OS News Archive

Jaluna introduces its first product, Jaluna-1, a suite of Real-Time software components. Jaluna-1 is based on C5, the 5th generation of Sun Microsystems' ChorusOS product. Millions of units of ChorusOS operating system products are shipping worldwide in the UNIX, telecom and network devices markets. Beyond Jaluna-1, future Jaluna Software Component Suites will leverage other Open Source technologies including Linux, Eclipse and Java.

Recent research on reconfigurable hardware designs has highlighted novel ways in which computers can dynamically change their structure to increase performance and density. However, work has only just begun to develop operating systems that can exploit theses types of hardware. Akin to hitting a moving target, making stable operating systems that can adapt to rapidly changing hardware will be an interesting challenge to operating systems researchers.

A new release for the JTMOS. The changes are, according to Jari's changes description to Freshmeat, "A TCP/IP stack (uIP) has been added. JTMOS now answers to ICMP pings. Major fixes were made in the SLIP driver. A working and usable WWW server was added and tested. A telnet server has been introduced. Many interrupt related problems have been fixed. A snake game called 'Greedy Snake' has been ported to JTMOS. Split partitioning support for the first floppy disk drive was added, which allows a file system to be placed on the same disk as the system loader and system image."

RISCOS Ltd have been busy bees over the summer and the fruits of their work are now available for all subscribers to download. RISC OS Select 1 was a step up from RISC OS 4.0 and Select 2 shows as much improvement again. As the Select site reports, the beta version of Select 2 is now online for download if you're a Select subscriber. A full stable CD based release is expected in 3 weeks time.

There is more to OS life than just Mac, Unix and Windows. Robert Szeleney did some good work for the past few weeks, porting Quake I and II to SkyOS, GCC and binutiles and developing a text programmer's editor to help him further develop the OS on a self-hosted environment. In the meantime, Marcus Overhagen continues to develop for OpenBeOS a MediaKit clone off the original BeOS, while MenuetOS gets lots of advancements in networking lately, same as TriangleOS does (expect a new version and a kernel re-write too for this new OS). Additionally, Syllable gets a CVS freeze in preperation for version 0.4.2, while Daryl Dudey continues his truly remarkable work on Syllable's preference panels.

Old-ish articles over at TheHaus, but a good read for the weekend. The VAX Files, Part 1: The Beginning, The VAX Files, Part 2: Getting the Hardware and Software, The VAX Files, Part 3: Installing OpenVMS. OSNews hosted an article about VMS as well, a few years ago.

Anyone knows of really cheap but good (==stable) server hosting with about 100 MB of web space and at least 25 GB of bandwidth allowance per month? Please let us know, as we are completely out of bandwidth for the month (this is why screenshots for older articles do not work anymore, our mirrors for images are disabled). Because of the way our mirroring system works, the server should support direct linking to files (not to require to load images together with ads or via web page instead of direct linking), while SSH support is surely preferrable but not required. If you are a hosting provider and you would like to sponsor us for an exchange of a linked logo/button on our site, we are open for discussing the possiblity. We do not need fancy features (eg. mysql, php), just LOTS of bandwith for cheap!

PaulOS is a low-latency, single-threaded embedded operating system for 16, 32, and 64-bit microprocessors. It is written to allow applications to be developed under GNU/Linux or FreeBSD and then recompiled for the target platform. It features POSIX file descriptors, a TCP stack (LwIP) with BSD socket API, an ANSI C library, and a DNS resolver library. A number of GNU/Linux network applications have already been ported.

"This project started with a simple dual boot between Windows 98 and 2000. Then I added some Linux distributions and BeOS. Somewhere along the line, adding operating systems became an obsession. I wanted to see exactly how many I could stuff in one box. It also became a project to prove people wrong. Many people told me that what I achieved could not be done." Read the original article at TechTV and the interview with the OS geek, Richard Robbins, at MaximumPC.

"With all the publicity that Windows and Linux get, you may be forgiven for not being aware of a number of other operating systems. Yet there are many other choices that I find interesting and as useful alternatives. Five Desktop Alternatives..." Read the article at Byte.

Justin Armstrong wrote JaysOS, a "toy OS" that runs on the Gameboy Advance. It provides preemptive threads, semaphores, condition variables, and message queues. As of 0.2, it also includes a port of the Waba VM for Java bytecodes. Waba comes with a few interesting demo applets you can try out. The OS apps interact with the world using the "UI Manager". Screenshots and more information available.

Athene 2.0 has been released today for the Windows platform. New features include audio and music support, faster graphics, more effects and higher stability. The Linux version is also updated, but released as v1.4 (same features but no audio support). Download here.

"In early 1986, a team in Apple's Advanced Technology Group began a research project that was code-named Pink, with the goal to create an operating system for the next generation of computers. In 1990, the project became TalOS—the property of Taligent—a joint venture between Apple and IBM. In 1994, Pink's OS dreams died as Taligent redirected its efforts toward CommonPoint, a non-OS application environment which would exist as a layer on other operating systems (as an API)." Old, but good read. More information about the OS who's heart stopped beating around 1997 can be found here.

Read more to vote for the operating system that should have been the Next Big Thing (TM), but that never happened for whatever reason. Please make sure you vote an OS based on its *technical capabilities*, not because you used to be its user when you were 16, or because you like its background color, or because you heard good things about it once. Vote for the one that you truly think it was technically superior at its time.