUB-less Linux' which searches the drive for Linux and boots into it, regardless of whether or not GRUB is installed. My take: A great tool for Vista users. I use it to manage various installations on my laptop, and it has never let me down.

The earliest OSNews articles and news postings have not been available online in many years, as they were mostly static HTML, and when we made the switch over to our v1 CMS, I just filed it away on my hard drive. But to celebrate our 10 year anniversary, let's take a peek at what was hot in the OS world in 1997. Visit our OSNews 1997 archive. We have some feature articles, opinion pieces, and a fascinating view of several days of daily news frozen in time (and chock full of dead links). Take some time to look it over. On an unrelated note, Read More if you are in, or have contacts in, the graphic design world and would like to help OSNews.

Today, 26th August 2007, OSNews has turned exactly ten years old. For a decade now, OSNews has been giving you the latest news on operating systems, its major applications, and a whole lot of other technology related things. We covered the demise of Be, Inc. we have seen 10 different years of Linux-on-the-desktop, we reported the release of Windows XP, and so much more. Thank you for reading, commenting, and complaining on OSNews for ten years now - we could not have done it without you.

Citrix Systems is acquiring XenSource, whose founders helped develop the open-source Xen hypervsior, for USD 500 million in a move that caps a significant week in the development of virtualization technology. The XenSource acquisition, which both companies announced Aug. 15, comes just a day after VMware, which has long been the dominant player in the x86 virtualization market, announced an initial public offering of 33 million shares of stock. By the end of its first day of trading, the company's stock closed at almost USD 51 a share.

"Bloomberg believe VMware’s IPO today may the largest technology offering since Google. But doubts have been cast over the company’s supposedly proprietary ESX product, which may be derived from Linux."

In the view of Mendel Rosenblum, chief scientist and co-founder of virtualization vendor VMware, today's modern operating system is destined for the dustbin, a scenario unlikely to please Microsoft or any of the Linux vendors. Rosenblum's keynote on Thursday wrapped up the LinuxWorld conference, preaching the virtues of virtualization, which he believes will eventually make today's complex, some would say bloated, operating systems obsolete. "It's just going to go away", Rosenblum said.

This is a review of the new VMware Fusion 1.0 for Mac. The article takes an in-depth look at the new virtualization software from VMware and compares it to Parallels Desktop 3.0.

A new operating system for the Cambridge Computer Z88 (Sinclair latest portable computer) is available. This version runs from an external flash eprom slot and thus is easily upgradeable. It uses a code hook present in the original ROM. This version is now international and handles ISO characters and lots of keyboards. All details are on the wiki.

Fiwix 0.3.3 has been released. "Fiwix is an operating system kernel based on the UNIX architecture and fully focused on being Linux compatible. It is designed and developed mainly for educational purposes, so the kernel code is kept as simple as possible for the benefit of students. It runs on the 32-bit x86 hardware platform, and is compatible with a good base of existing GNU applications."

"Parallels has released their latest Parallels 3.0 virtualization software for the Mac. Along with Elgato's EyeTV software, I find Parallels to be the best third party applications for the OS X desktop. If you have never used Parallels before you are in for a treat. If you already are a Parallels user, version 3.0 has enough new features and improvements to make it an essential upgrade."

"The majority of Linux users have gotten used to keeping more than one operating system on their hard disks. Most frequently the second system is a version of Microsoft Windows. Switching between the two systems tends to be irritating, especially when the secondary system is needed only once - to run an application WINE has refused to start, for example. Now we introduce the virtualization technology which allows us to run several systems on the same computer, at the same time, all under the control of one of them, called a 'host'. My examples are based on the VMware Server Console v. 1.0.3 (distributed from its manufacturer's website free of charge) running under Mandriva Linux Spring with KDE 3.5.7."

You might have noticed some user icons next to some comments today, this is because we enabled Gravatar support. Gravatar acts as a centralized identity pool where blogs, news sites (and recently Revver.com) can use their service and offer a universal icon for each unique email address. As long as you register on Gravatar with the same email address registered on OSNews, your personalized icon will be shown on OSNews (and on all other sites that support Gravatar) automatically. This is a testing period for Gravatar here at OSNews, and there are no guarantees whatsoever that the v4 version of OSNews will use that icon system or its own. It all depends on the kind of quality, stability and responsiveness we get from Gravatar's servers. So, upload your own icon at Gravatar.com and test away! Ability to turn off user icons will be built-in on v4.

"The Free Software community is well known for its diversity. This is most obvious at the application level, but even exists in the context of operating systems. David Chisnall takes a break from UNIX-derivatives and explores some of the more esoteric options." Note: From experience, I can say that the author's claim that "Haiku is more or less ready for their 1.0 release in terms of features" is a bit overambitious.