OS News Archive

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

LismoreSystems released today their x86 emulator for PPC. Prices start at $69.

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.

I just finished a quick round of mobile rendering optimizations for our sister site, GnomeFiles.org (automatic detection of mobile browsers included, just as for OSNews). The mobile mobile support of the site is not as good as OSNews' is, but it should serve well all smartphone & PDA users, as irritating horizontal scrollbars are now a thing of the past (tip for Netfront/iMode users: use the 'smart fit' mode with GnomeFiles, tip for Openwave's browser: use a phone with v6.2.0 and above). Also, browsers that hit the site and we know that they can only do WAP, will be automatically redirected on GnomeFiles' WAP site. In other site news, our other sister site, OS Galaxy is expanding quickly. Join OS Galaxy if you are in the OS-related business and you happen to blog about it. Update: More optimizations, Gnomefiles should render respectably now even on 128x128 phone screens.

For those who haven't been following the EROS project, it has now migrated to the Coyotos project. EROS, the Extremely Reliable Operating System, was a project to create an operating system whose security relied on capabilities rather than the traditional Unix model of root or non-root.

Lismore Software Systems announces Guest PC a new x86 software emulator for Mac OS X. With Guest PC you can easily create and manage virtual x86 computer on your Mac. You can install Windows operating system and access the application created for Windows compatible computers. Guest PC 1.0 will be available in the beginning of February 2005.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we create software. Contrary to conventional wisdom, unreliability is not an essential characteristic of complex software programs. In this 4-page article, Louis Savain will propose a silver bullet solution to the software reliability and productivity crisis. The solution will require a radical change in the way we program our computers.

True to the internet fashion these days, we believe it's time for an operating system "planet" site. We are happy to announce OS Galaxy, a site fed by blog posts of popular OS-related industry figures, mostly developers. At this time we have subscribed only 10 bloggers, but we welcome developers to let us know if they wish to join in if they fit in one of our categories. OSNews members will automatically see OS Galaxy with the same ad-free, fast-loading format that they enjoy for OSNews.

From HP World Magazine: "At press time, Hewlett-Packard planned to announce in January its long-awaited version of OpenVMS that runs on Itanium-based Integrity servers. We spoke with Mark Gorham, vice president for HP’s OpenVMS Systems Division. He is responsible for worldwide engineering, customer satisfaction, quality, partner management and business management of the OpenVMS Systems product portfolio."

Drobe.co.uk once again looks at RISC OS toolchain issues - this time it's Unixlib under the microscope and drobe considers how to improve it by adding code from the GNU C Library, or making a port of glibc to RISC OS.

TextOS is a small operating system for text-based applications which runs on a floppy. Built on top of FreeDOS, it runs programs made with the TextOS BASIC programming language. TextOS has been out for about a month, but it is only now in working condition. For more information see the official TextOS website.

In the newly released 0.77 of MenuetOS you will find Dosbox, ScummVM and Doom I ports; 3Com and Sis900 ethernet drivers; Improved protection, hd and floppy support. Additionally, 0.78-pre versions were also released.

The 0.5 release of Visopsys is now available to coincide with the initial public release of "Partition Logic": a small, GPLed, standalone graphical partitioning utility based on Visopsys.

A new kernel for an OS caled LSE/OS was developed by a french research laboratory: Epita System Laboratory. This laboratory is specialized in low-level system programming.For more than one year this laboratory has been developing an extremely stable nanokernel with specific features that place it in a very special class of systems. Read on for more. Update: English version here.