OS News Archive

PearPC, the PowerPC processor emulator capable of running Apple's Mac OS X on x86, has released version 0.4.0 after more than a year's wait. "This is the first release with G4 support by Daniel Foesch (you have to enable it in your config). Other features include support for native CD-ROMs (no need for images) and endianess safety (i.e. you can run PearPC on big-endian systems)." The full changelog is here, downloads are here.

You would like to install Linux/BSD but the Windows partition is taking up your whole hard disk space and you don't want to pay money for commercial solutions? Not to worry, you can resize partitions with the KNOPPIX Live Linux CD.

VMware has released VMware Player version 1.0.0-final for Windows and Linux. VMware Player runs virtual machines (VM's) created by VMware Workstation, GSX Server or ESX Server. It also supports VM's created with Virtual PC and Virtual Server from Microsoft. VMware also released version 1.0.0 of their free Browser Appliance VM running Ubuntu Linux 5.10 with Mozilla Firefox 1.07 and 1.5.

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.

Xen 3.0 has been released. "We've been seeing good stability on the XenRT regression tests for the last couple of weeks, and the number of bug reports submitted to bugzilla have dropped right down." Get it here. "Along with the usual binary install tarball, we've created a new live-iso demo CD, and some RPM packages for common linux distros."

"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).

Visopsys 0.6 introduces a host of new functionality including a cleaned up desktop with icons for browsing the computer, file systems, and administrative tasks, FAT defragmenting, ELF dynamic linking, a built in chain-boot loader and simple MBR formatting, file browsing widgets and dialogs, Windows .ico icon file support, a generic file viewing program, Italian keyboard support, new icons and a new splash screen.

"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?"

Iguana and NICTA::Pistachio-embedded (yes, the two together), a new open-source operating system for mobile phones and embedded devices has been released by the ERTOS group of NICTA and adopted by Qualcomm for some of their phones. Iguana is a small and secure OS which runs on top of the L4 microkernel. It also runs Linux as an application alongside trusted programs, giving backward compatibility with legacy software. The system currently works on ARM, x86, and MIPS64.

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).

"Even on a 2 GB RAM workstation (as mine) VMware virtual machines can run slowly. Too slowly sometimes. This can depend on a large amount of factors but we can reduce the number to 4 critical issues."

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.

"QEMU is an open source cross-platform emulator for Linux hosts. It allows you to emulate a number of hardware architectures (x86, x86-64, and PowerPC are currently known to work, with others, including SPARC and MIPS, in development). QEMU thereby lets you run another operating system on top of your existing OS. Going through the process of installing and configuring QEMU not only gave me a worthwhile new software tool, but also helped me learn a few things about Linux."

"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."