OS News Archive

"Even on a 2 GB RAM workstation (as mine) VMware virtual machines can run slowly. Too slowly sometimes. This can depend on a large amount of factors but we can reduce the number to 4 critical issues."

Currently in beta-testing, Parallels Workstation is a new virtual machine system for Windows and Linux. The main program is wizard driven and it takes around 30 seconds to set up a virtual machine profile.

"QEMU is an open source cross-platform emulator for Linux hosts. It allows you to emulate a number of hardware architectures (x86, x86-64, and PowerPC are currently known to work, with others, including SPARC and MIPS, in development). QEMU thereby lets you run another operating system on top of your existing OS. Going through the process of installing and configuring QEMU not only gave me a worthwhile new software tool, but also helped me learn a few things about Linux."

"It's almost mind-boggling that every 18 months or so, regular as clockwork, you can get twice as much computing power. In fact, it is mind-boggling, and these high octane servers can cause some hassles in the data center. In this tip, I explore the standard fixes applied when server shoppers go overboard. These include server consolidation and grid computing. Then, I explore another option: virtualization with Xen."

Today, we roll out the OSNews Meta Blog. We are trying something new. Whereas OSNews proper is moderated and logged, the OSNews Meta Blog is here solely to discuss the site, without bombing an unrelated news thread. It's unmoderated, anonymous, and, perhaps best of all.... XHTML compliant. For details, please visit this post.

VMWare released today the VMWare Player, a freely downloadable tool that 'plays' virtual machines (it just doesn't let you create any). This can prove a very important tool for OS makers who would like to demo their OS to new users, users who don't want to burn live CDs and also keep the OS makers safe from any hardware incompatibilities in the user's machine (as the OS would run inside VMWare Player, the compatibility is always guaranteed). VMWare already posted a demo for their VMWare Player, a 200 MB 'Browser Appliance' based on Ubuntu.

Miray has announced to show their realtime OS µnOS ('mu-nano-OS') running on Genesi's Open Desktop Workstation at the Systems 2005 fair for IT specialists in Munich, Germany. From the mission statement of this microkernel OS: "It is the goal to make µnOS available to the largest number of hardware platforms. A portable, scalable and real-time capable architecture should be delivered, which should make possible the usage of µnOS in embedded systems as well as in desktop computers up to servers."

Our short survey will take about two minutes to complete, and one survey respondent will win an iPod Nano for his or her trouble. Start here.

Many people rely on RISC OS and its software to look after their email and browse their favourite websites. But could you trust RISC OS to make sure you wake up to a warm shower every morning? Electronic engineer Dave Higton describes his RISC OS powered central heating system.

Likely the last of the Visopsys 0.5x series (a sparkly new 0.6 is imminent), this maintenance and bugfix release sports some new features such as EXT2 formatting, German keyboard layouts, GUID generation, and filesystem clobber. Version 0.58 also includes a number of important bugfixes to the featured Disk Manager partitioning program. Change log here and downloads here. As always, you can demo this tiny, full-GUI hobby OS from the ISO image or from a single floppy disk.

The operating system's group at Technische Universität Dresden is pleased to announce the release of version 1.2 of the Fiasco L4 microkernel. This release fixes many bugs, a few features have been added as well. For a list of changes please consult the CHANGES file. Get the package from the download directory or from CVS. Refer to the README file for further information.

Few of Google's projects, rumors of projects, and acquisitions have generated as much envy among Linux users as Google Earth. In some respects the search engine behemoth is quite OS-agnostic, but the 3D virtual globe remains limited to Windows desktops. But there is an alternative: NASA's World Wind project. Like Google Earth, it's a 3D planetary visualization system that overlays satellite imagery, weather, political, and topological map data. The difference is: World Wind is open source.

C. Karayiannis and A. Swartzbaugh have finished documenting Minix' networking protocol. This is a line to line commenting of the tcp/ip source code. This project took more than one year to complete and they hope visitors will find it useful.

An open-source alternative, Beagle provides fast indexing and searching of all your files. Kevin of the LinuxForums.org content development team has used it, abused it and reviewed it.