skyos

Almost no one has heard of SkyOS so to most of you it’s not really a big loss if it disappears. A quick run-down for those that don’t know what it is:  Robert Szeleney decided to create an operating system and to help fund it he encouraged people to donate money to the project. If someone donated money they were given a beta copy of the operating system.

It sounds like a good deal right? Well the OS was making quite a bit of progress for a while but then it’s purchasers were left without an update and no word from Mr. Szeleney as to what happened.  OSnews decided to post about the OS and the stagnation of the project which then elicited a response from Robert.

To sum it up Robert does not have the time necessary to dedicate to the project and he is trying to decide what to do with SkyOS. The options at this point are either let it die, open source it or release a free version.

All of this comes down to one thing, what do you think should happen to SkyOS? If you were one of the people that paid to test it would you be upset that development has been halted on it?

ros_033_shell_2

ReactOS has released Alpha version 3.8 today of their Windows NT clone operating system.  ReactOS is very different from other operating systems in that their goal is to create a Windows compatible operating system but with entirely original code.

This release is Alpha and as such is not suitible for every day usage but if you want to try it out you can download their Live CD.  This will allow you to boot off of it and use the operating system without making any changes to your own computer.

Changelog:

• Various bugfixes and enhancements to Kernel core services (e.g. registry, system information routines, sync primitives like guarded mutex, IO support and other)
• An initiative has been started to fix the remaining unstable parts of the kernel: Memory Manager, caching code and filesystems driver APIs and other dependencies of Mm
• Introduction of a new Portable Structured Exception Handling mechanism (PSEH 2.0), which is much closer to the native compiler SEH syntax
• A few longstanding bugs are fixed (such as multipartition HDD support by LiveCD, Task Manager CPU graph)
• Various GDI drawing problems were fixed
• A minimal open source version of the KernelDebugger protocol has been implemented, allowing basic MS WinDbg functionality
• CRT and RTL library improvements
• A number of problems were fixed in base system drivers: NPFS, CDFS, FASTFAT, FS_REC, SCSIPORT
• Video driver improvements for better real hardware support
• Ongoing Win32-subsystem work
• Continued work on supporting MSVC
• Build tool chain fixes and improvements (also as part of the MSVC support work)
• Core tools and components shared with Wine were updated to the latest version

Check It Out> ReactOS via OSNews

There is a new operating system making the news today called Phantom which is aiming to knock Microsoft off of it’s throne.  The idea is that it is a real time operating system where the state is always preserved and is instantly on.  The concept is pretty advanced but it has been attempted before by other operating systems however up to this point none of them have gone main stream.

To be able to preserve the state of the machine, snapshots are constantly being written to disk.  With the current implementation of snapshots, modern operating systems need to pause to keep it from being corrupted.  Phantom however has been designed around this obstacle to prevent it from being an issue.  System performance is one of my biggest concerns with the need for this much constant activity.

The operating system is physically functional in it’s current state but the Graphical User Interface (GUI) is not completed yet.  The OS has a long ways to go before it will even have a chance to compete against Microsoft, Apple or Linux.  While Phantom’s creator Dmitry Zavalishin is determined to bring the OS to market it needs to be more than revolutionary for people to buy it.

Marketing is everything when it comes to an operating system and right now Apple and Microsoft have the advantage.  Most normal consumers are unaware that there is anything more than those two and think Linux is only for geeks.

Check It Out> Phantom via The Register