OS News Archive

The GNU/Fiwix project began during the summer of 1997. In fact, even before than I had running around my head the idea to design and implement a new UNIX-like operating system. But it was not until 1997 that it started to become a reality.

Individuals who know what "Multics" is, raise your hand. Now, all individuals who know what a "Multician" is, raise the other hand. (Now lower your hands. Your coworkers are going to think you're a psychopath staring at your computer with your hands above your head.) For those without hands up, Multics is a historic 1965-2002-era operating system, which had a dramatic influence on computers as we know them today. osViews editorial contributor Kelly McNeill, authored an insightful and educational piece about the historic Multics operating system.

ITRON, the first in a series of open-source specifications for the TRON architecture, answered a pressing need for Japan's electronics firms, which traditionally have written their own software for embedded systems. Read the article at LinuxInsider.

Earlier in the month we made a call for contributions, and we had an overwhelming response. Hopefully we'll be seeing some new articles from OSNews readers in the near future. I'd like to announce that we've set up a mailing list for those readers who might be interested in contributing articles and reviews. I'd also like to make a public apology to those people who I mistakenly added to the list. "Read more" for details.

Darma today announced its network attached storage (NAS) operating system for OEMs who manufacturer NAS servers, NAS-SAN gateways, and disk-based backup appliances.

The new VMWare 4.0.5 release introduces internationalization of the shared folders and drag and drop features. These features now support localized guest operating systems, including locales such as Japanese that use double-byte characters. In this release, VMware Tools for Windows guests uses less memory than in previous releases.

OSNews often reports on small and hobby operating systems. Here is a list for you to vote for the one with the right amount of technical and wider success potential for a bright future.

Do you have a favorite OS or distribution with an upcoming release? We'd like you to do a review and publish it on OSNews. We can usually contact the company and get you an official copy of the release to use for your review (usually ahead of its official release, and mostly true for Linux distros). Aren't comfortable with your writing skills? As long as you're comfortable doing the review, an OSNews editor can assist you in making your observations readable. If you're interested, read more.

The FreeDOS Project has released kernel v2032 which fixes a few bugs and adds new features.

Athene 3.2 is now available for download. In conjunction with this release a port of SDL is available, along with a number of games at rocklytefiles.com. ZTerm has also been upgraded to provide full terminal emulation and is now installed by default in the 3.2 release. Rocklyte Systems also announced that the latest release of the freely distributed Athene for X11 overcomes one of the X Window System's most pressing speed constraints. Testing of the new release demonstrates graphics throughput approximately twice as fast as previous releases of Athene, by bypassing conventional X11 programming techniques and using the 'shared imaging' hack to copy graphics to the X video display.

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.

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.

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.

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.