OS News Archive

"We all know what its like to imerse one's self in the age old computer market-share debate. The problem is that when most people use the word "market-share", what they really mean is "installed-base." Because consumers choose a platform based on its popularity, misconceptions about market-share only confuse the issue even further." Read the editorial at OSCast.

Hobby OS TriangleOS now sports a new ATA driver and a FATxx filesystem addon.

TheRegister has an article about persistent storage for computers using magnetic memory. This triggered me to recall Genera, the Symbolics Object Oriented OS, and what an amazing system could be built pulling together an object oriented OS with a persistent storage. Where there was no need for files and pipes and everything could know about everything else. I'm way out of my depth here, but come on someone, build the future!

Some people have noticed that on OSNews feature articles, in addition to the normally-formatted green links on the page, there are also double-underlined black-green links, that link to offers from sponsors, like free .NET tutorials or a whitepaper on Intel Centrino. If you haven't seen these, it's probably due to the fact that it only works on IE for Windows. If you're using Linux, Mac, Mozilla, or another browser/platform you may never see it. Those who have seen it: don't worry. There's no strange spyware installed on your machine. "Read more" for more details.

Visopsys is a new operating system for PCs. It has been in development since late 1997. The kernel is small and fast, operates exclusively in 32-bit mode, and features real preemptive multi-tasking and virtual memory. The package includes a small suite of UNIX- and DOS-like commands, with which most users will be familiar, although Visopsys is not - and does not try to be - a clone of any existing OS. The binary distribution features an easy-to-use Java installation program, which works on Linux, Windows, and Solaris. You can install and demo the distribution on a floppy disk. Screenshot.

TriangleOS runs under the latest Bochs x86 emulator, ReactOS as well, and now you can run Syllable on it. Regarding Syllable, here is its updated tab-based terminal. On Bochs news, the CVS version now supports SSE/SSE2 emulation. Has anyone tried MenuetOS & SkyOS with the Bochs Vesa patch?

Google, one of the most visited sites worldwide, posted their OS results for April 2003. In the No1 spot, Windows 98 is steadily losing 1% every month to the always rising Windows XP, while MacOS is down to 3% from the 4% of the previous month. Linux is steady at around 1%. The "Other" OSes are also steady at 4% (note that the "other" section also includes other Microsoft OSes, like Windows ME).

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

From the press release: Under the terms of an amended licensing agreement with Geoworks of Emeryville, California, effective April 1, 2003, Breadbox Computer Company, LLC of Port Richey, Florida, has obtained the worldwide exclusive and perpetual rights to the patented Geos operating system for all hardware platforms.

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.

The K42 group is developing a new high performance, open source, general-purpose operating system kernel for cache-coherent multiprocessors. They are targeting next generation servers ranging from small-scale multiprocessors that we expect will become ubiquitous, to very large-scale non-symmetric multiprocessors that are becoming increasingly important in both commercial and technical environments.

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.

Emanuel Chanampa writes: "E/OS LX 0.2.2 pre is now available. Based on the linux kernel and Wine, the user gets a free Windows-compatible system, capable of running programs and some games."

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.