OS News Archive

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.

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.

"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.

The SkyOS developers are working on brining lots of new features in the new version 3.6 as you can see here. A new screenshot can be seen here as well. MenuetOS is prepared to release version 0.63 which enables the MTRRs for the Intel LFBs resulting to a much faster GUI. Also, a newer version of FreeVMS was released recently.

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.

Version 1.2 of the Athene Operating Environment is now available from the Rocklyte Systems web site. OSNews featured an exclusive interview with Rocklyte's Paul Manias recently. The new release (read more to see a brand new screenshot from version 1.2) is for Windows only (the Linux version will come in a few weeks) and includes the following changes:

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.

"Palm Inc. has revealed that it will release a 32-bit operating system and devices next year, and that it is gearing up for a fight against Microsoft Corp. to maintain its lead in the enterprise." It seems that Palm is going full speed, with the help of the Be engineers and the Be IP they bought recently from Be, Inc.

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.

Lineo, current holder of the CP/M and DR-DOS intellectual property, decided to open source the two operating systems. CP/M is a legendary operating system of the '70s and '80s, while DR-DOS is a clone of MS-DOS, used by Novell and Caldera at the end of the '80s and in the beginning of the '90s. Get more information at the full story at NewsForge. Update: DR-DOS' source code is only available for a fee.

Interactive Studio has published the QubeOS web site which serves as the developer's web site for Qube application developers. You can also download there the Windows, DOS, and Linux compatible Qube environment and the Windows Qube SDK. An interesting article found on QubeOS web site is about the Object Routing technology, a technology which Michal Stencl has been developing for Qube. OSNews featured an interview with Michal recently. Our Take: A port to FreeBSD would also be desirable.

Niklas Angebrand sent us information regarding the V2 Operating System, an OS written in assembly which was pretty popular 1-2 years ago. "V2_OS is a project which was started by the V2_Labs who wanted a superfast and scalable OS. They then designed a fully modular with its own superfast and supersmall filesystem. This OS got very popular and was soon released under the GPL, and it was even on SlashDot, twice. Now it has come to the point where the old design can no longer be developed further, as it sets many (ridiculous) limits. The new kernel, 0.70, needs coders, and people that know of OS designs. Its goals of design is maximum speed without limits and the tiniest size possible. These design goals are important, but the most iomportant element is the modularity. V2_OS needs you! V2_OS wants you!"

The VMS (Virtual Memory System) operating system is available only on VAX and Alpha processors, and in spite of its undeniable qualities, its future seems uncertain. The FreeVMS project tends to the coding of an operating system under the GPL licence according to the specifications of the VMS systems. This operating system will function at least on i386 architecture, PPC, Sparc and Alpha processors. It is developed using the C language and it consists of a POSIX kernel and a DCL command line interpreter. In other news, MenuetOS 0.61 was released just a couple of days ago.

"The desktop metaphor was a brilliant innovation--30 years ago. Now it's an unmanageable mess, and the search is on for a better way to handle information. If you have ever forgotten what you named a file or which folder you put it in, you probably will agree that it's time for a change. The desktop metaphor is decades old, arising from early-1970s work at Xerox's fabled Palo Alto Research Center, and was never intended to address today's computing needs. TechReview searches for our next computer Interface.