OS News Archive

Xen 3.0.3 Released

Submitted by chrishaney 2006-10-25 OS News 8 Comments

The Xen team writes: "We're pleased to announce the official release of xen 3.0.3! This release includes many new features as well as enhanced stability and performance." TheCodingStudio has a screenshot walkthrough of this new release.

Are you Keeping up with the Commodore?

Submitted by anonymous 2006-10-17 OS News 55 Comments

"When it comes to computers, the average person usually believes that 'newer is better'. After all, you can get more memory, a faster processor, and a larger hard disk, merely by waiting a few months. Old hardware is usually shunned as being of little value. In contrast, the elementary education sector has consistently found traditional educational methods to be superior to the newest, latest, and greatest methods. Some of the most knowledgeable and capable children are produced by the schools that use seemingly antiquated techniques. So what happens when the world of technology collides with the world of education? Why, the Commodore 64 makes a comeback!"

Submitted by Dolphin 2006-10-16 OS News 17 Comments

NeoSmart has just released EasyBCD 1.5, complete with support for Vista, Windows NT/2k/XP, and Windows 9x/ME. EasyBCD 1.5 adds experimental support for dual-booting any of these along with Linux, Mac OS X, or BSD - straight from the Windows Vista bootloader without any additional configuration needed. "Windows Vista's new bootmanager is a double-edged sword. It's one of the most powerful booting scripts in existence, and a far cry from the very limiting boot.ini of legacy Windows operating systems. But it overwrites the MBR without a second thought, and doesn't provide any means for users of alternate operating systems and boot managers to use their old system. That's where EasyBCD 1.5 comes in!"

Virtual PC 2007 Beta Now Available

Thom Holwerda 2006-10-13 OS News 13 Comments

Microsoft on Thursday released a beta version of Virtual PC 2007, the latest version of the company's virtual machine software that is capable of running Windows Vista as both a host and guest operating system. The update takes advantage of new hardware virtualization technology from both Intel and AMD. Virtual PC 2007 Beta is available for download from Microsoft's Connect beta site.

My Dream Operating System

Guest post by Michael Reed 2006-10-12 OS News 67 Comments

This article is a inspired by some of the ideas which seem be constantly floating around my mind whenever I think about or read about operating systems. Surely, every time-served OS-geek carries a mental list of this sort around with them? This is a summary of all of the features which I would like to see in my dream FOSS based Operating System.

VMware ‘Miles Ahead’ of Microsoft Virtual Server, Expert Says

Eugenia Loli 2006-09-28 OS News 8 Comments

IT managers gathered in New York City earlier this week to get advice from experts on when, why and how to virtualize their server environments. The takeaway from the conference? If you want to run an enterprise-class virtualization platform in production today, stick with VMware.

Submitted by worldsuksgo2mars 2006-09-27 OS News 7 Comments

"LivePCs are virtual PCs that you can create and share just as you can share the rest of your digital life (photos, music, videos, etc.) A LivePC contains everything needed to run a virtual computer - an operating system and a bunch of applications. You can create and share your own LivePCs, or use the public LivePCs created by others in our BetaGarage. You can use LivePCs on your desktop, or you can take them with you everywhere on a portable USB drive."

Ultr@VNC: Poor Man’s Virtual PC

Submitted by Sunidhi C. 2006-09-27 OS News 21 Comments

"Believe it or not, you don't need to purchase Win4Lin or Virtual PC to easily access your old Windows OS that you still find yourself relying on. As a matter of fact, if you already own a Windows machine, you're already halfway there. Enter the headless PC. Today, I'm going to share with you a technique that I feel has been lost, thanks in part to virtual PC options, such as VMware and Win4Lin. It's a utility that many of you may even still use to this very day - VNC."

The Elaboration Likelihood Model: Why People Won’t Switch

Thom Holwerda 2006-09-26 OS News 61 Comments

A common heard question in the operating systems world is, 'if the alternatives to Windows are so much better, why aren't people en masse switching to them?' People come up with all sorts of answers to this question, but in fact, the social psychology world already has a fairly simple answer to this question. This answer also happens to actually explain why Zeta sold so well through the usually superficial television retail channel.

Introduction to MINIX 3

Guest post by Andy Tanenbaum 2006-09-25 OS News 45 Comments

How often have you rebooted your TV set in the past year? Probably a lot less than you have rebooted your computer. Of course there are many "reasons" for this, but increasingly, nontechnical users don't want to hear them. They just want their computer to work perfectly all the time and never crash. MINIX 3 is a project to develop an operating system as reliable as a TV set, for embedded systems and mission critical applications, but also for future $50 single-chip laptops and general desktop use. The focus is being small, simple, and reliable. Note: This is the last entry for the Alternative OS Contest.

