OS News Archive

Tutorial: “Architecture of Embedded Device Drivers”

Submitted by David Kalinsky 2004-02-23 OS News 2 Comments

This technical tutorial by veteran real-time instructor David Kalinsky examines the high-level design of driver software to operate hardware devices that are interfaced to embedded computers. It begins with a discussion of basic issues such as mutual exclusion of device access, and synchronous vs. asynchronous input/output models. Then it goes through a series of structural models for device driver design with RTOS interaction, going from simple to more complex.

Disk Images Now Available for NewOS

Eugenia Loli 2004-02-21 OS News 15 Comments

NewOS now features automatically created bootable images on its web site. Users who would like to try out the latest version of the NewOS kernel can easily rawrite/dd it on a floppy disk and boot with it. NewOS is the preffered kernel for OpenBeOS, but OpenBeOS uses a modified older version of NewOS.

Review: VMware Workstation 4.0.5

Eugenia Loli 2004-02-18 OS News 8 Comments

"Part of what I do involves trying out and working with a large number of Linux distributions. It's important for me to know what's out there and how it compares with other products. When I'm not being a writer, I run a small computer consulting business that makes similar demands. My customers expect me to support and work in a number of different environments and operating systems." Read the rest of the article at UnixReview.

eCosCentric partners with SSV Embedded Systems

Submitted by eCosCentric Limited 2004-02-17 OS News No Comments

eCosCentric Limited announced their partnership with SSV Embedded Systems to deliver an eCosPro(tm) Starter Kit for the DIL/NetPC DNP/5280 embedded controller board.

Trion Operating System 0.1 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-02-16 OS News 16 Comments

The Trion Object Oriented Operating system is an OS that is designed to meet the needs for the 21st century, with a kernel written in C++ and modelled in UML. The project is ran by a team of OSDev.org community members and version 0.1 was released recently.

GEOS Available for Download

Eugenia Loli 2004-02-13 OS News 21 Comments

Slashdot reports in the release of the GEOS to the public. Check also our search page for links to the AppleII version and a past interview with an ex-GeoWorks employee.

Unununium gets official Scitech SNAP port

Submitted by Dave Poirier 2004-02-10 OS News 19 Comments

Scitech officially announced today a port of their SNAP graphic interface to the Unununium Operating System, read the white paper written by Richard Fillion, part of the Unununium main developers.

Introducing the Robotic Operating System

Eugenia Loli 2004-02-06 OS News 5 Comments

The Robotic Operating System, or ROS (download), is intended to operate at the center of behavior-based robotics systems. ROS is an operating system within an operating system, running as a normal program on UNIX-like systems and acting as an operating system for a set of other normal UNIX programs and scripts. ROS is used only to start, stop, and provide other services to behaviors, but without behaviors would perform no function. While a behavior might, technically, run without ROS, it would not fit into a system of behaviors and so would not be useful.

An Introduction to Virtualization

Eugenia Loli 2004-02-05 OS News 5 Comments

The purpose of this document can be informally stated as follows: if you were to use virtualization in a an endeavor (research or otherwise), here are some things to look at.

Athene 3.3 Released

Submitted by Paul Manias 2004-02-03 OS News 11 Comments

Rocklyte Systems has made Athene 3.3 available with a number of new features including an updated file manager, music player, and find files program. There are 11 updated and new UI gadgets, improved multi-lingual support and a revised SDK. The graphics performance has improved further since 3.2 by using XDGA to give a 25% performance boost when in X11 full-screen mode. Read more for the changelog and screenshots.

Dell Offers FreeDOS with New PCs

Eugenia Loli 2004-01-27 OS News 45 Comments

Dell now sells its N-Series computers (they start at $319) shipping with a FreeDOS CD in the box.

Linux To Reduce Boot Time for Windows XP Media Centers

Eugenia Loli 2004-01-25 OS News 27 Comments

The new Linux-based InstantOn software -- designed to help Windows XP Media Center Edition PCs boot more quickly -- is aimed at taking advantage of the power of Intel's Pentium processors, not at fixing fragmented hard drives. The software integrates into the computer's BIOS and the OS.

Jayacard Preview Release 0.6a

Submitted by Gilles Dumortier 2004-01-24 OS News 4 Comments

Jayacard is the open source smart card operating system focused on contactless products. Some of the supported norms include ISO 7816-3/4/8, ISO 14443, ISO 15693 and x509. Current version is a cleanroom development that has been ported to some secure microprocessor under NDA ; but opensource roadmap is to have this software also freely available for flashable microprocessor like the ATmega161 from Atmel.

New twoOStwo 2.3.40 beta Released

Submitted by Tony Zelenoff 2004-01-20 OS News 17 Comments

Virtual machine twoOStwo is a virtualization technology for Intel x86 platform, developed by Russian company Parallels Ltd for German company NetSys GmbH. twoOStwo allows to launch several operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2 etc., simultaneously on a single computer. Read more for screenshot and download links.

Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 45-day Free Trial Edition

Eugenia Loli 2004-01-15 OS News 29 Comments

Virtual PC is a powerful software virtualization solution that allows you to run multiple PC-based operating systems simultaneously on one workstation, providing a safety net to maintain compatibility with legacy applications while you migrate to a new operating system. It also saves reconfiguration time, so your support, development, and training staff can work more efficiently. This is a 45-day time-out, full version of the Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 product. No serial number is required.

New Release of Minix?

Submitted by DanO 2004-01-14 OS News 27 Comments

On November 23 a new relase of Minix sneaked out. To make things a bit more interesting it looks like there may well be more releases to come: "Version 2.0.4 has been slapped together in a hurry to have a fixed point to start a new Minix project at. The code should be OK, but most new things haven't been tested. (So there's already a fix out.) The documentation is alas far behind all the changes." A Bochs image is also available (in the i386/DOSMINIX.ZIP, use the minix.bxrc to start Bochs).

Get to Know Xen

Submitted by Hans Henrik Happe 2004-01-14 OS News 12 Comments

Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. A port of Linux 2.4 to run on the VMM works well, and *BSD and XP ports are in progress. Version 1.0 was released a few months ago.

Bochs 2.1 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-01-12 OS News 22 Comments

After a whole year, here is a new version for Bochs, v2.1. It sports a new disassembler, 3DNow!/SSE/SSE2/PNI instruction support, Vmware3/Sparse/Undoable/Growing harddisk images support, many VGA emulation improvements (e.g. high/true color VBE modes added), no more X11 vga font required etc. I tried Bochs 2.1 last night on my Mac OS X Panther but it couldn't read any of my VMWare 3.x images (I tried Syllable and Plan9) saying something to the effect of "VMWare COW Disk images are invalid" and while the ata0 mode was set correctly to "vmware3" in the .bochsrc file.

Unununium OS now has libc

Submitted by Charles Goodwin 2004-01-12 OS News 18 Comments

Progress looks to have been picking up for the Unununium OS, where dietlibc has been ported and much work has continued in all areas including the file system, thread engine, memory manager, graphic device support, network stack as well as the build and documentation system. A new release is 'imminent'.

Adopt a Lost Technology Today

Submitted by Simon Strandgaard 2004-01-12 OS News 44 Comments

When new operating systems gets designed today, great systems such as Amiga, Atari and VMS, seems to get overlooked in regard to their original features not found on other OSes. It might be time to collect and categorize those special unique features under the great/lost ideas wiki, so new OSes don't have to re-invent the wheel and re-innovate.