OS News Archive

I worked for a few years in the intersection between data science and software engineering. On the whole, it was a really enjoyable time and I’d like to have the chance to do so again at some point. One of the least enjoyable experiences from that time was to deal with big CSV exports. Unfortunately, this file format is still very common in the data science space. It is easy to understand why — it seems to be ubiquitous, present everywhere, it’s human-readable, it’s less verbose than options like JSON and XML, it’s super easy to produce from almost any tool. What’s not to like? ↫ Robin Kåveland I’m not going to pretend to be some sort of expert on this matter, but even as a casual it seems CSV isn’t exactly scalable to large data sets. It seems to work great for smaller exports and imports for personal use, but any more complicated matters it seems wholly unsuited for.

Complete desktops contain all operating system components as well as Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Where possible, I have tried to include built in file transfer programs (Web Publishing Wizard, Web Folders), useful system tools (System File Checker, System Restore) and certain wizards (Network Setup Wizard, Internet Connection Wizard). As a result, some of the desktops are quite large and can take some time to load. ↫ VirtualDesktop.org These are easily loaded virtual machines inside your browser, for various versions of Windows and macOS. There’s more and more of these websites now, and while I don’t use them for anything, they’re still quite handy in a pinch. And let’s face it – it’s still kind of magical to see entire operating systems running inside a browser. The website also has several virtual machines without applications, and application-specific virtual machines, too, focused on browsers and mail clients.

I’ve got two bits of related news that will affect the future of OSNews. The first bit of news kind of led to the second bit of news. You don’t have to care much about former, but the latter will be important for where OSNews will be going from here on out. First, after 14 years, I’ve effectively quit my job as a translator – I am self-employed so there’s no dramatic clearing of my desk of being led out by security, which is probably a little bit of a letdown to some of you. The translation industry is in the process of collapsing – you know why – and I’ve been feeling the squeeze for a while now, and I like going out on my own terms. I’ve known this day would come, and I’m not sad about it. My motto: it is what it is. Of course, this meant I had to think of what to do next. Well, I have decided to work on OSNews full-time. This is risky, scary, and I’m absolutely terrified of what this will mean. Right now, my OSNews income – ads plus Patreon – does not even remotely come close to what I earned as a translator, and as any translator will tell you, translating isn’t exactly a cornucopia either. This means I’ve got some serious work ahead of me to change that. After talking things over with David, OSNews’ owner who takes care of the commercial/advertisement side, we’ve already taken a few steps. First, we’ve switched hosting providers and saved considerably on our hosting costs in the process. Second, David changed advertising partners to one that will most likely yield us some better rates, but since I don’t know much about that side of OSNews – as it should be – I can’t comment much on it. There are two main ways in which I can increase OSNews’ revenue, and that is by growing our readership, and by giving people more reasons to become a Patreon, make individual donations, or buy our merch. In other words, you can expect more original articles so that people will want to keep coming back, and possibly support me financially because they like what I do. A third avenue for revenue I’m exploring is sponsorships – this is a longer-term project, and I’m approaching and talking to several (tech) companies about this. If you happen to work for a company who would be a good fit for an OSNews weekly sponsorship, feel free to contact me for more information. The end goal: have OSNews be entirely funded by readers and sponsors, and remove all regular advertising. This all sounds great, but there is a dark side to this news, too. If all of this fails, if I am unable to attract more readers and make my work for OSNews financially sustainable, I’ll have to find work elsewhere – and that would mean the end of OSNews. I’m not trying to be alarmist or scare you; I just want to be as honest and realistic as possible about where we stand. Anyway, this is a big deal for me. I’ve really only ever had one job, and that’s being a translator, a job I am trained for with two university degrees to show for it. My only other job was a teenage thing where I worked at a hardware store (think hammers and screws, not computers) for eight years. I don’t like taking risks with these sorts of matters, so I’m absolutely terrified, and while I believe there’s a sustainable income hiding in this ol’ website, it’s not always clear how to get at it. Anyway, want to become a Patreon? Or a sponsor? Pretty please? Now would be kind of a really good time to do so.

