OS News Archive

The Free Operating System Zoo provides ready-to-run disk images of free operating systems for use in the qemu processor emulator. Numerous Linux distributions, *BSDs, Darwin, Plan 9, and others are available. Nice for new users who want to try out other operating systems without installing them.

"This page is a place to keep track of all those things that we need to improve in GNU Mach, so that it is a reliable microkernel for The Hurd, both in terms of stability and performance. If you find anything missing here, please feel free to add a entry with a short description."

Today the eyeOS Project Team has officially released the first version of a MiniServer application that allows the eyeOS Web Desktop Environment 0.8.8 to be installed locally on an MS Windows machine with a very simple installation process. This will later help to expand the efforts in making eyeOS a complete intranet solution.

"In the past month, there's been much ado about Xen in the online community, both from developers, columnists and the SearchOpenSource.com audience at large. First Xen was given the green light to become an open source killer app, thanks to the work done by companies like XenSource with its XenOptimizer 3.0 upgrade. Meanwhile, some users and analysts said the technology was unproven and had a ways to go before the killer app label would fit."

Back in November, VMware released version 5.5 of their Workstation virtual machine product. Overall it's not a big improvement over version 5.0, but might be just the right "next step up" for those still on Workstation 4.x, says TheJemReport.

"According to George Cook of WVNET this cluster has been up for over 10 years. WVNET is the West Virginia Network, a dynamic service organization providing telecommunications and computing services within West Virginia. WVNET was created in 1975 to provide central computing facilities and wide-area network communications linking its 'central site' computing resources in Morgantown with the campus computing systems at most of the colleges and universities throughout the state. The cluster consists of an Alpha 4100 (with four 533Mhz CPUs) running VMS 7.3-2; a VAX 6000-630 running VMS 7.3; and four DEC 3000 workstations running VMS 7.3-2."

The JNode Project has released version 0.2.2 of their OS. This release offers improvements in the classpath runtime library and numberous GUI improvements; the changelog details the rest of the improvements in this release of JNode.

As 2005 draws to a close, a year with many changes for OSNews, we have one more big change to make OSNews a better place. But first, let us take a short look at all the big changes OSNews has seen this year.

"The J operating system is primarily intended for programmers. I've attempted to lower the bar, so amateurs can contribute. I hope to recreate the dynamic environment that used to exist when the Commodore 64 was around and everyone was creating odd-ball software." You can download it from this page.

As here in Europe Christmas eve has already begun, we, the OSNews team, both editors and site maintainers, would like to wish all of our readers a very merry Christmas. May everyone be with the ones they love-- no matter one's nationality, religion, favourite operating system, favourite desktop environment, or whatever. Let us also hope the victims of the tsunami, the earthquake in Pakistan, and Gulf Coast hurricane, and all others who have suffered this year, have found comfort. Let's have a moment of silence on the 26th for them. Merry Christmas, people (and anyone who dares to sing "Last Christmas" in the comments gets banned for a week) !

"QEMU version 0.8.0 is out. New features include: support for ARM Integrator/CP board system emulation; support for MIPS R4K system emulation; initial SMP support on x86 (up to 255 CPUs); many new audio emulation features; initial USB support; new networking options for VLAN support between several QEMU instances." The changelog is here, downloads are here.

PearPC, the PowerPC processor emulator capable of running Apple's Mac OS X on x86, has released version 0.4.0 after more than a year's wait. "This is the first release with G4 support by Daniel Foesch (you have to enable it in your config). Other features include support for native CD-ROMs (no need for images) and endianess safety (i.e. you can run PearPC on big-endian systems)." The full changelog is here, downloads are here.

As the end of the year approaches, it appears that virtualization's time in the open source spotlight has all but come. Whether it is because of the machinations of companies like XenSource or analyst endorsement, emulating an enterprise-class infrastructure environment using open source has been on the rise in 2005. And, now, it looks ready to burst next year.

VMware has released VMware Player version 1.0.0-final for Windows and Linux. VMware Player runs virtual machines (VM's) created by VMware Workstation, GSX Server or ESX Server. It also supports VM's created with Virtual PC and Virtual Server from Microsoft. VMware also released version 1.0.0 of their free Browser Appliance VM running Ubuntu Linux 5.10 with Mozilla Firefox 1.07 and 1.5.