OS News Archive

How to: Install VirtualBox

  Submitted by falko OS News 11 Comments
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).
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Visopsys 0.66 Released

  Submitted by poundsmack OS News 4 Comments
Today marks a new release of the Visopsys operating system, version 0.66. "This is a maintenance release, featuring the ability to resize Windows Vista partitions, more reliable loading on various systems, better exception handling, color text in graphics mode, improvements to the C library, and a number of bugfixes." The changelog has all the details.
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FreeVMS 0.3.2 Released

  Submitted by mariuz OS News 5 Comments
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.
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Contiki: From Niche Hobby OS to PhD Thesis

  Submitted by blb OS News 1 Comment
Remember the Contiki operating system? A few years back it was used to run web servers and web browsers on really old home computers such as the Commodore 64 and the Apple II. Today Contiki has grown up and moved from being a hobby project to a serious embedded OS used in research into networked embedded systems and wireless sensor networks. It has matured so much that Adam Dunkels, its creator, today announced his PhD thesis on Contiki and its components; protothreads and the uIP embedded TCP/IP stack. It is an interesting direction for a niche hobby OS to take and probably quite different from what people expected Contiki to become when it first was released.
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Using XenExpress to Virtualize Your Server

  Submitted by falko OS News No Comments
"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."
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Equinox Desktop Environment Ported to MINIX3

OS News 13 Comments
Two new important ports to MINIX3 have been released. First and foremost, the Equinox Desktop Environment: "Equinox Desktop Environment (shortly EDE) is small desktop environment, built to be simple and fast. It is based on modified FLTK library (called extended FLTK or just eFLTK). Comparing to other desktop environments, EDE is much faster and smaller in memory space (EDE's window manager use less memory than xterm)." Secondly, ImageMagick can now be run on MINIX3.
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CodeWeavers Unveils CrossOver 6.0, for Mac, Linux

  Submitted by twickline OS News 25 Comments
"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."
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Overview of Virtualization Methods, Architectures, and Implementations

OS News 6 Comments
Virtualization means many things to many people. A big focus of virtualization currently is server virtualization, or the hosting of multiple independent operating systems on a single host computer. This article explores the ideas behind virtualization and then discusses some of the many ways to implement virtualization. We also look at some of the other virtualization technologies out there, such as operating system virtualization on Linux.
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VMware Mac Fusion Beta – A Whole New Way to Slice it

  Submitted by Andrei Dorofeev OS News 14 Comments
VMware today released a beta version of the new VMware desktop product for the Mac, codenamed Fusion. It supports a wide variety of x86/x64 guests, and is cross-compatible with virtual machines created in VMware Workstation, VMware Player, VMware Server and VMware Infrastructure 3. It supports Virtual SMP, drag & drop of files between OS X and virtual machines, and supports all USB 2.0 devices. Even devices that do not have drivers for OS X will work in a virtual machine.
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Citrix Snags Embedded OS Provider Ardence

OS News No Comments
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.
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Visopsys 0.65 Released

  Submitted by andymc OS News 6 Comments
Version 0.65 of the Visopsys operating system was released today. A lot of work has been done on the USB subsystem and underlying UHCI driver - though it's still not 'there' yet it has been re-enabled for the time being. New features were added to the Disk Manager (a.k.a. Partition Logic) including partition copy/paste (same disk or disk-to-disk). And finally, as with the last few releases there's been a focus on improving the GUI code. You can demo Visopsys on a floppy or live CD. Downloads and change log.
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First Release of ExAmour

  Submitted by dhilus OS News 20 Comments
"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)."
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Introducing the Extensible Driver Interface

OS News 29 Comments
On December 28th, 2005 - a day which will live in anonymity - OSNews published an editorial of mine urging hobby and research operating system developers to implement Project UDI, because otherwise we (the small/ non-mainstream/ hobby/research OS community) would always wind up stuck with mutually incompatible sets of drivers for doing the same exact things. I also proclaimed that I would implement UDI for my own operating system kernel. Bad decision.
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GNU/DOS Project Discontinued

  Submitted by danq OS News 13 Comments
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."
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