OS News Archive

Yankee Group's second annual Server Operating System Reliability survey polled 700 users from 27 countries worldwide. The latest independent, non-sponsored Web-based survey revealed that all versions of UNIX -- which typically carry very high workloads -- are near bulletproof, achieving 99.999% reliability. IBM's AIX UNIX led all server operating systems for reliability with just over 30 minutes of per server annual downtime but Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems also got high scores.

MikeOS 1.3.0 has been released, with a new Minicom-like serial terminal program, a PCX image viewer, and many updates to the system calls and documentation. MikeOS is designed to teach x86 assembly language and basic OS construction, as detailed in the Handbook.

MenuetOS 0.82 has been released. "MenuetOS is an Operating System in development for the PC written entirely in 32/64 bit assembly language, and released under the License. It supports 32/64 bit x86 assembly programming for smaller, faster and less resource hungry applications."

"Whitix is a 32-bit operating system for the Intel and AMD range of processors, licensed under the GNU GPL. It features a C compiler (tcc), Python, assembler (nasm), text editor, shell and filesystem formatter. See the Introduction to Whitix for more information." Version 0.03 was released a month ago. My, aren't we sharp today.

Microsoft has released source code from the Singularity research project onto Codeplex under an academic, non-commercial license. "The Singularity Research Development Kit is based on the Microsoft Research Singularity project. It includes source code, build tools, test suites, design notes, and other background materials. The Singularity RDK is for academic non-commercial use only and is governed by this license."

Today, after much feedback and evaluation, we implemented some changes to the way OSNews "moderation" works. Previously, we had a dual-purposed feedback system - an "up" vote was based on agreement, but a "down" vote was based on specific rules. We've changed the way things work around here, read more for the details.

A preview of the 0.7 release of Visopsys is now available from the preview page. The page is light on details of the new technical features such as JPEG, 64-bit disk, UDF, and GPT support but provides screenshots and a breakdown of the updated look of Visopsys. As always you can try the OS from the 'live' CD image (and yes, after 10 years of development, there's still a basic version that fits on a floppy).

"C# has been a language with a mixed history but precise goals. Although the C# language definition is for some time an ISO standard, only a part of the Base Class Library, which contains the fundamental functions that are used by all C# programs (IO, User Interface, Web services, etc) is also standardized. Parts of the BCL have been patented by Microsoft, but that has not deterred developers from attempts at implementing the components that are standardized, in various forms (Mono and affiliated projects). What happens when you go beyond that? What happens when outside the language, you start to implement not a mere application platform, but an entire operating system around it? Brace yourselves, because there is not only Microsoft Research who has done this with Singularity, but at least two other projects doing the same; and they are doing this under opensource terms. A system based around a C# Kernel. In this article, we are looking at one of the two, Cosmos by asking Scott Balmos and Chad Hower about the project they are involved in."

Loyal OSNews readers, I 'd like to thank you for your patience as we've made a bumpy transition to a new back-end and an even bumpier rollout of the OSNews' new design, aka OSNews 4.1. We hope you like it. We'll be making many minor interface changes over the next weeks, and we'll read the comments of this posting in case you have any bug reports or suggestions. One feature that we've eliminated from the v4 beta was themes. For now, we are focusing on perfecting one unified theme, and hope to revisit that feature in the future. I'd like to thank OSNews' intrepid code slinger Adam Scheinberg for all his hard work on this project and also thank the many readers who helped us troubleshoot the v4 backend.

"SWsoft today announced the release of the beta version of Parallels Server, the company's hypervisor-powered server virtualization solution. Parallels Server is the first virtualization solution designed to run on Apple hardware, including Mac Pros and Xserves, and the first to run multiple copies of Mac OS X Server v10.5 Leopard on a single Apple computer. Parallels Server also runs on any x86 or 64-bit Windows or Linux-based server."

Version 0.2.0 of the Exclaim operating system has been released. "Exclaim is a project aiming to create a lightweight, simple and easy to use operating system from scratch, with POSIX-compliance to allow existing UNIX applications to run on it. It is intended to be suitable to run on old hardware while still being usable at a reasonable speed. The 0.2.0 release supports reading from ATA hard disks and Ext2 filesystems, and includes a simple shell plus a few other programs."

Every now and then, I find OSNews a tad bit too serious. We get carried away over quite a few things - insignificant things mostly, in the grand scheme of things. For a while now, I've been trying to find a way to relieve the tension on OSNews, and I think I may have found a way how. The only problem is - you need to like it too. Read on.

Written entirely in x86 assembly language, MikeOS is designed as a learning tool for assembler and basic OS design. New features in 1.1 include a Mac OS X build script and various improvements to the Handbook, which explains how it works and how to make your own first OS.

The Contiki team has just released version 2.1 of the open source Contiki operating system for low-power, wireless, memory-constrained networked embedded devices that typically have as little a few kilobytes of RAM. The major highlight of this release is a unique energy profiling mechanism that measures where energy is spent, and how much energy that is consumed. This is extremely important when optimizing for low-power operation: to know where to optimize, one must first know where energy is spent. Other additions to the 2.1 release are low-power radio protocols that increase system lifetime from days to years, and improved data collection routing protocols.