OS News Archive

Xen growing up

Submitted by Andrew Z. 2005-06-16 OS News 25 Comments

In August, XenSource will release Xen 3.0, software for running multiple operating systems on a single server. The Register's Ashlee Vance writes about big companies helping to make Xen a strong competitor with VMWare. New Xen features coming August and soon include better SMP support; x86 64-bit, Itanic, Power, and Intel VT CPU support; and Solaris and Windows support.

TriangleOS News

Submitted by Wim Cools 2005-06-11 OS News 11 Comments

A new storage layer is currently in development for TriangleOS, the VFDBS, which aims at replacing the VFS in order to change the way data is stored and handled through the entire OS (all data is centralised, support for meta-data, journaling for all filesystems, etc.). The User Interface also needs to change to enable the user to quickly browse through all the information.

Guest PC 1.4 – Ready for Prime Time?

Guest post by Keith Burgess 2005-06-07 OS News 17 Comments

Guest PC, as described by Lismore Software Systems, Ltd., is "another computer inside your Mac". While in simplicity this is true, Guest PC offers Mac users far more. Guest PC has received a few bad reviews along the way, however, version 1.4 makes up for many of the previous versions shortcomings. This review will discuss the features and highlight some of the improvements found in Guest PC 1.4.

Desert Spring-Time: An OCaml OS

Submitted by Jonathan Roewen 2005-05-31 OS News 12 Comments

Desert Spring-Time (DST) is an OS based on the OCaml runtime+native code compiler. Their goal is to build a robust system through extensive use of OCaml language features, such as static type checking. Currently, this is only a prototype, and is best tested with qemu. More information can be found here.

Rumours of the death of VMS…

Submitted by Ken Farmer 2005-05-27 OS News 25 Comments

After 30 years, the venerable VMS operating system is showing no signs of going away. How is it holding on to its position at the heart of some of the world’s most mission-critical systems?

Introducing Arch-OS

Eugenia Loli 2005-05-21 OS News 21 Comments

In the UK, Plymouth University's Portland Square building is the subject of an interactive experiment. Researchers have developed a software called Arch-OS which not only manages the buildings systems but also encourages those working inside to interact with their surroundings. Check the video too.

Partition Logic 0.55 Released

Submitted by Andy McLaughlin 2005-05-20 OS News 23 Comments

Partition Logic is a standalone graphical partitioning tool that boots from a single floppy disk or CD, intended to become a free-software alternative to certain well-known proprietary offerings. It's also an experiment in finding ways that a hobby OS (Visopsys) can be made useful/interesting to the sort of people who don't read OSNews. Release announcement here and download page here.

Visopsys 0.55 Released

Submitted by Andy McLaughlin 2005-05-18 OS News 8 Comments

Visopsys is an alternative operating system for PC compatible computers. Version 0.55 was released today. It is a maintenance and bugfix release that makes things a bit 'snappier' and more reliable, with some additional capabilities including installation support for all FAT filesystems, baseline PCI driver support, and a better organised device infrastructure. In addition, GUI window layout and resizing has been reimplemented and generally fixed. You can get it here.

File System Forensic Analysis: PC-based Partitions

Eugenia Loli 2005-05-16 OS News 12 Comments

This chapter dives into the details of the partition systems used in personal computers from DOS partitions, to Apple partitions, to removable media.

TextOS v2.0b1 released

Submitted by Daniel Quintiliani 2005-05-15 OS News 9 Comments

TextOS version 2.0b1 5/15/05 "Progression" has been released. It runs programs built with the new TextOS BASIC version 2.0, which adds many more commands to the TextOS BASIC language.

A Look at Guest PC 1.2

Eugenia Loli 2005-05-12 OS News 17 Comments

Guest PC is an emulator of the x86 PC for the Mac OS X platform. We had a quick look at the product and we compared it to VirtualPC 6.1 that we also happened to have in-house.

OS makers: Security is job No. 1

Eugenia Loli 2005-05-10 OS News 17 Comments

Look beyond the bells and whistles, and make sure the security's tough.

Desktop Virtualization: End of the Traditional Operating System?

Eugenia Loli 2005-05-05 OS News 86 Comments

"What Xen is, is a very thin layer of software that essentially presents to the operating system an idealized hardware abstraction," said Simon Crosby, vice president of marketing for XenSource. The OS is no longer glued to the hardware but floats above it, talking to Xen as if it were the machine.

Review: VMware 5.0

Eugenia Loli 2005-05-03 OS News 16 Comments

With last month's release of VMware Workstation 5, the virtual machine software is better than ever. VMware Workstation now has 64-bit host support, the ability to capture multiple snapshots for each virtual machine, easier sharing of virtual machines, and the ability to connect multiple virtual machines in a "team" setting.

The History of Non-UNIX Oses

Submitted by the_viking 2005-05-02 OS News 37 Comments

eXpert Zone Founder, Andrew Youll (youlle) has posted about a document he has found on the net detailing the history of "non-UNIX" oses in a timeline it also shows relationships between oses and shows which projects have borrowed from where or which oses have "compatibility" with other projects.

Qemu 0.7.0 released

Submitted by Chris 2005-05-02 OS News 21 Comments

Qemu 0.7.0 has been released. Changelog here: Full x86_64 and MMX/SSE/SSE2 emulation support. SPARC target can now boot Linux. Much improved ARM user mode emulation. Many bug fixes.

JNode release 0.2

Submitted by Martin Husted Hartvig 2005-04-28 OS News 19 Comments

The JNode team is proud to announce the release of the version 0.2 of JNode. JNode.org is an open source java OS written fully in java (with a very small assembler nano-kernel).

China Announces Unix-compatible Server OS

Submitted by synthespian 2005-04-24 OS News 62 Comments

Kylin, a server OS focusing on high performance, availability and security, that was funded by a Chinese government-sponsored R&D program, has been announced. Kylin has been organized in a hierarchy model, including the basic kernel layer which is similar to Mach, the system service layer which is similar to BSD and the desktop environment which is similar to Windows. It has been designed to comply with the UNIX standards and is compatible with Linux binaries. Unfortunately, the download page is currently nonfunctional.

DESKWORK – The Sci-fi in DOS

Guest post by Matthias Breiter 2005-04-14 OS News 41 Comments

I just want to show you a great add-on for DOS, called DESKWORK. It's an operating system build upon DOS, just like older Windows versions were build upon DOS. It has been written by Konstantin Koll for several years now, who founded a small company called Mystic Bytes to produce DESKWORK.

GeekOS 0.3.0 Released

Eugenia Loli 2005-04-13 OS News 13 Comments

GeekOS is a tiny operating system kernel for x86 PCs. Its goal is to be simple enough for beginners to understand and modify, but realistic enough to be interesting and fun. Version 0.3.0 has been released. In addition to many critical bug fixes, there's now seamless support for compiling under Cygwin.