OS News Archive

"Two weeks ago Microsoft and XenSource announced an agreement to grant interoperability of virtual machines on upcoming Windows Server Virtualization and XenEnterprise virtualization platforms. The move raised the attention of the whole IT world, involving license, support, security, and performance issues. Virtualization.info interviewed both companies to understand the details of the agreement and shed light on what customers can expect from the Microsoft hypervisor release."

"Too many Linux image viewers are tinged with little annoyances - they take too long to load, are slow to redraw the display, have limited format support, sport inconvenient controls - so when you want to settle on one, inevitably there's something to make you utter feh! in general discontent. Good call - feh is the name of a speedy little viewer that packs a surprising number of features for its size."

Some interesting tidbits on MINIX3 the last week. First, the MINIX3 team has set up a publicly accessible CVS server, running on a MINIX3 server (what else). You can access it via the ordinary CLI way, or via cvsweb. Secondly, the X11R6 release for MINIX3 has been updated and posted online. And lastly, MINIX3 now has a port of fltk, the fast light toolkit.

Plan 9 is an operating system designed by the same people who created the original UNIX. Its development began in the late 1980's and it was a research project intended to address a variety of system scalability issues that the UNIX and LINUX kernels don't do particularly well, namely, distributed computing, distributed name spaces, and distributed file systems. Plan 9 is open source and its current and fourth major release was in 2002. It is available as an install or LiveCD and it can be downloaded here. Note: This is an entry to our Alternative OS Contest.

"Microsoft and XenSource today announced they will cooperate on the development of technology to provide interoperability between Xen-enabled Linux and the new Microsoft Windows hypervisor technology-based Windows Server virtualization. With the resulting technology, the next version of Windows Server, code-named 'Longhorn', will provide customers with a flexible and powerful virtualization solution across their hardware infrastructure and operating system environments for cost-saving consolidation of Windows, Linux and Xen-enabled Linux distributions."

Lots of news on Xen. Firstly, "This is a document about how to set up XEN and iSCSI on 3 Debian Stable machines so that you can have a virtual host that can be migrated live between 2 of the machines. The third machine will be the common disk for the virtual machine that is seen via the 2 machines running XEN." Secondly, "IBM and Novell are throwing their considerable weight behind Xen, but some experts are suggesting that these companies may be pushing this nascent technology too far too fast." Lastly, "You can now run OpenSolaris domains under Xen as dom0 with OpenSolaris domUs too."

DROPS is the educational operating system of the Dresden University of Technology, Germany (TU-Dresden). Its name is an acronym for Dresden Real-Time Operating System, which reveals its strongest feature, it is real-time capable and it is designed with security in mind. Its homepage can be found here. Note: This is the 4th entry to our Alternative OS Contest which runs through 14th July!

Virtual PC 2004 SP1 now is completely free and VPC 2007 will also be free. Also, VMware released VMWare Server 1.0, a free virtualization solution for servers. Update: Here you are, one more for free.

"Sit tight, Linux Users. User Mode Linux will soon have the same capabilities as Xen in the virtualization arena - like live migration, says Jeff Dike, author of User Mode Linux. Operating out of the Linux kernel port, UML enables the port to host multiple virtual operating systems. Speaking with SearchOpenSource.com, Dike described the pros and cons of virtual machines versus virtual operating systems and offers some advice on whether to opt for UML, Xen or VMware."

Smile, you're on candid camera! Apparantly, FreeDOS is anything but dead. "FreeDOS is definitely still very much alive! Moving forward, I'm trying to put the focus on our '1.0' release. What's done is done. Right now, I want to get a '1.0' out there by end of July. We're already pretty stable, so what we have by month end will be '1.0'. I think we can do it." We got owned.

FreeDos has been declared dead, and the homepage been moved to Sourceforge. From the FreeDos.org site: "On 28 June 1994, the project that became FreeDOS was announced to the world. It's 12 years later, we still haven't reached "1.0", and there's no sign of getting there anytime soon. I have given up. I've stopped waiting for "1.0". FreeDOS is dead." You can still see the message if your DNS servers haven't been updated yet.

This paper describes the design of the kaneton microkernel. This system was designed to be ported on many architectures without being intrusive. Moreover, the main goal of this system was to be understandable by everyone interested in operating systems internals. To do so, the kaneton design and implementation are very elegant and easy to understand. Finally, the kaneton microkernel includes modern distributed concepts leading to a powerful, secure, flexible and reliable microkernel based OS. Note: This is the first entry to our Alternative OS Contest which runs through 14th July!

"Immediately after the release of new Virtual Infrastructure 3, Virtualization.info had the pleasure to reach Raghu Raghuram, Vice President of Platform Products at VMware, to ask him details about the just launched products, the recent Akimbi acquisition announcement, the secret VMware Integrity product, a planned presence in the Apple operating system, and further steps in the virtualization market leader's strategy. From his answers a revelation came out: VMware is going to partially support Microsoft'svirtualization technologies."

"Win4Lin announced the immediate availability of their new Enterprise and SMB product, Win4Lin Virtual Desktop Server. The product provides the ability to consolidate and serve multiple Windows Desktops from Linux server infrastructure. Win4Lin Virtual Desktop Server allows organizations to standardize the application environment to users regardless of desktop hardware and operating system - Windows, UNIX, or Linux can be used on the client, but a common application profile can be created and served from Linux server configurations such as blade servers, rack arrays or large multi-way machines."