OS News Archive

Wind River Systems, a maker of software that powers many of the lesser-known types of computing devices hidden in the fabric of the high-tech world, has won approval to have its operating system used in Formula One race cars. Read the report at ZDNews.

KernelTrap reports that Robert Millan recently made available a bootable Bochs image allowing users to run the GNU/Hurd under the Bochs x86 emulator. KernelTrap has also posted a screenshot.

"Breadbox Computer Company LLC has completed and released to company distributors, its new flagship desktop software suite, Breadbox Ensemble. Ensemble offers a full productivity and internet suite, including Web Browser and Email. Other essential programs such as word processing, spreadsheet, flat file database and graphics applications are integrated into this easy-to-use package". Read the rest of the news over at BreadBox.

The open source Bochs, VMware Workstation by VMware, Inc. and VirtualPC from Connectix are applications that virtualize or emulate the x86 hardware, allowing you to run multiple operating systems on top of a "host" operating system that these three applications run upon. This means that you will be able to run Linux or FreeBSD or other supported "guest" OSes under Windows, Linux (or Macintosh), inside a window or fullscreen. But which one delivers the best performance for the money? And what about the free Bochs?

We will first start with the 1.0 release of the free word processor, AbiWord, for many different platforms, including Linux, FreeBSD, Win32, MacOS and QNX. Mozilla RC-1 was released also a few days ago and its developers appreciate any bugs people can submit before the final 1.0 release. OSNews reader "Number9" submitted the news about the world's fastest computer, at NYTimes (free registration required). The computer is about 5 times faster than IBMs (previous world fastest) computer at a national lab. Another very interesting article can be found at PCMag. Given the hullabaloo around the Tablet PC, PC Magazine roundups six new tablet PCs from ACer, Fujitsu, HP, and others while it also investigates the past of such devices. The Menuet OS project released a new version and a new screenshot. Also, KlipFolio 1.0 for Windows is now released (more platforms are coming soon) and the OSNews news klip is installed by default! Thank you Serence!

Everyone's favourite opensource DOS GUI is back and better than ever in the new release, skinning support has been improved to allow better themeing, rather than just buttons skins, the Multimedia API(SFA) has been expanded to support more Audio Formats, the Disk Imager has been ported and many other improvements have been made, and still in just a 1.39MB download. Get your copy or take a look at a couple of screenshots: shot1 & shot2. Bad Desktop is also available as a separate download here.

OSNews reader Sylvain Martin writes: "The Clicker Operating system is moving forward. With last release 0.8.0, the system is now able to start user-level programs from another user-level program! This is a major advance if you consider that versions 0.7.x required the user-level program to be embedded within a system module. A pre-compiled demonstration package of 0.8.0 should be made available in a very soon future."

"A production version of the free GNU operating system is likely to be available by the end of this year, according to the president of the Boston-based Free Software Foundation (FSF). "We actually have the GNU kernel working, and we can now produce the GNU system, as opposed to the GNU/Linux system that people have been using so far," said Richard Stallman, who is in India this week to attend a GNU/Linux Day in Pune." Read the rest of the report about GNU/Hurd at IDG.net.

"What’s New in HP-UX 11i?" The new HP-UX 11i sports an 'Internet-centric' focus for end-to-end e-services. Irene Maltzan covers the major new features of the HP-UX 11i operating environment -including better scalability and availability- in this article. "Example File Systems" This chapter excerpt from 'Modern Operating Systems' book discusses several example file systems, ranging from quite simple to highly sophisticated. "Clustering Microsoft Exchange Server 2000" Ensuring reliability and scalability within your email system can be a trying experience. Let author and columnist Joseph M. Lamb guide you through the construction of a clustered Exchange Server utilizing Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Exchange Server 2000. "What is a Microsoft Cluster?" Let author and columnist Joseph M. Lamb guide you through the various cluster types, and how you can implement clusters that best serve the needs of your application using Microsoft's Windows 2000 Advanced Server. "Optimizing Disk Performance in Windows XP Professional" In this second article on getting better performance from Windows XP Professional, Louis Columbus provides step-by-step directions for increasing disk drive performance on your Windows XP system. Read all these articles at InformIT.

ROME is a lightweight, modular, multitasking, embedded operating system which has been developed and used for multiple research projects. ROME was designed to manage high speed data streams within a multimedia environment. The system is highly modular, with functionality split between multiple processes. To ensure a high throughput with minimal overhead ROME provides a zero copy architecture where pointer references to data are passed around instead of data being copied. The goal of this approach is to maximize the utilization of a given hardware configuration. ROME released version 2.01 yesterday.

As many people noticed, and quite a few emailed us about, the past couple of days OS News has been displaying a great number of pop-up ads. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that OS News thinks that pop-up ads are generally bad, and that we have stopped using the ad broker that was serving the pop-ups. They made arrangements to not display pop-ups at our request, but didn't follow through on their agreement, so we have yanked them until they do. We're sorry for putting our loyal readers through it, but rest assured that we're trying to balance our need to make a little money and maintaining a good experience for our beloved readers. You may still see the occasional pop-up, but we're determined to keep it to a minimum. By the way, if you'd like to provide support to OSNews, so we don't have to resort to pop-ups and other intrusive advertising, there are two easy ways to do it that won't cost you a cent: First, when you buy something--anything--from Amazon.com, use This Link and OSNews will get a small percentage of your purchase, without costing you more. Also, when you're in the market to buy anything, check OS News' Pricegrabber where we also get a little kick-back.

"When Mary gets home from work and goes to her PC to check e-mail, the PC isn't just sitting there. It's working for a biotech company, matching gene sequences to a library of protein molecules. Its DSL connection is busy downloading a block of radio telescope data to be analyzed later. Its disk contains, in addition to Mary's own files, encrypted fragments of thousands of other files. Occasionally one of these fragments is read and transmitted; it's part of a movie that someone is watching in Helsinki. Then Mary moves the mouse, and this activity abruptly stops. Now the PC and its network connection are all hers." Read more about an operating system spanning the Internet that would bring the power of millions of the world's Internet-connected PCs to everyone's fingertips.

Breadbox Inc. has secured a limited number of NewDealOffice 2000 boxes and they are selling them out for $100 USD. Get more info about the GeOS-powered operating system at Breadbox's web pages.