OS News Archive

As a programmer and manager of embedded software products for a living, I think that operating system programming is so much fun that it will eventually be outlawed. I've previously published two articles on OSNews, So, you want to write an operating system and Climbing the kernel mountain, and tried to summarize my experience in designing operating system kernels as well as technical traps that can be easily avoided.

This article offers feature suggestions to budding OS developers looking for that neat edge. This osnews mini-series is a series to give people developing hobby operating systems - for fun - ideas that take their OS from a kernel to a 'system'.

The OpenCroquet Project is near its first release. As written on their homepage: "WHAT IF..." ...we were to create a new operating system and user interface knowing what we know today, how far could we go? What kinds of decisions would we make that we might have been unable to even consider 20 or 30 years ago, when the current set of operating systems were first created?

Two articles on OpenVMS, one at ShannonKnowsHPC and one at ITPlanet, read on.

This HOW-TO is a handy one for the Mac folks out there who want to run multiple operating systems, but not install them to their hard drive, all using an iPod as a bootable FireWire drive. This HOW-TO is also helpful for trying out new software (on another OS), running developer versions of Mac OS (like Mac OSX Server/Tiger) as well as having a way to repair your Mac if for some reason it can't boot on its own.

With the advent of PearPC a large portion of the computing world was stunned as people watched OS X starting up on their very own x86 PCs. While this 0.3 release is not as ground breaking as the first it follows along the lines of the second with good speed improovements & complete fullscreen support.

Arstechnica covers the basics of set up, OS installation and support, performance, and also benchmarks the two applications on the host machine. Virtual PC vs. VMware: which VM cuisine will reign supreme?

Peter N. Glaskowsky of Electronic Business weighs in the situation in the 64-bit desktop market and analyzes of how consumers will finally buy in.

Athene is a Windows/Linux desktop system. On v4, VESA graphics drivers were added, and the security model for direct graphics access was improved. The File Manager has been enhanced, and there have been a number of bugfixes.

Yesterday, on pearpc.net, it was anounced that PearPC has experimental altivec support. Among other things Altivec theoretically improves OS and application speed due to the ability to handle floating point math operations. The builds can be downloaded here.

This technical overview by veteran real-time lecturer David Kalinsky examines a number of directions in which RTOSs continue to change and mature. Two main directions are alternative task scheduling algorithms, and intertask communication via asynchronous direct message passing. In order to keep at a practical level, the focus is on trends and features that can be expected to appear in RTOSs soon.

VMWare makes it very easy to run Linux right on your Windows desktop (and the other way around). And, if you're feeling adventurous, you can even try running the beta versions of the next version of Windows called "Longhorn" or even Sun's Solaris operating system. Read the review at ExtremeTech.

ComputerWeekly takes a look at OpenVMS, one of the most stable OSes ever placed in production. Originally known as VMS, it's probably the best designed and most robust general purpose operating system in existence. It's also one of the least-known and appreciated, simply because it works quietly in the background without drama, unlike its noisier and more fussy siblings and offspring.

The VAX system at Triumph Components has been in use since about 1996, and information systems manager Dan Blackshear couldn't be happier with it. There's just one problem: He's got to scrap it. The system is fast, works well with Windows and "fits into the modern environment very cleanly" at the El Cajon, aerospace parts maker, said Blackshear. "But it's a dinosaur, and eventually it has to go".