Operating Systems

Operating Systems - Unix

My introduction to unix came in college via Digital Unix. After giving linux a spin in its infancy I've been using FreeBSD since around 1995. There is always at least one BSD box in my house, and I've pretty much split my time between NeXT/OS X and BSD since 1996.

Some time around the turn of the millenium, a new version of FreeBSD broke something on the box I was running it on. Broke as in I lost some functionality I had before, or stability was compromised. I don't exactly remember. Anyway I dabbled with linux and Solaris, and just couldn't stomach either. I ended up running OpenBSD for a while, and was happy with it. I engaged in the openbsd-misc mailing list, and as I recall I even had a couple of pleasant conversations with Theo de Raadt. This came as something of a surprise given his reputation, and my feeling at the time was that Theo was a smart guy that didn't suffer fools, and I was just fine with that.

Eventually I said something in a discussion that drew his ire, and he laid into me. I looked for it in the list archives but didn't have any luck finding it to use as an example. Anyway, I was a serious young man at the time and my response to getting flamed by Theo was "FU and F your os, bitch", and I stopped using OpenBSD.

Years have gone by and I'm older now. I don't have any hard feelings toward Theo or OpenBSD. On the contrary, we are lucky to have pioneers like Theo, and I very much respect the contributions that OpenBSD has made to open source and system security. I don't know what made me think of it the other day, but I did, and it gave me an idea.

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Operating Systems - Amiga

Despite having a troubled history over the course of the last 15 years, the Amiga platform has an extraordinarily loyal and active community on the internet. There is an active and excellent Amiga emulation scene for those wanting to experience the classic Amiga system. Amiga web forums abound. The official Amiga OS is on its second revision in the 4.x tree and is currently in active development. MorphOS is another modern operating system that is very Amiga-minded, and has its own following. AROS is a clean slate redesign of Amiga OS 3.1 for x86 and other platforms. The problem with all of the above in terms of attracting new users to the platform is the obscure hardware needed to run the system, or in AROS case, the unfinished state that it is currently in.

The main obstacle faced by the official Amiga platform in recent years has been the legal dispute between Hyperion, the developers of Amiga OS 4.x, and Amiga Inc., the caretakers of the Amiga brand. Hyperion has just announced that the court case has been resolved, overwhelmingly in Hyperion's favor. The decision gives Hyperion control over the legacy Amiga OS 3.1 code and puts them firmly in the driver seat regarding the present and future course of Amiga OS.

This is great news for Amiga enthusiasts, and promises the possibility that the Amiga could once again become a viable, active platform. There's a reason the Amiga presence is as strong as it is after so many years of uncertainty and questionable moves by the people controlling the future of the brand: it's a great system. Hyperion has been hinting that a big announcement is coming. Speculation ranges from a new hardware platform to a port to x86. Whatever direction they choose, the path is now clear for them to drive the Amiga platform forward in the way they see fit. Hopefully they will prove to be conscientious caretakers of the Amiga brand and its future.

Operating Systems - Unix

Apple heralded OS X 10.6 with "0 new features.". The Windows crowd smugly calls Snow Leopard a service pack in order to make themselves feel good about themselves. As a Mac user, I was really excited about 10.6. Sure, no GUI redesign or anything major, but the addition of Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL and nearly the entire operating system getting a 64 bit facelift all seemed like a pretty big deal to me.

On September 10, 2009 Apple released the source code to libdispatch under the Apache license. Today it's been announced that libdispatch has been ported to FreeBSD. 

What's the fuss about Grand Central Dispatch? We're all running multi-processor or multi-core systems for the most part in 2009. For applications to run on more than one processor the burden falls on the developer to make the application multi-core aware. The application is responsible for scheduling its own threads. Otherwise, your operating system may be smart enough to spread the work load out over a couple of cores, but people like me who have an eight core system see their cores idle most of the time.

Grand Central Dispatch gives developers a library that schedules their application's threads across multiple cores without any more work on their part than adding some includes to their code. That is huge. Prior to Grand Central Dispatch only a handful of pro applications utilized multiple cores. Now Mac developers have a ready built library in their toolbox that will make their applications multi-core aware if they choose to include it in future builds of their apps. 

Now FreeBSD has their own port of libdispatch. How long will it be before we have multi-core aware applications that currently only utilize one cpu or core? You can see the possibilities. Kudos to Apple for making their technology open source, and congratulations to FreeBSD for being the first server operating system that will be able to offer the advantages of this technology.

Operating Systems - Other

After eight years in development Haiku released the first alpha of their open source recreation of BeOS today. Haiku R1/alpha 1 is a livecd, so you will be able to either install it to a hard drive or just run it from the cd to give it a test drive.

BeOS was ahead of it's time in many ways, not least of which was it's focus on multi-threading to make use of multiple processors. Be went under before hardware had caught up with their vision, but launching Haiku from the livecd makes you feel like you are picking up right where you left off the last time you were on a Be desktop. Haiku is a complete reconstruction of BeOS, and not just some linux distro with a Be-ish window manager. Like Be, Haiku boots to a usable desktop in less than ten seconds, and is exceptionally responsive and usable even on older, slower hardware and systems with as little as 128Mb of RAM. Haiku also runs well under virtualization if you'd like to test drive it that way. You'll be shocked at how snappy it is, and if you've ever used BeOS it will feel like a flashback.

BeOS had a small, but loyal following. Haiku recreates the Be desktop to perfection as near as I can tell. No support for wireless in this release, but the FreeBSD wi-fi stack has been ported to Haiku. As soon as they merge it into the release, Haiku is going on my laptop. Got a machine that doesn't have bleeding edge specs, but you'd like to run an operating system that performs like it's running on faster hardware? Take a look at Haiku.