OS News Archive

Leaner Virtualization Coming to Windows, Linux

OS News 20 Comments
Virtualization software that's all the rage today - chiefly VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, and Xen - lets a single computer run multiple operating systems. Now, a newer variety of virtualization is emerging that employs a lighter-weight approach so that a single operating system can be sliced into independent sections. While details of the concept are just beginning to emerge, it's likely only a matter of time before it shows up in Windows and Linux.
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MINIX Ported to Xen

  Submitted by Ivan Kelly OS News 20 Comments
Over the past few months, Ivan Kelly has been working on porting MINIX to Xen as part of a university project. As last Monday was the final submission date for the project, he is now free to release it in the wild. Currently only the microkernel and the console driver have been ported, but a block device driver is in the works. The code and a compilation guide can be found on the website. Contributors are welcome to join the project. On a related note, a new test version of MINIX has been released as well. OSNews reported extensively on MINIX 3 last year.
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NeXT Information Archive Is Back

  Submitted by Kim Bergholtz OS News 12 Comments
The NeXT Information Archive is back. "NIA has evolved from being an information place to being the actual place for ALL NeXT related material; We provide you with information, guides, articles - yes, all the classic stuff, that you know us for - but we've also started to bring you software directly on our site. Help you on your way with learning programming and in general just bring resources to you – everything needed for being able to use NeXT as your daily operating system and of course thereby using NeXT software."
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OSNews Hacked

OS News 76 Comments
Folks, as the webmaster of OSNews, I'm sorry to report that the OSNews server was hacked early this morning by a l33t haxx0r known only as "osV_rul3z." Although our database server does not appear to have been comprimised, all of the advertising code was deleted and our code was slightly modified to make everyone a premium level subscriber. Rest assured, we are working on the problem and hope to have OSNews restored to its original state as quickly as possible. UPDATE: As everyone suspected, April Fools!
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Extending the Operating System: a Quick Look

  Submitted by Sunidhi Chauhan OS News 2 Comments
"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."
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Scanning in Geek History

OS News 5 Comments
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.
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OS Group of Dresden University Releases Live Demo CD

  Submitted by Norman Feske OS News 17 Comments
The OS Group of Technische Universitaet Dresden (TUD:OS) has released a live demo CD of their custom operating system project. TUD:OS is a microkernel-based operating system targeted at secure and real-time systems. Some highlights of the demo CD include a new approach for securing graphical user interfaces called Nitpicker, multiple L4Linux kernels running at the same time on top of a custom L4 microkernel, a survey on the reuse of device drivers on the TUD:OS platform, native Qt-applications, the DOpE windowing system, games, and much more. More information is available at the demo CD website. And yes, boys and girls, there are screenshots, too.
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MenuetOS Drops 32 Bit Development; Users Pick It up

  Submitted by hidden player OS News 20 Comments
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.
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JNode 0.2.3 Released

  Submitted by Martin Husted Hartvig OS News 14 Comments
The JNode team has released version 0.2.3 of the JNode operating system. JNode is an open source operating system written completely in Java (with a very small assembler nano-kernel). New features and improvements in this release are many classpath patches, improvements in AWT, Swing and desktop support, various bugfixes in the JIT compiler, ISO9660 support, better support for testing JNode with Mauve (mauve plugins, invoker commands), and more. Screenshots are available.
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Review: SWsoft Virtuozzo for Windows

  Submitted by Alessandro Perilli OS News 1 Comment
"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."
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