OS News Archive

"MINIX is an operating system designed for 'resource limited' or embedded computer systems. Versions 1 and 2 were teaching operating systems upon which the famous book, Operating Systems Design and Implementation, by Andrew S Tanenbaum and Albert S Woodhull, is based and also was the inspiration for Linux. With this latest release, version 3, MINIX aims to be a complete, stable, secure desktop operating system for everyday use. Does it live up to those claims? Read on to find out."

Today, we did a fairly major restructuring of our database categories. Before, we only added one or, in rare cases, two; this time, however, we have added three new categories, and also split one up. Read one for the how and why, and also how you can help in finding misplaced stories.

After MacOSX and Linux start to become viable alternatives to Windows on the desktop, more and more applications are developed to be cross- platform; all potential users can run them on their platform of choice. In the following article I will discuss different ways of creating a cross-platform application and their (dis)advantages for the user.

KolibriOS is an operating system for the PC, written in assembly, which is based on the source code of MenuetOS. It fits on a single floppy. Some of the features are: NTFS read support, AC'97 player, drivers for Fat12/16/32/ISO9660, tcp/ip stack, network applications include ftp/http/mp3 servers, GUI with resolutions up to 1280x1024, 16 million colours, over 150 programs (text editor, paint editor, file managers, games, etc.), and much more.

After weeks of hard work, I would like to introduce you to version 1.0 of the "OSNews Style Guide: Rules and Guidelines for Publishing and Participating on OSNews" . Read on for some small notes on what this actually means.

"Lines that once seemed clear are being smudged. Perhaps we delude ourselves to think that we once knew the difference between a 'big' operating system and a 'little' one, but today the biggest operating system ever written runs on desktop personal computers, not mainframes, and desktop operating systems are migrating to telephones and other consumer devices, while there is a trend for the "little" operating systems developed specifically for those devices to take on many of the capabilities of desktop operating systems as those devices themselves become more like computers. And, as further evidence that the apocalypse is upon us, you can, with Apple's blessing, run Windows Vista natively on your Macintosh. What are operating systems coming to?"

"For several years, Win4Lin has offered a virtual operating environment whereby you can run Microsoft Windows inside of GNU/Linux. The first several generations of Win4Lin were limited to Windows 98, difficult to install, and had requirements that were difficult to satisfy, such as a proprietary kernel module and various acts of command line kung fu. Version 3.5 still has some of these problems, but it's nowhere near as bad as it used to be."

This tutorial shows how to install and use VirtualBox on Fedora Core 6, CentOS 4, and OpenSuSE 10.2. InnoTek VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU Public License. On a related note, Qemu 0.9.0 was released along with a new version of the Qemu accelerator (the latter's license being changed to GPL).

FreeVMS is an OpenVMS-like operating system; it consists of a POSIX kernel and a DCL command line interpreter. The only architectures currently supported are i386 and x86-64. Version 0.3.2 has just been released and you can grab it from the ftp server. It is probably wise to read the USE file before diving into FreeVMS. News: support for DCL open/read/close, and all open/read/write/close with VMS-style logicals, some I/O counts, DCL show status, and a better-looking show system.

"CodeWeavers this month announced version 6.0 of its flagship Windows compatibility product. Now called CrossOver Linux, the new version is the first with official support for games. With its growing application support and foray into gaming, CrossOver Linux 6 is an excellent alternative for Linux users who are stuck with a Windows application at work or at school."

Andrew Tanenbaum has introduced his latest metric: LFs - Lifetime Failures to describe the number of times software, particularly the operating system, has crashed in a user's lifetime.

"This howto covers the installation of XenExpress and the creation of virtual machines with the XenServer Administrator Console. XenExpress is the free virtualization platform from XenSource, the company behind the well known Xen virtualization engine. XenExpress makes it easy to create, run and manage Xen virtual machines with the XenServer Administrator Console. XenExpress can run up to 4 virtual machines at the same time with a max. total amount of 4GB RAM. The XenExpress installation CD contains a full Linux distribution which is customized to run XenExpress."

"I am very happy to announce that we have shipped final versions of CrossOver Mac 6.0 and CrossOver Linux 6.0. Users of Intel based Mac systems can now seamlessly run many Windows applications on their Mac without needing a Windows license. Supported applications include Outlook, Visio, Project, Quicken, Steam based games such as Half Life 2, and many more. For Linux users, we have added support for Outlook 2003, World of Warcraft, a range of Steam based games such as Half-Life 2, and a number of other applications. Additionally, CrossOver 6 represents another major step forward in the evolution of Wine, so most users will find substantial improvements in the overall compatibility and behavior of CrossOver as compared to version 5."

More and more organizations are consolidating physical hardware using virtualization. But virtualization technology and tools aren't limited to big-dollar corporations. With the free-as-in-beer VMware Player, and the very cheap VMware Workstation, you too can use this fancy technology to utilize the processing horsepower of cheap multi-core hardware available off-the-shelf. More here.