OS News Archive

VMware Windows-on-a-Mac Product Close to Launch

Submitted by AdministratorX 2007-06-12 OS News 17 Comments

VMware is pricing its upcoming new software to run Windows on a Mac similar to rival Parallels's software announced last week. VMware said that its Fusion software for Macintosh computers can be pre-ordered beginning Tuesday for USD 39.99, and USD 79.99 when it becomes generally available near the end of August. Parallels priced its Parallels Desktop version 3.0 at USD 79.99 when it became generally available Thursday, and USD 39.99 for users upgrading from a previous version of Parallels.

MINIX 3.1.3a Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-06-08 OS News 40 Comments

A minor extra release of MINIX 3.1.3 was done, called 3.1.3a, correcting some flaws in 3.1.3. "Found after release time and fixed in 3.1.3a: mkfs does not check for overflow of firstdatazone field in superblock; a missing check in rename caused moving directories to hang sometimes; autopart truncates new partitions at 4GB. If you want to create a larger partition, use part (expert mode) to do that first; and more."

Parallels 3.0 Released; VMWare Fusion Video

Submitted by Michael Welch 2007-06-08 OS News 27 Comments

Parallels 3.0 has just been released. Parallels is about to get more competition, however. Virtualization specialist VMWare, which has been testing its own Fusion product for the Mac, plans to release a fourth beta on Friday, with a goal of releasing the product later this summer. Video of Fusion here.

EyeOS 1.0, Kolibri 0.7.0.0 Released

Submitted by hidnplayr 2007-06-07 OS News 22 Comments

Kolibri 0.7.0.0 has been released. "Less than 4 months since our previous release and we are glad to give you a new one, Kolibri 0.7.0.0. There are quite a lot of changes for such a small amount of time. The kernel was modified to use a flat memory model and to support fast system calls (sysenter, syscall). There are also many other changes such as kernel configuration using external ini-file, special /sys directory, system boot screen improvements, and much more." The web operating system EyeOS 1.0 (and 1.0.1 shortly after) has also been released.

VMware Workstation Goes Rootless

Thom Holwerda 2007-06-06 OS News 26 Comments

"I remember the day I was interviewed at VMware. I was asked what I would do to improve Workstation, and one of the things I said was that it would be nice to make a VM go rootless. That is, pull application windows out of the VM and make them integrate well with the operating system. I wasn’t the only one. A lot of people wanted this type of feature. It’s been discussed for years, but it’s always been hard to find the manpower to do it. But competition is good, and we finally got some people on this feature. And it turned out spectacularly."

Submitted by John Nilsson 2007-06-03 OS News 7 Comments

"Chung-chieh Shan and have submitted a paper on delimited contexts in operating systems and the zipper OS (which has not been formally published). Systems programmers do use contexts whether they are aware of that or not. The first version of UNIX on PDP-7 already implemented delimited continuations, in the form of co-routines between user programs and the shell. Being aware of delimited continuations may help systems programmers to better implement context switching, signal handling, etc., using the techniques developed in programming language research. It also leads to new insights, for example, that checkpointing a process and snapshotting a file system are essentially the same activity."

Parallels 3.0 Adds 3D GPU Support to Mac Virtualisation

Submitted by Dan Warne 2007-06-01 OS News 39 Comments

Parallels is just weeks away from releasing version 3.0 of its Mac virtualisation suite, beating VMWare to an offering with 3D GPU emulation built-in. Parallels says high-end Windows games will now be playable within a virtual machine There are some other features included too, like the ability to associate any file type in Mac OS X to open in a Windows app, and vice versa.

The Top 10 Dead (or Dying) Computer Skills

Eugenia Loli 2007-05-24 OS News 99 Comments

"Those in search of eternal life need look no further than the computer industry. Here, last gasps are rarely taken, as aging systems crank away in back rooms across the U.S., not unlike 1970s reruns on Nickelodeon's TV Land. So while it may not be exactly easy for Novell NetWare engineers and OS/2 administrators to find employers who require their services, it's very difficult to declare these skills -- or any computer skill, really -- dead." My Take: "C" dying should have been "x86 Assembly".

Submitted by andymc 2007-05-10 OS News 6 Comments

The 0.68 release of the Visopsys OS went live today. It's a maintenance release with the usual array of tweaks and bug fixes, plus a focus on disk I/O performance; the software disk caching was re-written, and lookahead/write caching were added to the IDE driver. Another new feature is secure deletion (shredding) of files, partitions, and disks. Change log here and downloads here.

‘Win4Lin Pro Desktop 4.0 Lags Behind Free Alternatives’

Submitted by FreeRhino 2007-04-29 OS News 6 Comments

"One of the oldest virtualization products, Win4Lin, is starting to show signs of aging. Win4Lin flourished in 2000, when competition was sparse and expensive. But seven years on, not only are there several virtualization products, but almost half a dozen are available for free. With no visible improvements over its previous version, Win4Lin Pro Desktop 4.0 is now outdated and outclassed."

