OS News Archive

Yesterday, HP announced the official release of OpenVMS 8.2 on both Integrity (based on IA-64 processors) and Alpha-based systems. As reported in my article here, OpenVMS on Integrity is in excellent shape and ready for normal use.

From HP World Magazine: "At press time, Hewlett-Packard planned to announce in January its long-awaited version of OpenVMS that runs on Itanium-based Integrity servers. We spoke with Mark Gorham, vice president for HP’s OpenVMS Systems Division. He is responsible for worldwide engineering, customer satisfaction, quality, partner management and business management of the OpenVMS Systems product portfolio."

From all of us here at OSNews, Happy New Year! 2005 promises to be an exciting year in technology - what surprises do you think this year will hold? What news do you think will top the technology news sites in 2005 - Linux? SCO? Microsoft? Firefox? Security? Wireless networking? A destructive new worm? Share your thoughts here.

TextOS is a small operating system for text-based applications which runs on a floppy. Built on top of FreeDOS, it runs programs made with the TextOS BASIC programming language. TextOS has been out for about a month, but it is only now in working condition. For more information see the official TextOS website.

Every hard-core OS aficionado has done it: Laid out a grand scheme for creating the perfect OS. Taking all the best features and attributes from the OSes we love, and making sure to assiduously avoid the pitfalls of the OSes we don't. Maybe our goals were modest, and we just wanted a slightly tweaked version of an existing OS. But sometimes we're feeling ambitious, and we have large, creative ideas for revolutionizing computing. Long-time OSNews reader and contributor J. Scott Edwards just couldn't help himself, and he has set about to not only plan, but to try to build his dream OS.

The 0.5 release of Visopsys is now available to coincide with the initial public release of "Partition Logic": a small, GPLed, standalone graphical partitioning utility based on Visopsys.

Flexbeta has got a review of VMWare Workstation 5.0. This new beta includes many nice features such as the ability to capture movies, and support for 64Bit hardware.

I just returned from spending three days with the OpenVMS stream of the HP - Intel Developer Forum in Mahwah, New Jersey. The over-subscribed OpenVMS stream was extremely successful, and provided an advanced view of what OpenVMS users can expect from the soon-to-be generally released OpenVMS for HP Integrity Servers. Read article...

Take the poll inside and let us know what you think (javascript required).

The next version of McOS Re is now avaiable. McOS Re 0.4.2f has been released in two StuffIt archives: "Boot" (for users) and "Build" (for devs). The project's website is now featuring FAQ and Progress pages. Please note that this project is still not at "pactical use" stage, it's more at "demo" stage.

From CP/M to OpenVMS, one of the best things to do with a Linux box is to run programs for other operating systems on it. It can simplify your life considerably. Emulations of a wide variety of operating systems are available for Linux. More than mere academic exercises, these "hosted OSes" are practical investments for many server rooms. Also see Cameron Laird’s notes on emulators.

hOp is a micro-kernel based on the RTS of GHC. It is meant to enable people to experiment with writing device drivers in Haskell. Currently, hOp is still very hackish, and IA32-specific. More info here and here.

The JNode project just reached a very important mileston. The SWING GUI starts to work. This is a very important milestone for the first almost pure java operating system.

Brad Parker has announced a working emulator for the MIT CADR Lisp Machine. The CADR used a microcode which was designed to run an early version of MacLisp. Many things are working, including ZMacs, its version of Emacs.