OS News Archive

MINIX 3.0 Released

OS News 36 Comments
Today, Andy Tanenbaum has officially announced the release of MINIX 3.0, the third stable version of this rather legendary operating system. The launch of v3 has been accompanied by a new website and a new logo. From the new website: "MINIX 3 is a new open-source operating system designed to be highly reliable and secure. It is based somewhat on previous versions of MINIX, but is fundamentally different in many key ways. MINIX 1 and 2 were intended as teaching tools; MINIX 3 adds the new goal of being usable as a serious system on resource-limited and embedded computers and for applications requiring high reliability." Read on for more information.
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VMWare Releases Freeware VMWare Player

OS News 54 Comments
VMWare released today the VMWare Player, a freely downloadable tool that 'plays' virtual machines (it just doesn't let you create any). This can prove a very important tool for OS makers who would like to demo their OS to new users, users who don't want to burn live CDs and also keep the OS makers safe from any hardware incompatibilities in the user's machine (as the OS would run inside VMWare Player, the compatibility is always guaranteed). VMWare already posted a demo for their VMWare Player, a 200 MB 'Browser Appliance' based on Ubuntu.
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Children’s BBC: the Acorn Years

  Submitted by fylfot OS News 5 Comments
"This year marks the 20th anniversary since Children's BBC began using the familiar format of sitting a presenter behind a live camera in a small continuity suite, dubbed the 'Broom Cupboard'. Prior to this move in September 1985, and for several years after, the BBC used Acorn kit to produce their broadcast graphics and animations.For a happy trip down a long memory lane, we caught up with Chris Poole, who produced the early ident graphics using a BBC B and later an Archimedes which ran RISC OS."
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Miray To Show µnOS Running on Genesi’s ODW

OS News 11 Comments
Miray has announced to show their realtime OS µnOS ('mu-nano-OS') running on Genesi's Open Desktop Workstation at the Systems 2005 fair for IT specialists in Munich, Germany. From the mission statement of this microkernel OS: "It is the goal to make µnOS available to the largest number of hardware platforms. A portable, scalable and real-time capable architecture should be delivered, which should make possible the usage of µnOS in embedded systems as well as in desktop computers up to servers."
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Visopsys 0.58 Released

  Submitted by Andy McLaughlin OS News 2 Comments
Likely the last of the Visopsys 0.5x series (a sparkly new 0.6 is imminent), this maintenance and bugfix release sports some new features such as EXT2 formatting, German keyboard layouts, GUID generation, and filesystem clobber. Version 0.58 also includes a number of important bugfixes to the featured Disk Manager partitioning program. Change log here and downloads here. As always, you can demo this tiny, full-GUI hobby OS from the ISO image or from a single floppy disk.
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Triviad Beta Started

  Submitted by Andre van Schoubroeck OS News 2 Comments
Triavid is a web implementation of a TriangleOS VFDBS system. The service will eventually be fully integrated in TriangleOS, allowing users to use the web-disk as just any other drive. All objects stored on the web-disk can be viewed from any PC with an internet connection. The web-disk can also be accessed with by a browser, by using a user interface similar to that of the the TriangleOS GUI.
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World Wind: Open Source Alternative to Google Earth

OS News 26 Comments
Few of Google's projects, rumors of projects, and acquisitions have generated as much envy among Linux users as Google Earth. In some respects the search engine behemoth is quite OS-agnostic, but the 3D virtual globe remains limited to Windows desktops. But there is an alternative: NASA's World Wind project. Like Google Earth, it's a 3D planetary visualization system that overlays satellite imagery, weather, political, and topological map data. The difference is: World Wind is open source.
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Plan B, 3rd Edition

  Submitted by Andrey Nikanorov OS News 12 Comments
"Plan B is an operating system designed to work in distributed environments where the set of available resources is different at different points in time. Plan B 3rd edition is a modified Plan 9 system. Therefore, any experience with Plan 9 will help you to install and use Plan B. Because Plan 9 inherits from UNIX, any experience with UNIX will help as well."
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OpenGEM ‘Project Liberation’ Beta 3 Released

  Submitted by Shane Coughlan OS News 16 Comments
"There is a new member of the OpenGEM family. We'd like to introduce Project Liberation, based on the software behind OpenGEM Experimental. Project Liberation is a whole new type of OpenGEM, and it's such a leap forward it'll blow your socks off. Project Liberation has a new 3D interface, with a neat modern pointer set, a beautiful new default system font, and cool new icons." Beta 3 has just been released. Download it here.
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Introduction to the Xen Virtual Machine

OS News 28 Comments
This article is intended mainly for developers who are new to Xen and who want to know more about it. The Xen VMM (virtual machine monitor) is an open-source project that is being developed in the computer laboratory of the University of Cambridge, UK. It enables us to create many virtual machines, each of which runs an instance of an operating system. These guest operating systems can be a patched Linux kernel, version 2.4 or 2.6, or a patched NetBSD/FreeBSD kernel.
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Partition Logic 0.57 Released

  Submitted by Andy McLaughlin OS News 11 Comments
Partition Logic is a graphical, easy-to-use partitioning and hard disk management tool for PCs, based on the alternative Visopsys OS. It can create, delete, reorder and move partitions, and modify their attributes, as well as doing things like copying entire hard disks. It boots from a single floppy or CD image. Version 0.57 (freshmeat announcement) has a number of tweaks and some important bug fixes. A change log is here, and downloads are here.
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Review: QEMU 0.7.1

  Submitted by Flavio Villanustre OS News 15 Comments
Here is a review of QEMU, a "generic and open source processor emulator which achieves a good emulation speed by using dynamic translation": "In sum, if you have emulation or virtualization needs, before you think of any commercial products, give QEMU a try. While it may not be as feature rich as some commercial alternatives, it’s stable, fast and free. And the convenience of having the source code available is a real plus."
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