OS News Archive

OSNews T-shirt Ideas (With Contest)

David Adams 2003-09-17 OS News 43 Comments

We've been thinking of printing up some OSNews T-shirts. We're going to print up a whole batch of them, and we wanted to get some feedback on what they should look like. Would you be interested in buying a shirt? What would you like it to look like?

Windowing System DOpE GPL’ed

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-14 OS News 19 Comments

DOpE - a windowing system for the realtime OS DROPS, which is based on the microkernel Fiasco (an implementation of the L4 API) provides the realtime facilities of DROPS at the user interface level and is now available for download via CVS. The system is now offered under the GPL, via the project's CVS.

Comments, Trolls, and Flamewars

David Adams 2003-09-09 OS News 65 Comments

You may have noticed that we've implemented a system that allows readers to report comments that abuse our forum rules, in an effort to improve the quality of the conversation and make the job of moderating the comments a little easier for OSNews volunteers. However, this reactive solution is only half of the effort that will be required to make OSNews a better place for reasoned debate. The proactive, and more important, effort is the responsibility of all those who use the comments system. It involves showing a little restraint before being lured into the fray and contributing to a negative atmosphere.

FreeDOS Beta 9 pre2 Released

Submitted by Charles E. Reno 2003-09-02 OS News 10 Comments

The FreeDOS Project has recently released pre2 of its Beta 9 series. This is the base disk set only.

eCosCentric announces eCosPro Developer’s Kit

Submitted by eCosCentric 2003-09-02 OS News No Comments

eCosCentric Limited, the eCos and RedBoot experts, today announced the release of the eCosPro Developer's Kit for a number of hardware platforms. Read more for the rest of the press release.

JourneyOS Hybrid Exokernel Operating System

Submitted by alucard 2003-09-01 OS News 9 Comments

There is a group trying to develop an exokernel operating system for real world use, and it is supposed to be a hybrid with microkernels. There's not a lot at their SourceForge site yet, except for a cute slogan, but there's a comprehensive overview of the project's goals.

Japan, China, Korea May Develop Windows Replacement

Submitted by ajam 2003-08-31 OS News 60 Comments

Citing the recent havoc caused by worms and security holes, three Asian powers are considering jointly developing an alternative to the Microsoft platform, probably using an open source OS as the foundation. From the Reuters story: The plan is to be proposed by Japanese Trade Minister Takeo Hiranuma at a meeting of economic ministers from the three nations in Phnom Penh on Wednesday, it said, adding that agreement was seen as likely.

Contiki Videos

Submitted by Paul Gallant 2003-08-27 OS News 20 Comments

Contiki is a usable (internet-enabled) OS for Commodore 64 hardware. System requirements for Contiki is about 20K RAM for the base functionality and about 50K for full functionality (desktop icons, web browser, web server, etc.) See the videos of Contiki in action.

GEOS for Apple II Officially Available Again

Submitted by Konstantin Meyer 2003-08-26 OS News 35 Comments

The GEOS operating system for the Apple II computer, once very much ahead of its time, has been officially re-released by its current owner, Breadbox Computer, LLC. You can now download it for free. I know it could already be downloaded from several dark corners of the Internet but I thought it might still be worth a note.

Happy Anniversary!

David Adams 2003-08-13 OS News 101 Comments

Today is the second anniversary of OSNews' renaissance. Though OSNews started in Autumn of 1997, there was a long period in which it was in deep-freeze, with only occasional updates. August 2001 bought daily updates, a new back-end, and a lot of new readers, thanks to our new Editor-in-Chief (Eugenia). Since that time we've had:

4,247 news postings
133,118 comments
244 Feature Articles
82 Editorials
94 Interviews
1001 Flamewars

Thanks for reading, and keep coming back!

