OS News Archive

"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)."

Travis Geiselbrecht, the developer of NewOS, writes in his web site: "Haven't updated this list in a while, but there's a lot of progress being made. Over the last couple of months we've implemented a rudimentary network stack, full dynamic lib support, and work has been started on a real native filesystem. Also a full-fledged IDE driver is in the work. Thanks to all the people that have helped me out." Download the latest version of this young operating system, in a source form here.

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.

"As someone who writes about Open Source, I spend quite a bit of time considering its future in the enterprise. I don't spend much time reflecting on how Open Source can improve on the technology of yesteryear. But there are people who do just that." Read the rest of the story at NewsForge.

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.

"An operating system spanning the Internet would bring the power of millions of the world's Internet-connected PCs to everyone's fingertips". Read the interesting article by David Anderson (SETI@Home director) and John Kubiatowitz (assistant professor at Berkeley Uni). Our Take: I am wondering if Plan9 could actually fit in such an OS model.

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.

"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.

From the press release: "In a move to dramatically broaden the market for handhelds and smart phones, PalmSource, Inc., the Palm OS subsidiary of Palm, Inc., today previewed the Palm OS 5 beta and announced that final delivery of the new operating system to Palm OS licensees is scheduled for early summer. Palm OS 5 will be the foundation to build a new class of devices that will help make mobile computing ubiquitous. Palm OS 5 will bring the flexibility, innovation and ease of use of the Palm OS to powerful ARM-compliant processors. Licensees can choose from a full range of processors, starting with the ARM 7 CPU and scaling to the highest-performance ARM chips from Intel, Motorola and Texas Instruments. In addition, the operating system will deliver enhanced performance, data security, multimedia and wireless networking, as well as compatibility with existing Palm OS software programs ." ZDNews also has an article about it: "The new OS will feature only a modest influence from Palm's acquisition of the assets of Be. Palm executives said future versions of the OS will use more Be technology, although Palm is not continuing development of the Be operating system."

"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.

InformIT.com features two special articles (free registration required), excerpts from the "Modern Operating Systems" book by Dr. Andrew Tanenbaum (who is also the author of Minix - the 'grandfather' of Linux). This book is valued as the Bible of the operating system design and implementation and every serious OS designer/developer has by his/her side. The two free chapters featured, are "A History of Operating Systems" and "Operating System Threads". A must read for everyone and if you are serious into operating systems, you should very well buy the book with no second thought. Our Take: It's that good. Highly recommended by both myself and my husband (who is already largely involved in three operating systems so far).

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."

Friday 11th January saw the commercial release of the THEOS Corona, a multi-user operating system for Intel PCs. Latest in a long line of THEOS products, this updated version of the popular business-oriented operating system includes support for more PCI, USB and PCMCIA devices, enhanced screen objects for different console types, integrated TCP/IP networking, large file system / long filename support, and much more. More information is available from www.theos-software.com (the US developer) or www.theos-gb.com (the UK distributor for THEOS products). THEOS was originally known as the OASIS operating system on Z80 supermicros such as those from Onyx, Altos and IBC. It was relaunched for the IBM PC-AT and compatibles in the mid-1980s and renamed as THEOS. The core development team has remained constant for all that time, with additional development for THEOS Corona being done in Madrid and the Canary Islands.

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.