OS News Archive

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.

Older document, but interesting read. ESR is comparing VMS, MacOS, OS/2, WinNT, BeOS & Linux.

"Linux, Windows, Mac. All have their place, and before long that place will be in history books. The seeds of a new style of computing device have been sown, and as they grow they will inevitably lead to a world where the computer operating system as we know it today is as dead as the planetary transmission that drove the Model T Ford." Read the editorial at NewsForge, by Roblimo.

The version 0.73 of MenuetOS includes a tiny HTTP & Mp3 server, IRC client, real-time additions & demos. Also, SkyOS redesigned their driver handling, while Syllable is preparing an IDE driver.

We've received an anonymous report from Trumpet Software that they have a 64 bit (x86-64) version of their operating system PetrOS running in their lab. This kernel (which is fully 64 bit) can run 32 bit and 64 bit userland programs which conform the PetrOS ABI. The development team used the latest version of Bochs 2.0 which has recently been enhanced to emulate x86-64 architecture. The anonymous source hinted that a beta version of 64 bit PetrOS would be released some time in March 2003.

Anders Østergård writes "According to this newsgroup message, the OpenVMS OS (former DEC, now owned by Compaq) is now able to boot and operate on Intel's 64-bit Itanium-platform. OpenVMS was originally developed for the legendary VAX-architecture and has evolved for into a stable but anonymous OS for more than 25 years."

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I had been trying to find a means to write a new Operating System since 1997 and back then an Mphil/Dphil at the Universities seemed realistic. I had assessed a variety of institutions and made applications were relevant but nothing was doing. It was then that I realised that I had to do it myself so my plan was to quickly develop a standard Kernel to start the business and allow me to focus on innovation.

The long-awaited port of HP's OpenVMS to Intel's Itanium is set for full release next year, as are plans to move Tru64 Unix features into HP-UX. The announcements came as HP introduced its new Alpha servers, based on the EV7 chip, plus a strategy to migrate Alpha users to Itanium servers over the next three to eight years.Plans are to sell new Alpha systems through 2006 and support them through 2011.