Mac OS X vs. Windows XP vs. Linux

Submitted by James Alcasid 2003-08-11 OS News 112 Comments

PC Buyer's Guide has posted a shootout comparing Max OS X to Windows XP to Linux, comparing basic, factory-included functionality. It includes a huge side-by-side chart. The overview seems to be pretty evenhanded, and isn't too preoccupied with declaring a winner and drawing much of a hard and fast conclusion. The bottom line: OS X is a very usable and elegant OS, XP has a leg up on some functionality (and of course more apps), and Linux is an impressive contender.

Contiki ported to x86

Submitted by Innominandum 2003-08-07 OS News 9 Comments

Contiki OS, "a highly portable, modern, open source, Internet-enabled operating system and desktop environment for very constrained systems," has been ported to the x86 platform. Previously able to run on only much smaller platforms, such as Atari, Gameboy, and Commodore, this is good news for developers interested in researching the OS.

B-Free 0.0.20 Released

Eugenia Loli 2003-08-01 OS News 5 Comments

The B-Free project is a collaborative work aimed at creating a BTRON operating system from scratch, with free distribution. It is a preemptive multitasking operating system constructed through micro-kernel technology, which assumes 32-bit or higher CPUs. The BTRON operating system is a subset of the TRON project, which in turn, is a worldwide open Real Time Operating System (RTOS) specification.

MenuetOS 0.74 Released

Submitted by Jarek Pelczar 2003-07-30 OS News 27 Comments

MenuetOS 0.74 is released and includes a Tiny email server, improved Http/Mp3 servers, Fasm 1.48, improved protection, skinning and font additions, Minesweeper and more. The OS is written in 100% assembly and is running off a floppy disk. However, developers are now adding support for a C library and they are looking for more developers to help with fixing the bugs and adding new features.

Embedded and PC OS µnOS 0.98 Released

Submitted by Michael Haunreiter 2003-07-30 OS News 10 Comments

miray Software released the latest version of its embedded and PC operating system µnOS. Besides a number of runtime enhancements of the system core the new version 0.98 contains a vastly improved window server, an all-new intelligent console interface and new system utilities. A dedicated internet platform for developers and interested users will be launched by miray in the near future.

VMware Broadens Server Software

Eugenia Loli 2003-07-21 OS News 3 Comments

The company, whose software lets an Intel server run several operating systems simultaneously, releases new software that supports a much wider variety of computers.

L4Env and DDE 0.1 for L4 released

Submitted by Anonymous 2003-07-12 OS News 7 Comments

The L4Env, the L4 Environment, and DDE, the Device Driver Environment. L4Env is a programming environment for application development on top of the L4 microkernel family. DDE is an environment for Linux device drivers for using native Linux 2.4 drivers together with L4Env.

HP Announces OpenVMS Evaluation Release Version 8.0 for Itanium

Submitted by Sagres 2003-07-08 OS News 26 Comments

HP announced the evaluation release of OpenVMS version 8.0 for Itanium-based HP Integrity servers. This release is for selected ISVs including BEA, Cerner, Computer Associates, Brooks Automation, Attunity, Synergex, Legato and TECSys. These partners have begun porting their applications to the OpenVMS Industry Standard 64 (OpenVMS I64) operating system, utilizing the HP rx2600 server. In addition, HP partners have committed porting over 450 applications to this new version to date.

Athene 3.1 Puts a New Face on Desktop Computing

Submitted by Paul Manias 2003-07-03 OS News 40 Comments

Rocklyte Systems announced the latest version of its free multi-platform operating system environment, Athene 3.1. Available for Linux and Windows, Athene supports the rare ability of being able to function on competing operating systems, while also maintaining its own independent OS infrastructure (the Athenyx 2003 CDROM series). The 3.1 release of Athene continues to make significant strides in the advancement of its desktop interface.

Contiki AVR Port for Embedded Systems

Guest post by Adam Dunkels 2003-07-03 OS News 8 Comments

Do you remember the Contiki desktop OS, an Internet-enabled graphical operating system for constrained systems? I have just ported Contiki to the 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontroller, which is commonly used in various kinds of embedded systems, and have set up a demo server running the Contiki AVR software at http://contiki-demo.sics.se/.