OS News Archive

Citrix Systems on Dec. 20 will put another piece of its Dynamic DesktopInitiative into place when it announces its plannedacquisition of Ardence. Ardence, a privately held company that marketsembedded real-time operating system software and a software streamingplatform for Windows and Linux, brings to the table real-time provisioningmanagement for operating systems.

"ExAmour is an exokernel, a kernel bound to ensure a fair access to hardware resources for applications. The management of those resources is up to the applications (called environment under ExAmour). Kernel specifications: it presently works on x86-32; each application can define its own memory management policy, its own scheduling policy an use its own drivers (hardware or logical); it is multi segmented, no pagination, no overlap between segments in order to avoid exploitation of buffers overflows, heap overflow or off by one; there is no drivers in kernel mode. (increases the security, reliability of the system)."

The GNU/DOS Project has been discontinued. From the web site: "Further development of GNU/DOS has been discontinued due to: a lack of developer time for the project; the fact that the project's objectives were not fully met; and the fact that the latest stable release of FreeDOS, when combined with the DJGPP development tools, is very much superior to the final release of GNU/DOS."

House is a demo of software written in Haskell, running in a standalone environment. It is a system than can serve as a platform for exploring various ideas relating to low-level and system-level programming in a high-level functional language.

The first international workshop on Plan 9 aims at bringing together researchers and developers working on Plan 9 from Bell Labs and Inferno, or working on related ideas and projects. Workshop topics will include system architecture, system services, file systems and servers, applications, projects for other platforms related to Plan 9, security issues, and others. The workshop will take place on December 4th and 5th at the University Rey Juan Carlos of Madrid in Spain.

Blake Ross helped make Firefox one of the biggest open-source success stories ever. Just wait until you see what he's up to now. Ross's is named Parakey. As he describes it, from a user’s point of view, Parakey is "a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do." Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox's. There are differences between the two projects, however. Although Ross plans to incorporate the talents and passions of the free-software community, he's building Parakey around a for-profit business model. And he's leading the charge with a simple battle cry: "One interface, not two!"