ROME is a lightweight, modular, multitasking, embedded operating system which has been developed and used for multiple research projects. ROME was designed to manage high speed data streams within a multimedia environment. The system is highly modular, with functionality split between multiple processes. To ensure a high throughput with minimal overhead ROME provides a zero copy architecture where pointer references to data are passed around instead of data being copied. The goal of this approach is to maximize the utilization of a given hardware configuration. ROME released version 2.01 yesterday.

"AOL Time Warner's Netscape unit is snooping on searches performed by users of its latest Navigator browser at Google and other search sites. According to a network traffic analysis performed by Newsbytes, Netscape is capturing Navigator 6 users' search terms, along with their Internet protocol (IP) address, the date Navigator was installed and a unique identification number." Read the report at NewsBytes. Our Take: Yet another reason to use the original Mozilla and not the Mozilla-Netscap(-ed) package by AOL.

"Software security is a major concern for the high-tech industry, and the most feared and misunderstood software vulnerability is the buffer overrun. Today, the mention of a buffer overrun is enough to make people stop and listen. All too often, the technical details get lost in the transcription, and the general public comes away with a rather alarming view of a rather fundamental problem. To address this problem, Visual (unmanaged) C++ .NET introduces security checks to assist developers in identifying buffer overruns." Read the rest of the article at MSDN.

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.

In an interview with ZDNet U.K., the Linux 'kernel hacker' gives his views on the GPL, 64-bit computing and why grandmothers should want to use Linux. Alan Cox is generally referred to in the open-source developer community as a "kernel hacker"--someone whose programming responsibilities cover the Linux kernel, or core, itself. Thousands of developers all over the world, from hobbyists to IBM engineers, are constantly contributing to open source software, so Cox's role of organizing and applying improvements is vital.

Especially if you're just starting out in embedded development, the wealth of available bootloaders, scaled-down distributions, filesystems, and GUIs can seem overwhelming. But this wealth of options is actually a boon, allowing you to tailor your development or user environment exactly to your needs. This overview of embedded development on Linux on IBM's developerWorks will help you make sense of it all.

The Linux (for Playstation 2) kit is now accepting pre-orders on playstation.com for North America. The kit will allow people to run a fully functional Linux environment on their Playstation 2 computer entertainment systems. If you are a developer, you can also install the SDL gaming libraries for the PS2 and port or write your own games for the popular gaming console.

This document at BSDToday covers the basic steps in building a bootable CD containing a live FreeBSD filesystem with a couple of security features enabled and configured. With this CD, it is possible to transform a PC from a mediocre workstation into a VPN Gateway or firewall or both without touching the hard drive.

"Mac OS X gave us a host of interface enhancements, for better or for worse. Some are seemingly frivolous, such as the whiz-bang animations that dominate Aqua, and others haven proven truly useful, such as the Finder’s column view. Personally, I dig it all." The article at O'ReillyNet discusses the main Aqua enhancements, animated window resizing and the drawers.

This paper presents the results of the test conducted on a 58-node Cluster 1300 system, simultaneously running eight instances of e-Business Trade 2 benchmark tests on Red Hat Linux. This solution mounted in only three racks supported 800,000 users, serving an unprecedented 12,547 requests/sec with an average response time of 0.27 sec/request.

February was a month of rapid growth for Lycoris. Its flagship product, Desktop/LX, has been selling well and attracting worldwide partners. In addition to favorable reviews in the Linux world and surrounding tech community, Lycoris is responding to users' needs by providing Hewlett Packard PCs Pre-Loaded with Desktop/LX. OSNews will be featuring a Lycoris review in the near future.

Embedded developers who choose the QNX RTOS for its unmatched reliability will soon have another reason to use QNX technology: significantly faster development cycles. This is all thanks to the new QNX integrated development environment (IDE), to be showcased next week at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in San Francisco. Show attendees can have a sneak peek at this QNX offering in booth #818.

IBM developerWorks has come out with three articles on OpenSSH, a free version of the SSH protocol suite for network connectivity. The first discusses RSA/DSA authentication, the second introduces ssh-agent and keychain, while the last goes over Agent forwarding and keychain improvements. Its a great resource for someone who needs some encryption.

This week OSNews spoke to the CEO of Vita Nuova Michael Jeffrey. VitaNuova are the publishers of the Plan9 and Inferno Operating Systems. Originally created at Bell Labs, both OS are descendants of the Unix family tree, but they are massively distributed in their nature.