OS News Archive

As 2005 draws to a close, a year with many changes for OSNews, we have one more big change to make OSNews a better place. But first, let us take a short look at all the big changes OSNews has seen this year.

"Want to try the latest technologies over the Internet? This program allows you to testdrive some of the hottest hardware and operating systems available today. Have you ever wanted to try out HP's exciting 64-bit Integrity, Alpha, and PA-RISC technology? Get time on SMP x86 and Opteron ProLiant servers? Try out a Blade server. Try different Open Source operating systems."

As here in Europe Christmas eve has already begun, we, the OSNews team, both editors and site maintainers, would like to wish all of our readers a very merry Christmas. May everyone be with the ones they love-- no matter one's nationality, religion, favourite operating system, favourite desktop environment, or whatever. Let us also hope the victims of the tsunami, the earthquake in Pakistan, and Gulf Coast hurricane, and all others who have suffered this year, have found comfort. Let's have a moment of silence on the 26th for them. Merry Christmas, people (and anyone who dares to sing "Last Christmas" in the comments gets banned for a week) !

"Uim is a multilingual input method library, whose goal is to provide a secure and useful input method for all languages. Uim works in many environments, including of course general desktop systems such as GNOME or KDE. It also supports Linux Zaurus, Mac OS X." Version 1.0.0 has been released.

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).