OS News Archive

NeTraverse informed us that they will be releasing Win4Lin 5.0 later this month. New features include:

I am writing to let you know that I have created a derivative work from JaysOS, the 'Toy OS' for Gameboy advance of which you have talked here. It is called ISOS and runs on ARM's Evaluator-7T evaluation boards which feature the same processor has the Gameboy Advance.

The L4Ka team is pleased to announce the first release of the L4Ka::Pistachio microkernel. L4Ka::Pistachio is the latest L4 microkernel developed by the System Architecture Group at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in collaboration with the DISY group at the University of New South Wales, Australia. It is the first available kernel implementation of the L4 Version 4 kernel API.

TriangleOS 0.0.3-RELEASE and a floppy image is now available for download, along with a readme and changelog. There are some new screenshots. Since the previous release last year most of the kernel code has been rewritten, network support has been added, updated the GUI and added more applications, like an editor and webserver.

Free of the shackles imposed by Red Hat Inc., maintainers of the open-source eCos real-time operating system said in mid-March that version 2.0, now in beta, could be generally available around April 15. The new version will add an all-new bootloader with remote debugging and full POSIX compliance, giving it the ability to run many Linux and Unix applications with just a recompile.

The Fiasco--Microkernel based Dresden Realtime Operating System (DROPS) has made available a demo disk containing several examples sessions (including the experimental GUI DOpE).

VMWare 4.0 has been released and there is a demo version available to download. In other similar news, get to know QEMU, an x86 processor emulator. Its purpose is to run x86 Linux processes on non-x86 Linux architectures such as PowerPC or ARM. By using dynamic translation it achieves a reasonnable speed while being easy to port on new host CPUs. Its main goal is to be able to launch the Wine Windows API emulator on non-x86 CPUs.

The Fiasco Team is pleased to announce Fiasco version 1.0, the first official release of the Fiasco L4 microkernel developed at the University of Technology, Dresden.

eCosCentric Limited working in conjunction with the eCos maintainers, today announced the release of eCos 2.0 Beta, the latest version of the eCos real-time operating system.

A thought-provoking ZDNet editorial talks about Intel's plans to bring the BIOS into the 21st century by making it more sophisticated and operating system-like. That will bring some welcome benefits to the PC world, but there are lurking dangers. The real birth of the PC platform was not IBM's invention of the PC or the release of the IBM PC Technical Reference Manual, but what rather Compaq's clean room rewrite of the PC BIOS. While IBM maintained proprietary control over the BIOS, it still had a stranglehold over the platform. Now, Intel wants to push through a new BIOS, and it's unlilkey that anyone will be able to pull off the clean room stunt again. Intel will own the PC platform going forward, even more than it already does.

"When considering emulation, should companies count on a product like CodeWeavers to serve a limited number of applications, or should they choose software that requires them to buy licenses for Windows but can run more applications?" Read Zonker's article at NewsFactor.

Mike Janger writes: "What is Open Croquet? Alan Kay (one of the inventors of Smalltalk, one of the fathers of object oriented programming, conceiver of the laptop computer, inventor of much of the modern windowing GUI, etc.) is working on it. But what IS it? Have you guys looked into it?" I downloaded its 90 MB late last night. It's an 'academic' project featuring a futuristic OS 3D environment running through the Squeak environment on Windows or Mac. It requires a supported 3D accelerator (however, it didn't work with my Voodoo5 in hardware mode so it was painfully slow).

"Various analysts report and company insiders reckon that HP earns an estimated $400M USD per year in profit on the OpenVMS operating system, which is one of the most robust and disaster-tolerant OSes on the market. For example, it's used to build the Intel chips it hopefully will run on, some day. So why is it being given short shrift in favor of Windows, Linux and HP-UX and the mythical--and nearly impossible to actually implement--Consolidated Enterprise Unix?" Read the mini-article at TheInquirer.

"LynuxWorks today introduced LynxOS-178, a commercially available DO-178B level A certifiable (FAA standard), real-time operating system (RTOS) that meets the stringent standards for safety-critical systems. LynxOS-178 originated from a partnership between Rockwell Collins and LynuxWorks. Rockwell Collins made several enhancements to the original LynxOS product and created the Rockwell Collins' Virtual Machine Operating System (VMOS)." Read the rest of the press release here.