Did you know we offer sponsorships at OSNews? A weekly sponsorship puts your display ad on our site for a week. We will make an introductory post at the start of the week, and a thank you post at the end of the week, which will both make it to our RSS feed and social accounts. OSNews gets about 450,000 visits per month with more than 32,000 registered users, spread out over North America and Europe. In addition, for any sponsorship you buy, you can opt to give a free weekly sponsorship to any open source and/or small project of your choosing. Does your company make use of an open source project you’d wish to help out? Let us know, and we’ll see if they’re interested in that free weekly sponsorship. Read our Sponsorship page for more information, or contact Thom Holwerda for sponsorship inquiries.

MenuetOS has released two new versions recently, version 1.49.60 on 5 February, and 1.50.00 on 1 March. Aside from the usual bugfixes and updates, these two new versions bring, among other things, new screensavers, a musical chord calculator, and support for UEFI booting thanks to Easyboot. MenuetOS is a small operating system written entirely in assembly, available in both 32bit and 64bit versions for x86.

I wrote different boot managers. Three boot managers are available as download. The Plop Boot Manager 5, PlopKexec and the new boot manager PBM6. The new boot manager is under development. ↫ Elmar Hanlhofer I had never heard of the three Plop boot managers, written by Elmar Hanlhofer, but they seem like quite the capable tools. First, Plop Boot Manager 5 is the most complete version, but it’s also quite outdated by now, with its last release stemming from 2013. That being said, it’s incredibly feature-packed, but since it lacks UEFI support, its use case seems more focused on legacy systems. PBM6, meanwhile, is the modern version with UEFI support, but it’s not complete and is under development, with regular releases. Finally, PlopKexec is exactly what the name implies – a boot manager that uses the Linux kernel. I’ve never encountered these before, but they seem quite interesting, and if it wasn’t for how much I do not like messing with bootloaders, I’d love to give these a go. Have any of you ever used it?

SeaweedFS is a simple and highly scalable distributed file system. There are two objectives: to store billions of files!, to serve the files fast! SeaweedFS started as an Object Store to handle small files efficiently. Instead of managing all file metadata in a central master, the central master only manages volumes on volume servers, and these volume servers manage files and their metadata. This relieves concurrency pressure from the central master and spreads file metadata into volume servers, allowing faster file access (O(1), usually just one disk read operation). There is only 40 bytes of disk storage overhead for each file’s metadata. It is so simple with O(1) disk reads that you are welcome to challenge the performance with your actual use cases. ↫ SeaweedFS’s GitHub page It’s Apache-licensed and the code is, as usual, on GitHub.

While GNU Hurd predates the Linux kernel, its hardware support has been woefully behind with very limited and dated hardware support compared to modern PC/server hardware. Not only that, its been largely x86 limited but during Q4’2023 the developers involved have made progress on x86_64 support and begun tackling AArch64 porting. Developer Samuel Thibault shared that the GNU Hurd 64-bit port now has enough packages in the debian-ports archive to be able to bootstrap a chroot. A 64-bit Debian + GNU Hurd build daemon is getting setup and the other infrastructure work is coming along. ↫ Michael Larabel In addition, work has started to port Hurd to POWER9, and someone is working on bringing the Ladybird web browser to Hurd, for a more modern browsing experience, among many other points of progress.

Motūrus project builds a simple, fast, and secure operating system (Motūrus OS) for the cloud. In more specific terms, Motūrus OS (sometimes called Motor OS), is a new operating system targeting virtual machine-based workloads such as web serving, “serverless”, edge caching, etc. Motūrus OS is a microkernel-based operating system, built in Rust, that targets virtualized workloads exclusively. It currently supports x64 KVM-based virtual machines, and can run in either Qemu or Cloud Hypervisor. Rust is the language of Motūrus OS: not only it is implemented in Rust, it also exposes its ABI in Rust, not C. ↫ Motūrus OS GitHub page At this point, there are more alternative operating systems written in Rust than there are Linux distributions, but you’re not hearing any complaints from me. While not all of these will have a bright future, they’ll teach a lot of people valuable skills and introduce a lot of people to the concept of alternative operating systems.

Maestro is a lightweight Unix-like kernel written in Rust. The goal is to provide a lightweight operating system able to use the safety features of the Rust language to be reliable. ↫ Maestro’s GitHub page The state of this project is actually kind of amazing – roughly 31% of Linux systemcalls are more or less already implemented, and it also comes with a daemon manager, a package manager, and can already run musl, bash, various core GNU utilities, and so on. It has kernel modules, a VGA text mode terminal, virtual memory, and a lot more.

