OS News Archive

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

FreeRTOS is a portable open source (GPL) real-time operating system for embedded devices. It offers a smaller and easier real-time processing alternative for applications where eCOS and embedded Linux (or Real Time Linux) won't fit, are not appropriate, or are not available. FreeRTOS runs on a bunch of architectures, both 8- and 16-bit. TCP/IP support is provided either from the uIP software TCP/IP stack (live demo server here) or by using the Wiznet hardware TCP/IP co-processor (live demo server here).

A new FreeVMS release is available and a new bliss compiler is available in this release.

Version 1.0b6 of TextOS, the floppy-based operating system/programming language built on top of FreeDOS, was released. Released a month after the previous release, it features various bug fixes.