OS News Archive

Prex, a portable real-time operating system for embedded systems, is a small, reliable and low power micro kernel designed specifically for the small memory footprint system. Prex 0.1 is the first public release, and includes kernel, syscall library, sample hello world application, and some technical documents.

XMK - eXtreme Minimal Kernel - is a preemptive multitasking real-time operating system for embedded microcontrollers. What makes XMK different from other RTOSes is that XMK is designed to be small first, then scaled up to larger platforms. The BSD-licensed XMK is designed to be highly configurable and comes with a choice TCP/IP stacks: the tiny uIP stack or the more powerful but larger lwIP stack. XMK is available for a number of embedded platforms.

Portable, compact, and simple hobby Operating System for the 64bit age: AireOS.

The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project has released v7.01.07 of Enhanced DR-DOS, an Open Source OS based on DR-DOS 7.01 alias OpenDOS.

I have interviewed the author of the fascinating software Contiki OS, lwIP, uIP and protothreads, and asked him questions about the software itself, the way he develops on embedded platforms, as well as his interests in sensor networks and opensource.

A program can't ever really die, but it can get old. Very old. This is a paradox millions of computer users are living with. Almost four years after the release of Windows XP and Mac OS X, they boot their machines into more senior versions of Windows or the Mac OS.

When I joined OSNews in 2001, I did it with a great excitment because of my love for... messing around with many operating systems in order to explore news ways of doing things. Back in the '80s and the '90s there were a lot of OS projects that would draw the attention of the computer users of the time. But in this decade, it seems that other than Windows, OSX, Linux and a very few other much smaller OSes, the scene is sterile. And it's only getting worse.

Mockup Web site has been migrated to Mocka from Plone. Mocka is the Mockup Web Platform based on Silva. In other news the first beta of the Mockup project has been released today, as a live CD.

The results are in! The winners of the giveaway are: In the "new member" category: Pascal Hos. In the "existing members" category: Robert Kerby and Jeremy Messenger. In the "commenters" category: Rayiner Hashem and "therandthem." If you are one of these winners, and you haven't received an email from us yet, contact us right away. Thanks to all the new members who signed up in the past two weeks. We'll try to have more giveaways soon!

JNode.org has just released a new version of the Java OS JNode with a port to the AMD64 architecture. This version 0.1.10 also includes several improvements.

Miray Software announces that the real-time operating system µnOS is available for XScale processors as from now. The porting has been accomplished in collaboration with Technische Universität München (TU). This is an important step for Miray Software on the way to establish µnOS in the field of mobile and power saving embedded systems.

USB2 support for RISC OS 5 on the Iyonix is here.

Visopsys is an alternative hobby operating system for PC compatible computers. This is a maintenance release, with numerous small improvements and bugfixes. The kernel's file handling has been re-engineered, and the memory usage reporting tools have been enhanced. The Disk Manager once again reports correct disk sizes in megabytes. A file copying bug has been fixed. A number of unnecessary files and programs have been removed. A couple of small but potentially critical bits of the boot code have been refined.

I've got some great books that I'll be giving away to OSNews members next week. Here's how it will work: Two books will go to OSNews members picked at random, including people who sign up for new memberships this week. One book will go to a new member who signs up between now and next friday. And two books will go to regular OSNews readers, members or not, picked at random from people who post an insightful, non-troll, non-flame, comment on an OSNews story between now and next friday. Read more to see the books and learn more about signing up.