OS News Archive

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.

This article is intended mainly for developers who are new to Xen and who want to know more about it. The Xen VMM (virtual machine monitor) is an open-source project that is being developed in the computer laboratory of the University of Cambridge, UK. It enables us to create many virtual machines, each of which runs an instance of an operating system. These guest operating systems can be a patched Linux kernel, version 2.4 or 2.6, or a patched NetBSD/FreeBSD kernel.

Partition Logic is a graphical, easy-to-use partitioning and hard disk management tool for PCs, based on the alternative Visopsys OS. It can create, delete, reorder and move partitions, and modify their attributes, as well as doing things like copying entire hard disks. It boots from a single floppy or CD image. Version 0.57 (freshmeat announcement) has a number of tweaks and some important bug fixes. A change log is here, and downloads are here.

What utility do practically all Linux users use, regardless of their job or expertise? A boot loader. In this article, see how a boot loader works, meet two popular loaders, LILO (LInux LOader) and GNU GRUB (GRand Unified Boot loader), and review the pros and cons of each.

AROS Developer Adam Chodorowski is interviewed at The AROS Show. AROS community have also, been discussing browsers and work on numerous drivers has taken place in recent months.

Head-Tracking Pointer is an application that, using an inexpensive camera, lets users control a mouse pointer by aiming their face around the screen. It works with virtually any camera that can be connected to a computer, and without the user wearing anything. This solution provides computer access for those unable to use traditional pointing devices due to temporary or permanent physical impairment.

Version 0.57 of Visopsys is now available for download. This is a bugfix and maintenance release. There are various GUI touch-ups, the Disk Manager (a.k.a. Partition Logic) now updates disk geometry information in FAT partitions after disk copy operations, the window 'list' component has been reimplemented, and a number of kernel improvements have been back-ported from the 0.6 development branch. As always, the ISO image is an installable live demo. Downloads here, changelog here, and Freshmeat announcement here.