OS News Archive

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 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.

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.

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).

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.

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'.

Visopsys 0.33 is primarily a bugfix release but with bootable CD-ROM support added. The download site now offers a bootable ISO image containing a complete distribution with source code.

RadiOS is a microkernel-based operating system written entirely in the i386 assembly language (NASM). It uses many ideas and implementation techniques from VSTa and QNX.

"Do you rely on legacy DOS apps. that are critical to the survival of your business? Me neither - I just want to play Frogger again... One way of running those old favourites under Linux is to use the DOSBox software package." Read the tutorial here.

The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project has finished work on version 7.01.06 of the patches to the original Caldera OpenDOS/DR-DOS 7.01 source code, adding support for the FAT32 file system.

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.

JNode is a Java new Operating System design effort. The goal is to get an simple to use and install Java operating system for personal use. Any java application should run on it.

This guy managed to squeeze 55 OSes running on his Powerbook.

Slashdot reports that TICalc.org announced yesterday that Patrick Pelisier has released a new beta OS, called PedroM, for the TI-89 and TI-92+ under the GPL.