OS News Archive

Using XenExpress to Virtualize Your Server

"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."

Equinox Desktop Environment Ported to MINIX3

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.

CodeWeavers Unveils CrossOver 6.0, for Mac, Linux

"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."

Overview of Virtualization Methods, Architectures, and Implementations

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.

VMware Mac Fusion Beta – A Whole New Way to Slice it

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.

Citrix Snags Embedded OS Provider Ardence

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.

Visopsys 0.65 Released

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.

First Release of ExAmour

"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)."

Introducing the Extensible Driver Interface

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.

GNU/DOS Project Discontinued

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."

Tabos: New Operating System

"Tabos is a new operating system, at this stage of development aimed to run on Intel's x86 platform. Although it is our first try in creating a runable, modern OS, it seems that we are on the right way. We decided to develop a modular monolithic kernel with module loading support, using x86 platform features to achieve this goal: multitasking, paging, virtual memory, dma, pci, acpi are yet to be implemented."

A Very Critical Look at OS Re-creation Projects

There are at this time, a number of what I would term 'OS re-creation projects' (OSRs) in active development. These are OSes that attempt, by varying degrees, to re-implement the features of another operating system. In this article, I'm going to explore some of issues surrounding projects of this type. In the second half of the article, I apply these observations and examine two example platforms (Amiga and OS/2) and the related re-creation OSes.

First International Workshop on Plan 9 and Inferno

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.