OS News Archive

OSNews reader Sylvain Martin writes: "The Clicker Operating system is moving forward. With last release 0.8.0, the system is now able to start user-level programs from another user-level program! This is a major advance if you consider that versions 0.7.x required the user-level program to be embedded within a system module. A pre-compiled demonstration package of 0.8.0 should be made available in a very soon future."

The first source snapshot of Nova, a POSIX server running on top of RTMK, is now available. After just three months of development Nova can now run native applications from a ext2 filesystem mounted on a IDE hard disc. The next thing to do is to get more parts of the GNU C library working, providing Nova with more applications, Johan Rydberg wrote. The sources can be downloaded from savannah.

"What’s New in HP-UX 11i?" The new HP-UX 11i sports an 'Internet-centric' focus for end-to-end e-services. Irene Maltzan covers the major new features of the HP-UX 11i operating environment -including better scalability and availability- in this article. "Example File Systems" This chapter excerpt from 'Modern Operating Systems' book discusses several example file systems, ranging from quite simple to highly sophisticated. "Clustering Microsoft Exchange Server 2000" Ensuring reliability and scalability within your email system can be a trying experience. Let author and columnist Joseph M. Lamb guide you through the construction of a clustered Exchange Server utilizing Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Exchange Server 2000. "What is a Microsoft Cluster?" Let author and columnist Joseph M. Lamb guide you through the various cluster types, and how you can implement clusters that best serve the needs of your application using Microsoft's Windows 2000 Advanced Server. "Optimizing Disk Performance in Windows XP Professional" In this second article on getting better performance from Windows XP Professional, Louis Columbus provides step-by-step directions for increasing disk drive performance on your Windows XP system. Read all these articles at InformIT.

"Building upon its expanding success with the most advanced and open embedded operating systems and tools solutions portfolio, LynuxWorks today announced the general availability of its next major revision to its popular LynxOS real time operating system (RTOS). LynxOS 4.0 raises the bar for RTOS vendors by adding Linux binary compatibility and enhancements in networking, porting support, and performance." Read more at LinuxDevices on the release of LynxOS 4 from LynuxWorks.

As many people noticed, and quite a few emailed us about, the past couple of days OS News has been displaying a great number of pop-up ads. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that OS News thinks that pop-up ads are generally bad, and that we have stopped using the ad broker that was serving the pop-ups. They made arrangements to not display pop-ups at our request, but didn't follow through on their agreement, so we have yanked them until they do. We're sorry for putting our loyal readers through it, but rest assured that we're trying to balance our need to make a little money and maintaining a good experience for our beloved readers. You may still see the occasional pop-up, but we're determined to keep it to a minimum. By the way, if you'd like to provide support to OSNews, so we don't have to resort to pop-ups and other intrusive advertising, there are two easy ways to do it that won't cost you a cent: First, when you buy something--anything--from Amazon.com, use This Link and OSNews will get a small percentage of your purchase, without costing you more. Also, when you're in the market to buy anything, check OS News' Pricegrabber where we also get a little kick-back.

Carson Reynolds writes: "One of the more memorable architectures and operating systems of recent history were the Symbolics Lisp Machine and Genera Operating System. The systems featured such interesting novelties as 36-bit wide processors, hardware support for LISP interpreters, and open source (circa 1986). Those still pining might consider trying to get their own Symbolics system."

Breadbox Inc. has secured a limited number of NewDealOffice 2000 boxes and they are selling them out for $100 USD. Get more info about the GeOS-powered operating system at Breadbox's web pages.

"Franco-Italian chipmaker STMicroelectronics and Philips Electronics agreed on Tuesday to jointly develop and promote a software system for the next generation of interactive set-top boxes and television sets. Philips said STMicro would back the Multimedia Home Platform software in the emerging fight for the supremacy over the next operating system used by cable operators as they unveil new interactive TV services." Read the rest of the report at ZDNews. Update: Ken writes: "The Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) software is not really an OS, but a set of middleware services that provide basic STB functions. It can sit on top of any OS (like pSoS that Philips currently uses)."

InformIT features two interesting articles (free registration required), excerpts from the two books: Modern Operating Systems (again) & WindowsXP Unleashed. "The first general-purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC, had 18,000 vacuum tubes and consumed 140,000 watts of power. As a result, it ran up a nontrivial electricity bill. After the invention of the transistor, power usage dropped dramatically and the computer industry lost interest in power requirements. However, nowadays power management is back in the spotlight for several reasons, and the operating system is playing a role here." Read the rest of the excerpt article from Tanenbaum's book. "Microsoft’s Windows XP Professional and Home Editions can be made to perform faster than their default installed configurations by making a few modifications at the user level. Louis Columbus shows you the steps you need to take to increase Windows XP’s overall performance." Read the first out of ten articles regarding the optimization of WindowsXP.

Attempting to not be out-done by newcomer Microsoft, Nokia announced it will offer mobile phone makers its own development kit and OS, according to a ZDnet article.

"Imagine computers in a group providing disk storage for their users, transparently swapping files and optimizing their collective performance, all with no central administration. But the machines providing this pool of virtual storage dare not trust one another completely. Indeed, a hacker takes over one of them and ruthlessly begins attacking others in the group. But not to worry. Thanks to an experimental operating system technology called Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols, users and their data are protected." Interesting article at CNN, exploring the FarSite project that Microsoft Research and once again exploring the idea and the potential of Distributed Operating Systems.

Breadbox Computer Company, announced recently that they have signed a worldwide non-exclusive licensing agreement with Geoworks, to license the GEOS operating system for use on any and all hardware platforms and devices, including desktop computers, PDAs, smart phones, communicators, set-top boxes, and other embedded devices. Breadbox has been devoted to and particpated in most major GEOS projects for the past 10 years. In other operating system news, Roadrunner, a single-user, general-purpose operating system based on the POSIX standards just had a new release, while MenuetOS, the x86 assembly-only OS, had a release with support for more advanced multithreading. Last, but not least, the SkyOS folks let us know of their latest advancements on their OS, which it seems to be shaping up pretty good.

"Operating systems will become highly distributed and self-healing and will collaborate with applications. Imagine computers in a group providing disk storage for their users, transparently swapping files and optimizing their collective performance, all with no central administration. But the machines providing this pool of virtual storage dare not trust one another completely. Indeed, a hacker takes over one of them and ruthlessly begins attacking others in the group." Read the rest of the story at ComputerWorld.

After more than a week of coding, the updated OSNews design is pretty much done. While a lot of you (including myself) prefered the older, simpler & cleaner design, which was also much faster to load and even rendered nicely on... text-based browsers, this updated design was necessary. We had to expand PriceGrabber (part of the deal) so we can get some revenue to be able to pay for our (always on-the-increase) bandwidth needs, and the only way to do so was to add a vertical bar. Also, we needed to add more menu items (check out the massively updated "OS Resources" and "Advertise" pages), so we had to make the menu vertical (the 765-pixel wide horizontal menu was not a scalable option anymore). UPDATE: I just added better support for Lynx, Links & W3M text-based browsers. *You will have* to load www.osnews.com/home.php instead of the plain www.osnews.com though because the default index.php is actually static (generated on-the-fly every 1 minute) so it won't work with my PHP text browser detection code. UPDATE 2: Better AvantGo support added.