OS News Archive

"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."

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.

"BixData is a system, application, and network monitoring tool which allows you to easily monitor nearly every aspect of your servers. The newly released version 2.6 is the only application that has the ability to control both Xen and VMware virtual machines. You can control both VM Hosts (the computer that's running the VM software) and VM Guests (the virtual machines running on the hosts).

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.

VMware, long an advocate of prepackaged software appliances that can be loaded onto virtualization software, launched a program Tuesday to certify and sell such virtual appliances. The move expands VMware's earlier support for virtual appliances as a good way to try software. Now its Virtual Appliance Marketplace provides a way to buy as well. The EMC subsidiary also launched a certification program to ensure such appliances are working properly.

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!"

After a couple of months of serious work, Visopsys 0.64 has been released. There are only a handful of new, user-visible features (including right-click context menus and 32-bit .bmp/.ico support). The real focus of this release has been stability, quality, and debugging, plus large scale GUI re-engineering. In addition, graphics mode now works under Bochs 2.3 (as well as Qemu and VmWare). Downloads here and changelog here.

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.

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!"

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.