AtomicOS – Another AjaxOS

Eugenia Loli 2006-09-16 OS News 17 Comments

There is at least one project that aims to build an Ajax OS from the ground up: Atomic OS. It has a ROM and a Kernel and build itself up much like a real operating system on real hardware. The only difference is that everything is written in Javascript.

VMware Player Now Runs Para-Virtualized Linux

Submitted by Alessandro Perilli 2006-09-16 OS News 14 Comments

At the last USENIX VMware and XenSource finally agreed to work on a joint project for hypervisor standardization, coordinated by Rusty Russell, Linux kernel hacker working for IBM Linux Technology Center, and called paravirt-ops. But VMware doesn't want to give up its own standardization implementation, VMI, and today released by surprise a working version of its Player able to run para-virtualized Linux distributions over a VMI compliant engine.

Introduction to TUD:OS

Guest post by Michael Voigt 2006-09-12 OS News 4 Comments

If you are in Germany, the country of Sauerkraut and Beethoven, and you move far to the east, you might arrive at the town of Dresden. In this city, the Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden) is located, which’s operating systems group has developed a C++ implementation of Jochen Liedtkes well-known L4 µ-kernel interface. This microkernel, ironically called Fiasco, is the center of all the different projects of the TU Dresden Operating System (TUD:OS) research group.

Parallels Desktop for Mac Review

Submitted by Anthony Agius 2006-09-11 OS News 13 Comments

Wondered how Parallels works and how to actually get it going? This article is an overview of the Parallels vitalization software and a simple guide on creating a virtual machine.

The Asbestos Operating System

Submitted by anonymous 2006-09-09 OS News 32 Comments

Asbestos, a new prototype operating system, provides labeling and isolation mechanisms that help contain the effects of exploitable software flaws. Applications can express a wide range of policies with Asbestos's kernel-enforced label mechanism, including controls on inter-process communication and system-wide information flow. A new event process abstraction provides lightweight, isolated contexts within a single process, allowing the same process to act on behalf of multiple users while preventing it from leaking any single user's data to any other user. Initial tests have been promising, and Eddie Kohler, Asbestos's creator, hopes that within a few years, Asbestos will be an alternative to server operating systems such as Linux and Windows.

FreeDOS 9 Review

Guest post by Marti van Lin 2006-09-07 OS News 14 Comments

The FreeDOS kernel originally produced by Pat Villani and what we consider today to be the full featured operating system "FreeDOS" by Jim Hall and is currently maintained by the FreeDOS team, including many third party contributors. It's first goal was to create a full featured MS DOS clone but it has extended beyond this with features like "out of the box" networking support.

FreeDOS 1.0 Released

Submitted by Velcro_SP 2006-09-04 OS News 60 Comments

12 years after the project was conceived, and after a long period in which it was useable though incomplete, FreeDOS has reached version 1.0. The ISO is downloadable at SourceForge. Versions with more extras should be available soon, as should a mail-order option.

Sartoris Microkernel Tutorial

Submitted by Santiago Bazerque 2006-08-25 OS News 2 Comments

"What follows is meant to be a hands-on introduction to system programming, using C and the Sartoris microkernel. Knowledge of the C programming language is assumed. This tutorial should have you writing, compiling and booting several little programs presto. In order to do this, you will need access to a *nix system and development tools. Linux is what we use over here, but if you are a windows user, Cygwin will do as well."

Guest post by Kroc 2006-08-24 OS News 44 Comments

GEOS managed to offer nearly all the functionality of the original Mac in a 1 MHz computer with 64 Kilobytes of RAM. It wasn't an OS written to run on a generic x86 chip on a moving hardware platform. It was written using immense knowledge of the hardware and the tricks one could use to maximise speed. Note: After a small break, here is another one of the articles for the Alternative OS contest.

XenSource Releases XenEnterprise

Submitted by Alessandro Perilli 2006-08-24 OS News 2 Comments

After bitter statements around Xen's maturity these last weeks from Red Hat, Novell, and XenSource itself, the company finally launched its first commercial product based on the open source hypervisor: XenEnterprise 1.0. The product adds commercial grade features and support to Xen 3.0. XenSource also built around it a sales channel infrastructure, a technical certification program, and a much discussed agreement with Microsoft.