Recoll: a Search Engine for the Linux Desktop

Submitted by FreeRhino 2007-04-25 OS News 29 Comments

"Desktop search engines are all the rage these days. While Beagle may be the most popular desktop search engine for Linux, there are alternatives. If you are looking for a lightweight and easy-to-use yet powerful desktop search engine, you might want to try Recoll. Unlike Beagle, Recoll doesn't require Mono, it's fast, and it's highly configurable. Recoll is based on Xapian, a mature open source search engine library that supports advanced features such as phrase and proximity search, relevance feedback, document categorization, boolean queries, and wildcard search."

MINIX 3.1.3 Released, Weekly Snapshots Available

Thom Holwerda 2007-04-18 OS News 13 Comments

"An early preview of the next version has been released under version number 3.1.3, an interim release intended for developers who want to see the bleeding edge of MINIX and perhaps then track the current source. For more information, see the 3.1.3 release notes and the download page." MINIX3 will now also release weekly snapshots.

Prex 0.4.3 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-04-13 OS News 16 Comments

Prex 0.4.3 has been released. "Prex is a portable real-time operating system for embedded systems. The small, reliable, and low power kernel is written in the C language based on microkernel design. The file system, Unix process, and networking features are provided by user mode tasks."

Submitted by andymc 2007-04-03 OS News 11 Comments

Version 0.67 of Visopsys was released today, with all the usual bug fixes and tweaks plus two focus areas of improvement: the IDE/ATA disk driver has been 'modernized' with PCI, DMA, and 48-bit addressing support, resulting in a raw I/O performance increase of up to 700%; additionally the Disk Manager (Partition Logic) has been re-engineered and modularized to support the later addition of new disk label types, as well as improved support for MS-DOS logical partitions (moving, creating out-of-order, etc.). Downloads are here, and the change log is here.

Contiki 2.0 Released

Submitted by Adam Dunkels 2007-04-03 OS News 1 Comment

Contiki is an open source operating system for memory-constrained networked embedded systems. Version 2.0 of Contiki has just been released. The 2.0 release is the first release from the 2.x series, which brings many new features: dynamic run-time loading and linking of standard ELF object code files; Rime, a protocol stack designed for low-power radio communication; Cooja, a Java-based network simulator for Contiki; and an updated build system that makes cross-compiling for many platforms easy. See the Contiki website for details and downloads.

OSNews Version 4, Take 2

Adam Scheinberg 2007-04-02 OS News 150 Comments

After several modifications, feature tweaks, and revisions, please feel free to beta test our revision of OSNews.com version 4. Recently introduced to the site? Amongst many other things: Themes! Read on for a more complete changelog!

Submitted by WillM 2007-04-01 OS News 19 Comments

"The server operating system wars never seem to slow down. Last week it was Red Hat's turn with the announcement of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which incorporates the Xen open source hypervisor. Naturally there's also the endless market speculation about the final feature set and likely arrival date of Windows Server 2007. And then there's Solaris, which with its nice value-add features like DTrace and its new status as open source software is making something of a comeback, it seems."

Help Us Beta Test OSNews Version 4

Adam Scheinberg 2007-03-22 OS News 245 Comments

After a long development period, we're ready to introduce the first "release candidate" of OSNews version 4. OSN4 is a very big change for us - for years, we've worked with the mantra "We render everywhere." We are still using MySQL and PHP, like in Eugenia's OSNews v2, but with the sudden prevalence of newer web technologies, we've decided that in order to really offer the best platform for our readers, it was time to enter a brave new world. Read on for details and the link. Updated: ("read more" to see update)

Kernel Designs Explained

Thom Holwerda 2007-03-21 OS News 53 Comments

I wrote the following article for university. It tries to explain the difference between three kernel types in such a way that less-computer savvy people should understand it. I had a 1500 word limitation, so detailed elaborations were out of the question. "In this article, I will try to make the 'microkernel vs. monolithic kernel' debate more accessible and understandable for laymen. I will explain the purpose of a kernel, after which I will detail the differences between the two competing designs. Finally, I will introduce the hybrid design, which aims to combine the two. In the conclusion, I will argue that this hybrid design is the most common kernel type in the world of personal computers today." Because of the limitations, this article contains little news for most of you. Still, I thought I'd share.

MINIX3 Gets Links, Links-2

Thom Holwerda 2007-03-08 OS News 25 Comments

MINIX3 has received some new interesting ports. "Links, an advanced text-based www browser, and also Links-2, a version of links that displays webpages in an X window." Screenshots included.