OS News Archive

The latest LUG Radio podcast is on virtulaization: "if you're wondering what the difference between Xen and VMWare and QEmu actually is, or you like the idea of having one server which is actually thirty servers, then this is the section for you!"

EyeOS 1.2, a web-based operating system, has been released. "We are proud to announce that eyeOS 1.2 has just been released! It's not just a necessary update on eyeOS 1.x, but also a bunch of new features and applications needed by eyeOS to be really useful for the every day use. Need to send a mail? Well, just open eyeMail. Did your friend send a Microsoft Word file? No problem, eyeOS will open it and allow you to modify it. Want to have multiple groups for family and friends to share information between them? eyeControl 1.2 will let you do that and much more, visually."

HP announced the release of OpenVMS 8.3-1H1. "HP is pleased to announce the release of OpenVMS version 8.3-1H1 for Integrity servers, the 30th anniversary edition of the OpenVMS operating system! OpenVMS version 8.3-1H1 includes all the capabilities of its predecessor, and introduces new features and hardware support."

"In short, it allows Wine applications to be run just as easily as those native to Linux, meaning that they can be linked to or run from any directory, whether from a terminal or even a file manager like nautilus. It also handles some of the more awkward Wine extensions like .lnk and .msi, allowing them to be run with a double click."

"MonaOS is a free operating system. It's new, small, simple, open source and well structured. So, MonaOS may be suitable for education of operating system and program at school." It's a microkernel-based operating system, MIT-licensed, and available for IA-32.

Miray Software has released the first version of its newly developed embedded RTOS, Symobi. "Symobi was introduced in professional circles for the first time on the Systems 2006 exposition. Symobi is a graphical RTOS with a newly designed architecture, according to state-of-the-art technology. It is based on the microkernel system µnOS, which was also developed by Miray Software. Therefore, Symobi has its main characteristics - real-time, stability, portability, and modularity - and expands it with new services. The research team of Prof. Dr. Uwe Baumgarten of the Technical University Munich is also involved in the development." There are screenshots, as well as a live CD (for x86 and the Pegasos II/ODW).

MikeOS 1.0 has been released. It is an open source PC operating system, designed as a tutor for basic OS design and x86 assembly language. "MikeOS is a 16-bit operating system for x86 PCs, written in assembly language, which boots from a floppy disk or CD-ROM. It features a text-based dialog-driven user interface, a command-line, support for FAT12 (DOS) floppies and PC speaker sound. It can load external programs and has over 30 system calls. Basic DOS .COM program support is also included." This version includes a complete Handbook with a whole section on writing your own OS.

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."

We have recently begun beta-testing a new section of OSNews called "Talk." If you're interested in discussing the Apple press conference while it's happening, head on over to OSNews Talk beta and then let us know what you think in the comments. Please be aware: this section is in "beta" testing and may still have some features missing.

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.

"The HelenOS project is an effort to develop a complete and usable modern operating system, yet offering room for experimenting and research. HelenOS uses its own microkernel written from scratch and supports SMP, multitasking and multithreading on both 32-bit and 64-bit, little-endian and big-endian processor architectures, among wich are AMD64/EM64T (x86-64), ARM, IA-32, IA-64 (Itanium), 32-bit MIPS, 32-bit PowerPC, SPARC V9 and Xen 3.0. Thanks to the relatively high number of supported architectures and suitable design, HelenOS is extremely-well portable."

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.

The GNU libc maintainer writes: "People are starting to realize how broken the Xen model is with its privileged Dom0 domain. But the actions they want to take are simply ridiculous: they want to add the drivers back into the hypervisor. There are many technical reasons why this is a terrible idea. You'd have to add all the PCI handling and lots of other lowlevel code which is now maintained as part of the Linux kernel. But this is of course also the direction of VMWare who loudly proclaim that in the future we won't have OS as they exist today."

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.