The holidays are coming, there’s a chill in the air (literally for me, I live in the Arctic), so it’s time for a few new additions to the official OSNews Merch Store. Do you live in the terminal, breathe the terminal? We’ve got new shirts just for you. The opening message of the terminals of Mac OS X, BeOS, and MS-DOS (let’s be generous and call MS-DOS a terminal), with a command to call an osnews directory on the file system, printed on the front of the shirt. They sport the correct fonts, background colours, and exact verbiage used in the operating systems themselves. For the Mac OS X one, I had to choose a last login date and a username, so I opted for the exact time and date of birth of my oldest son, and a username that’s a bit of an Easter egg. These shirts of the organic cotton variety, and all proceeds go to supporting OSNews’ continued existence so we don’t have to resort to SEO crap, “AI”-generated garbage, and malvertising. Every item sold on the store generates around $10 for us, with the rest going to our partner Bonfire for producing the items and running the store. You can also support OSNews through individual donations on Ko-Fi, by becoming a Patreon, and by supporting us through LiberaPay.

OpenVMS on x86 is now available for hobbyists! Almost a year after the official release. This is a part 1 of my getting started guide, showing you how to install OpenVMS on VirtualBox on Windows 10/11. More parts will follow, documenting license installation, network setup, ssh, application installation etc. If you want to give OpenVMS for x86 a try, this is the series of articles to read and follow along with. Excellent work by Remy van Elst.

Update 2: At a staggering 176% of the original goal within 2 days, I think it’s time to end this crazy ride. Rests me to thank all of you – donor or not – for the incredible support and generosity. This will enable me to go far beyond “mid-tier” and build something that’s going to set me for close to a decade. I’m absolutely stunned. Update: I did not expect this to take off, but within a few hours we’ve already reached the goal! Thanks, everyone – I’m stunned and at a loss for words, which, I can assure you, is a rather rare occurrence. The goal sits at 110% now, and I’ll leave it up for the night so this story doesn’t suddenly stop making sense (it’s 02:26 where I live). I’ll also contact the two largest donors privately and work out the details with them. Since we started our more visible push for donations to ensure we can keep OSNews running as an independent technology news website without having to resort to SEO spam, ad overload, and worse, a number of people have expressed interest in donating to specific goals instead of donating generically. A possible goal for this has recently come up, so I’m stepping out of my comfort zone (this whole thing terrifies me): you can now donate specifically towards a much, much-needed upgrade for my PC – and troll me along the way. Read on! After almost 8 years of loyal service, my PC, with a 7700K and GTX 1070, is starting to show some serious signs of old-age and constant use. This machine is the main computer I have, used for both my work on OSNews as well as gaming, and it’s getting long in the tooth. As such, I’m planning a relatively conservative, mid-tier upgrade for the machine, retaining as many parts as possible to keep costs down. I will retain the case, power supply, CPU cooler, and the various SSDs and hard drives. My intention is to purchase the following parts: In Sweden, this would add up to SEK 10900 (incl. all applicable taxes), or €921/$978, so I set the goal at an even €1000. With the state of the world as it is, as well as having a family with two young children, investments like this simply aren’t something I can do out of pocket, and that’s why people have been suggesting for months to take this step. However, I want to make things a bit more interesting, and provide you lovely nerds with some ways to troll me. As such, I will give the two largest combined donations (as in, you can donate multiple times and it’ll count) some extra perks, designed to give you the opportunity to mess with me: Obviously, there are some ground rules here – no pornography, no hateful stuff like racism, no gore, stuff like that. We’re all adults here, and I’m pretty sure we all instinctively know what I mean. Other than that – anything goes! Any required stickers I’ll buy myself, as long as you can provide me a link. Any donation made through our Ko-Fi will count towards this goal, and you can keep track of the progress there as well. Since I have absolutely no idea how this will go (like I said, I’m terrified), I haven’t set a time limit on the goal. So, hop on over to our Ko-Fi page and donate away! In the meantime, I’m going to curl up in a corner because I have no clue how anyone is going to respond to this.

Modern PCs provide plenty of metering and power-management options. Version 23.10 of the Genode-based Sculpt operating system makes these features available via an interactive user interface. One can watch the temperature of each CPU core, monitor the individual CPU frequencies, switch between power profiles, and reveal details about power draw. Go to the download page to get started with Sculpt OS. It’s used as the day-to-day operating system by Genode developers, so it’s quite capable.