OS News Archive

"The operating systems debate tends to run on religious lines. In an attempt to shed some light on the issue, we assembled a panel drawn from various parts of the IT community (systems administration, systems integrators, market analysts, academia, and recruitment) and asked them to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of various systems for different network services: mail serving, web serving, database serving, file/Print serving, application serving, network services, staffing issues." So, which operating system is good for what exactly? Read what these professionals have to say at ZDNet Australia.

Last week InformIT had released two chapters from the bible of the operating systems books, "Modern Operating Systems" by Andrew Tanenbaum. This new excerpt from the book (free registration required) provides an introduction to the causes of OS deadlocks. Deadlock can be defined formally as follows: "A set of processes is deadlocked if each process in the set is waiting for an event that only another process in the set can cause."

"Wireless software pioneer Geoworks Corp has thrown in the towel, giving up hope of developing its AirBoss application platform technology and has put it up for sale along with the source code for its GEOS and GEOS-SC operating systems. The Alameda, California-based company said the wireless infrastructure market is "very weak" and, while it will eventually be significant as enterprises adopt mobile data applications, Geoworks simply does not have the financial resources to support development of the AirBoss platform and wait for the market to emerge." Read the rest of the story at TheRegister.

It has been 5.5 months since OSNews is online in this form and we have grown incredibly. The scary part (bandwidth-wise) is that we are continuing to grow incredibly fast. For example, when we started back in mid-August 2001, we were merely receiving 600 page views per day, while January 2002 has awarded us with 23,500 page views per day on average (~740,000 page views per month). I would like to thank you all for participating in this growth and encouraging us continue... news hunting. I would also like to inform you that the site layout of OSNews will change soon slightly and also I would like to prompt everyone who would like to have up to the minute access to OS News and other well known sites (Slashdot, CNet, FreshMeat and 90 more sites) from his/her Windows desktop, to download KlipFolio and the needed OSNews klip file (to get it, browse their Directory page after the necessary registration). Screenshot available.

Descriptive quote from the article: "Multics is a mainframe timesharing OS that started as far back as 1965 and was put to rest after a long life in October 2000. You may be asking why you need to know more about an OS that is no longer in use. The answer to that question is, "You'll never know where you're going if you don't know where you've been." Although this saying is a bit corny, it is especially true of Multics because of its influence on today's mainstream operating systems."

The FreeDOS Ripcord Beta 7 H02 distribution is now available for download. Ripcord distributions are 'semi-official' distributions based on the latest official distribution, but (tries to) contain the latest versions of the available programs.

A reader over at Slashdot noted that the folks making Debian GNU/Hurd have released a new snapshot in 4 CD images. This is up from three CDs in the G1 release we noted in October, although only the first CD is required to install a basic system.

"From our perspective, we believe VMware 3.0 is a big improvement from Version 2.0, which had some technical problems and limitations, a non-intuitive user interface, and required users to edit config files at times to gain added features (much like configuring Linux). It also presented misleading messages occasionally. Version 3.0 brings a big change to the UI, with a cleaner more intuitive look, and more descriptive messages. The help system has been expanded, with far fewer references to the Web (which was a real problem in Version 2)." This is the second part of the excellent two-part article on Virtual Machines and VMWare at ExtremeTech. Read the first part here.

"Ever want to try out a new operating system on your pc without trashing your existing Operating System? Got a legacy application that won't run on your current OS? Are you a developer who needs to test your code on a number of platforms? Would you like to test distributed applications on a network without requiring a server farm? Find out what companies like Symantec and Merrill Lynch know--you can do these tasks with a Virtual Machine (VM) on a single PC." Read the very interesting and in-depth article at ExtremeTech regarding how exactly Virtual Machines work.

Nemesis is an operating system written from scratch (but it does retain some Posix compatibility layer for easy application porting), whose design is geared to the support of time-sensitive applications requiring a consistent 'Quality of Service' (QoS), such as those which use multimedia. Nemesis provides fine-grained guaranteed levels of all system resources including CPU, memory, network bandwidth and disk bandwidth. The OS has been built with the Multimedia in mind, its sole purpose of existance was the delivery and performance of multimedia content in the best way possible. Screenshots are available but read more for information and status of this interesting operating system.

A new source snapshot of RTMK was released today, the first in ten months. This new release includes a totally rewritten kernel and a PowerPC port as well. RMTK is still in early development stages, but the GUI for it is already underway. Crust is its name, developed by the same person who writes RTMK.

A new version for the MenuetOS project. Version 0.62 came out today and it features a new memory model and free-form window shapes (non-rectangle windows). In the meantime, RootLinux 1.3 is ready for its prime time, but its developer needs some FTP space where he can upload the ISO image (around 650 MB) and asks for people who can provide such FTP space.

I was meaning to write a message like this for quite some time and leave it at the top, so more readers can see it. People, STOP complaining when we put up development articles or when we put .NET or Microsoft articles or sci-fi news.

MC emailed us about his own, new, operating system for x86 processors called... BugOS. Latest version is less than one month old, and the OS even has a TCP/IP stack, IDE driver, 64-bit FAT filesystem, a micro-kernel and more. The OS can be booted from a partition, from within DOS, CD-ROM or from two floppies.