OS News Archive

Virtualization allows you to have multiple "virtual machines," each with its own operating systems running in a sandbox, shielded from each other, all in one physical machine. Each virtual machine shares a common set of hardware, unaware that it is also being used by another virtual machine at the same time. More here.

Parallels Workstation 2.0 has been released. From the press release: "After months of focused research, development and testing, Parallels today announced the immediate general availability of Parallels Workstation 2.0, the world’s first hypervisor-powered desktop virtualization solution."

"The Enomalism Virtualized Management Console is a powerful web-based systems administrator and management tool for XEN hypervisor. Servers with hundreds of multiple isolated Virtual Private Servers can be managed like a standalone server with Enomalism tools which include a VPS creation wizard and templates which facilitate VPS configuration, loading applications and centralized software management and deployment." It's completely open-source, they say, yet I can't find any info on what license they're using (but I suspect the GPL).

With a recent releases of the new kernels (latest being 022stab050) and tools we can now declare OpenVZ status as stable. There has been a lot of advances during last three months of development: better OS templates and tools, improved stability due to a lot of openvz and mainstream bug fixes, better CPU fair scheduler, support for x86_64 and IA64 architectures, and a lot of new hardware (see the hardware compatibility list)

"One of the hottest topics in all of IT today is the subject of virtualization. While it has been around for some time, it has just recently started to garner the attention of the biggest names in tech. Everyone from Intel and AMD, to Microsoft, Sun, and virtually every commercial Linux vendor has either current or planned support for virtualization. So what is it, and why is everyone so head over heels about it?"

"Bluebottle is a powerful operating system developed in the Programming Languages and Runtime Systems Research Group, based on the Active Object System (Aos) kernel. The Aos kernel provides a compact runtime environment for the Active Oberon language, which supports active objects (threads) directly, and enables the construction of efficient active object-based systems that directly run on the hardware." You can read the changelog for the latest changes, and be sure to check the screenshot of the window manager.

One of the most expected virtualization release, Workstation 5.5 (build 18463) brings in a lot of new features and improvements. This announcement is made before the VMware official one (which should go public on 11/29/05).

There's now a preview release of Visopsys 0.6 online at the Visopsys website. This upcoming version will introduce an array of new features that have been in development over the past year. As always, you can demo this hobby OS from a floppy disk or live CD image. See the changelog for details, and you can download here. Update: screenshots.

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.

For the past few years, the V2_OS project was nearly dead. Things are about to change as the project is getting reorganized. The new website is nearly ready and the source code was moved from Sourceforge, back to the real server. Development of the complete rewrite (version 0.70) is expected to restart in the following days. For those who do not remember V2_OS, this is one of the first operating systems written in pure assembly language.

"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, Andy Tanenbaum has officially announced the release of MINIX 3.0, the third stable version of this rather legendary operating system. The launch of v3 has been accompanied by a new website and a new logo. From the new website: "MINIX 3 is a new open-source operating system designed to be highly reliable and secure. It is based somewhat on previous versions of MINIX, but is fundamentally different in many key ways. MINIX 1 and 2 were intended as teaching tools; MINIX 3 adds the new goal of being usable as a serious system on resource-limited and embedded computers and for applications requiring high reliability." Read on for more information.

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.

"This year marks the 20th anniversary since Children's BBC began using the familiar format of sitting a presenter behind a live camera in a small continuity suite, dubbed the 'Broom Cupboard'. Prior to this move in September 1985, and for several years after, the BBC used Acorn kit to produce their broadcast graphics and animations.For a happy trip down a long memory lane, we caught up with Chris Poole, who produced the early ident graphics using a BBC B and later an Archimedes which ran RISC OS."