OS News Archive

"What would happen if the beginning of file systems embedded a driver for accessing the disk? If the driver was in some sort of neutral format (similar to the X Windows drivers), then any OS could access the file system! While this concept was exciting in of itself, it didn't even begin to scratch the surface of what was possible. It wasn't long before I considered the fact that a file system is nothing more than a hierarchical database. There's nothing inherently special about it, so why can't the file system payload be replaced with some sort of other data? As long as the embedded driver can read the format and produce some sort of usable data structure, there's no reason why the concept could be extended for all types of data!"

As expected, VMware enlarges its free (as in beer) software offers, introducing the free VMware Server (in beta) for Linux and Windows. Containing a bunch of features (server solution comparison), this seems like a serious step forward to enlarge the acceptance of virtualization in soho use, without the software license costs. You can download datasheets , or download the program .

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is still very much alive. They just got an updated website, with easier access to nightly builds. "Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system developed at Bell Labs starting in the late 1980s. Its original designers and authors were Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom. They were joined by many others as development continued throughout the 1990s to the present. Plan 9 demonstrates a new and often cleaner way to solve most systems problems. The system as a whole is likely to feel tantalizingly familiar to Unix users but at the same time quite foreign."

This Visopsys 0.61 maintenance release adds Disk Manager support for resizing NTFS filesystems and arbitrary partitions, purely unprivileged user-space processes, I/O port permissions and protection, IDE block mode I/O, Linux swap detection and clobber, improved atomic kernel locks, many C library additions, a calendar program, and bugfixes.

GNU/DOS 2006, the latest version of the FreeDOS distribution, has been released. New features include an easy installation/upgrade, package management utilities, the MTXE screen saver, Arachne GPL version 1.89, OpenGEM Release 5, vim 6.4, and other updates. Download it here.

"Parallels officially released its Workstation 2.0 product at the end of 2005, entering in the desktop virtualization market where VMware, Microsoft and Serenity Systems International are already. Parallels Workstation 2.0 raised a lot of attention because is the first time a desktop virtualization product features the hypervisor technology. In the following interview Benjamin Rudolph talks about Parallels 2006 roadmap, mentioning enterprise virtualization products and touching hot topics like Microsoft Vista Aero support and Apple MacOS x86 virtualization."