OS News Archive

"As we all know, the operating system is an essential part of any computer system, but what most of us don't understand are the intricacies of how OS environments operate. This article discusses the ways of extending the operating system by various ways including, but not limited to, recompiling the kernel and managing libraries. Extensibility is the need of time. It gives the user more 'power' over the machine, since every user can have his 'personalized' copy of the OS. This approach of extending the operating system at user level is more advantageous than other methods."

"This week was a huge move forward for the OpenVZ project. We have released an updated vzctl, an updated stable kernel, a new development kernel based on 2.6.16, a SUSE kernel, a template for Fedora Core 5, and finally a GIT repository with our development kernel."

The C64 group 'Singular' has released 'Singular Browser' - a graphical web browser with CSS support for the C64. It's still in the early beta stages, but looks quite impressive for a computer launched in 1982.

For almost two decades, Jason Scott squirreled away thousands of pages of old advertisements, mailers, and brochures left over from the genesis of personal computing. Whether people see it as geek history or just junk, he now wants to share his stash with the world. Maybe Mac fans can't recall what that Apple II they considered so cutting-edge back in the mid-1980s looked like. Perhaps video-game aficionados forgot that Atari once pinned dreams of dominating the PC market on the now long-forgotten 1450 XLD computer. Scott's site can jog their memory.

"Switch from one operating system to another - without manual intervention - by following these step-by-step instructions for enabling a dual-boot machine. Duplicate this setup for running both Linux and Windows on your own machine with the scripts provided with this article."

Even a small operating system can have big disputes within its community. The lead developer of MenuetOS, an OS written in assembly, has decided to drop all support for the 32bit version of Menuet, focusing development on the 64bit version. However, disgruntled users of the open source operating system are trying to keep the 32bit version alive by starting a special forum for it.

"The eCos embedded operating system offers an alternative to UNIX-style operating systems for development work. This article examines how its architecture influences the development process, building a sample application and exploring the differences in architecture between eCos and UNIX."

"SWsoft Virtuozzo for Windows is deadly simple to install and manage, with extended virtual servers' centralized management features, and enhanced provisioning capabilities. Anyway you should consider that OS partitioning is different from virtualization. Virtuozzo is less flexible than any VMware or Microsoft virtualization software and you won't be able to consolidate different platforms, or migrate some of them when the new Microsoft codename Longhorn Server will come."

"Parallels today announced the availability of Parallels Workstation 2.1 Beta2. In addition to the numerous enhancements and new features included in Parallels Workstation 2.1 Beta1, this upgraded version of Parallels' desktop virtualization solution includes a completely new user interface, faster virtual machine performance, better stability and stronger isolation, more advanced USB support that enables users to access a broader range of popular USB devices like cameras, flash drives and PDAs directly in virtual machines."

"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!"

Parallels launched the beta program for Workstation 2.1, an upgraded version of their desktop virtualization solution. This version adds new features like USB support, PAE-mode support, wireless networking support, and a new tools package. The program runs Solaris virtual machines too. The beta is fully functional for 45 days.

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 .

"Today's virtualization barely permits us to disregard what kind of resources we really have inside our servers. Companies like VMware, Microsoft, Xen, etc., are offering solutions to share (although still not in a dynamical way) CPU power, memory, storage and partially networking within a single server (or a cluster). Companies like Citrix, Microsoft, Sun, etc., are offering solutions to share applications within a single server (or a cluster). If you think these technologies could be just refined and nothing else, think again.

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."