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OS News Archive

Jayacard Preview Release 0.6a

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

Castle and Tematic merge

Castle Technology Ltd and Tematic Limited confirmed that Castle and Tematic merged in the fourth quarter of 2003. The combined business will trade under the Castle Technology Ltd name with a new "Tematic Division", focused on offering full design and engineering resources to customers wishing to licence RISC OS for use in their new products.

OpenVMS eval Version 8.1 Ships today

The evaluation release of HP OpenVMS Version 8.1 for Integrity servers based on the Intel Itanium processor is out. OpenVMS Version 8.1 includes native compilers, and a substantial suite of functionality that ISVs and customers are eager to use, including clustering and a wide range of development tools and integration technologies.

JNode 0.1.5 Released

JNode has released a new intermediate version of JNode reflecting the current state of development. This release contains USB support, TCP support, various filesystems improvements, initial GUI toolkit, significant performance improvements and lots of bug-fixes.

EROS Persists

Jonathan Shapiro has changed his mind about halting EROS development. In an email this morning, he wrote:"The EROS project is back. I'm sure this will seem very funny to some of you, but sometimes you have to firmly put something down in order to step back and think clearly about it." Since his first email, the list has hosted a flurry of productive discussions about the strengths and weaknesses of EROS.

OpenVMS Clusters Give Windows, Unix Thorough Thrashing

"Everyone is talking about Windows clusters, Unix clusters and Linux cluster. But all we are saying, is that the 20 year-old architecture of clustered OpenVMS can teach these whippersnappers a thing or two. At OpenVMS.org there's a report about an OpenVMS cluster which handles the major processing for the Greater Amsterdam Police and naturally is required 24/7." Read the story at TheInquirer.