OS News Archive

As others looked into the past, ExtremeTech is looking forward to 2003, asking: What's in store for desktop operating systems? Will Linux and Mac OS X go the way of OS/2, or is Windows doomed?

From all of us at OSNews, we wish our readers a happy and prosperous 2003. 2002 was a great year for OSNews. We saw steady growth in readership, a huge effort by Eugenia to make the site better, and constant support and submissions by OSNews readers that kept the wheels turning. The bad economy didn't seem to dampen the action in the OS Arena, and may have even given Linux a boost as people look for more economical solutions. We hope that the world's economy improves, that the technophiles who read OSNews have and keep good jobs, and that ad rates go up. 2003 will probably see the launch of a sister site to OSNews. Please post with any ideas you have on a tech-oriented topic that's under-covered, and we may launch a site to cover it!

Gil Bates wrote "SPIN is an operating system that blurs the distinction between kernels and applications. Applications traditionally live in user-level address spaces, separated from kernel resources and services by an expensive protection boundary. With SPIN, applications can specialize the kernel by dynamically linking new code into the running system. Kernel extensions can add new kernel services, replace default policies, or simply migrate application functionality into the kernel address space. Sensitive kernel interfaces are secured via a restricted linker and the type-safe properties of the Modula-3 programming language. The result is a flexible operating system that helps applications run fast but doesn't crash." More can be found on the SPIN homepage. More on Modula-3 can be found here.

Bochs 2.0 x86 emulator was released today with many new features and support for MMX/SSE/SSE2 and more modern operating systems in graphics mode.

MenuetOS 0.72 released with TCP/IP from Mike Hibbett & demos: OpenGL, 3D Maze, games, GUI appearance setup etc. Additionally, SkyOS has some interesting updates too.

"It's not quite open source, but the makers of the embedded operating system LynxOS have taken a step towards bringing code availablity to their customers. That was the word out of California yesterday afternoon when LynuxWorks announced a new set of pricing packages designed to make LynxOS a more affordable option for those who are considering using the real-time operating system (RTOS) for their embedded projects" Read the full article at All Linux Devices.

One of the great difficulties a hobbyist programmer faces when trying to start the development of his own OS is finding out where to start. Many books describe in-depth theoretical OS concepts, yet noone seems to take a hobyist programmer by the hand and bring him face to face with these concepts. This is precisely what this article aims at doing.

There was a very long break in development of this operating system, and people could only download the boot code and a nearly empty file that promised to contain AuroraOS. But this is over now!

From GNU-Friends: "A new image of GNU (also known as GNU/Hurd) for the Bochs i386 emulator has been available for download since yesterday. It seems to work quite well (as well a Hurd-based system gets). Network, Xfree86 and the new console server are installed and configured, although there are some problems with X. Anyone interested on trying it out should read the included mini-FAQ first."

DeviceLogics said that it bought DR-DOS from the Canopy Group and will upgrade it in Spring 2003 with version 8.0. Read the report at TheInquirer.

The first news report on Athene's upcoming commercial release reveals an all-new accelerated graphics system and a new set of screenshots showing some of the new features of the coming release.

"The release of a production version of the free GNU operating system (OS) has been delayed beyond the end of the year, as the current development version of the system does not support large disk partitions and high speed serial I/O (input-output), according to Richard Stallman, president of the Boston-based Free Software Foundation (FSF)." Read about Hurd at LinuxWorld.au.

Yeah, I might be just re-inventing the wheel here, who knows? But I had this (original? I doubt it) idea a few months ago and I was meant to write about it for some time now. So, my idea is about creating a new operating system that is like none of the current ones. It would be so different, that porting applications from other "traditional" systems wouldn't be possible. But the gains would be much more important of what we would lose by implementing a brand new new system.

It is that time of the quarter again, asking the OSNews readers to participate and send articles for publication. We can guarantee that your articles will be read by many thousands of people, as October saw OSNews becoming one of the biggest "alternative" technology news sites on the web. We are already in the Top-5 in the specific of Linux-related news reporting (according to Alexa.com at least). For October 2002, OSNews hit 2.8+ million page views, with an average of 92,000+ page views per day. So, if you want your voice to be heard, please read our (updated) article guidelines and then send your masterpiece over for publication!