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| 01 Oct 2008 05:59:55 am |
 Google Android |
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Google finally released the first cell phone running on Google Android. This is a T-Mobile G1 model. The phone was demonstrated in September, 2008 and is expected to go on sale on October 22. Lets us first see what Android is and what it is doing here in an operating system blog.
First the history of Android. Google acquired Android Inc, a small start up company in July, 2005. At this time, little was know about the functions of Android Inc other than they made softwares for mobile phones.
Following is the definition of Android given in its home page.
Quote : Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. Android SDK provides the tools and APIs necessary to begin developing applications on the Android platform using the Java programming language.
Features of Android:
- Application framework enabling reuse and replacement of components
- Dalvik virtual machine optimized for mobile devices
- Integrated browser based on the open source WebKit engine
- Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification (hardware acceleration optional)
- SQLite for structured data storage
- Media support for common audio, video, and still image formats (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF)
- GSM Telephony (hardware dependent)
- Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi (hardware dependent)
- Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer (hardware dependent)
- Rich development environment including a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plugin for the Eclipse IDE
Ok, now the best part. Android relies on Linux version 2.6 for core system services such as security, memory management, process management, network stack, and driver model. The kernel also acts as an abstraction layer between the hardware and the rest of the software stack.
Looking forward towards the success of a mobile phone running on linux platform.
Official Site: http://www.android.com
Official Site on Google Code: http://code.google.com/android/
Few snap shots of mobile phone running on Android:
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Category : General
| By : viral |  Comments [0] |  Trackbacks [0] |
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| 25 Sep 2008 06:22:04 am |
| Windows 7: Let's take a look |
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Lets take a look at windows new operating system, "Windows 7: Codename Blackcomb and later Vienna". Windows 7 is expected to be released on June 3, 2009.
Few features of Windows 7 are:
- Windows 7 will ship in both client and server versions with the client versions available in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. The server versions will be called Windows Server 2008 R2 and will be 64-bit only.
- Milestone 1 build of Windows 7 adds support for systems using multiple heterogeneous graphics cards and a new version of Windows Media Center. New features in Milestone 1 also reportedly include Gadgets being integrated into Windows Explorer, a Gadget for Windows Media Center, the ability to visually pin and unpin items from the Start Menu and Recycle Bin, improved media features, the XPS Essentials Pack being integrated, and a multiline Calculator featuring Programmer and Statistics modes along with unit conversion.
- Many new items have been added to control panel including: Location and Other Sensors, Credential Manager ,Biometric Devices,System Icons, Windows Solution Center, and Display.
- In the demonstration of Windows 7 at D6, the operating system featured multi-touch, including a virtual piano program, a mapping and directions program and a touch-aware version of Paint.
- Hilton Locke, who worked on the Tablet PC team at Microsoft, reported on December 11, 2007 that Windows 7 will have new touch features. An overview of the touch capabilities was demonstrated at the All Things Digital Conference on May 27, 2008.
- Windows 7 has impelemented VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) support i.e. support for single-file containers that represent an entire hard drive including partitions, and transparently performing I/O operations on this as a typical hard drive, including boot support.
- Windows 7 will boot fast. Microsoft has aside a team to work solely on the issue, and that team aims to "significantly increase the number of systems that experience very good boot times." They "focused very hard on increasing parallelism of driver initialization." Also, it aims to "dramatically reduce" the number of system services, along with their processor, storage, and memory demands.
Lets see what Microsoft has did to make this operating system better than Vista.
Snapshots of Windows 7:
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Category : Operating System
| By : viral | Comments [0] | Trackbacks [0] |
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| 15 Sep 2008 08:35:04 am |
| Lonngggggg Break |
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| I have not posted any new blog item since quite a long time. Really stuck with lots of things in life. I will try to resume my blogging and will update the blog regularly. |
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Category : General
| By : viral | Comments [0] | Trackbacks [0] |
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| 30 Aug 2007 09:53:21 am |
| Hurd Opearting System Kernel |
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GNU Hurd is a free software computer operating system kernel, released under the GNU General Public License. It has been under development since 1990 by the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation. It consists of a set of servers (or daemons, in Unix terminology) that work on top of a microkernel; together they form the kernel of GNU. The Hurd aims to surpass Unix kernels in functionality, security, and stability, while remaining largely compatible with them.
HURD is a co-recursive acronym, standing for HIRD of Unix-Replacing Daemons, where HIRD stands for HURD of Interfaces Representing Depth.
Thomas Bushnell, Roland McGrath and Marcus Brinkmann are the lead developers of the HURD kernel.
Unlike the majority of Unix-like kernels, the Hurd builds on top of a microkernel which is responsible for providing the most basic kernel services — coordinating access to the hardware: the CPU (through multiprocessing), RAM (via memory management), and other various devices for sound, graphics, mass storage, etc. In theory the microkernel design would allow for all device drivers to be built as servers working in user space, but today most drivers of this kind are still contained inside GNU Mach, the currently used microkernel. That is because initially user-space drivers would have suffered from performance loss, due to the overhead of the Mach interprocess communication. With the performance of today's machines, it is possible that this overhead would no longer cause a significant performance problem.
Hurd's Official Site: http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd |
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Category : Operating System
| By : viral | Comments [0] | Trackbacks [0] |
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| 27 Aug 2007 08:38:17 pm |
| Richard Stallman and GNU |
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Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often abbreviated rms (lower case), is a software freedom activist, hacker and software developer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU project he started the free software movement, and in October 1985 set up the Free Software Foundation. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom. Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against both software patents and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger.
Stallman was born in 1953 in New York City, New York. Hired by the IBM New York Scientific Center, Stallman spent the summer after his high-school graduation writing his first program, a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM 360.
During this time, Stallman was also a volunteer Laboratory Assistant in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Although he was already moving toward a career in mathematics or physics, his teaching professor at Rockefeller thought he would have a future as a biologist.
Stallman announced the plan for the GNU operating system in September 1983 on several ARPAnet mailing lists and USENET.
In 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto, which outlined his motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU, which would be compatible with Unix. The name GNU is a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix. Soon after, he started a non-profit corporation called the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to employ free software programmers and provide a legal infrastructure for the free software movement. Stallman is the unsalaried president of the FSF, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in Massachusetts.
In 1985, Stallman invented and popularized the concept of copyleft, a legal mechanism to protect the modification and redistribution rights for free software. It was first implemented in the GNU Emacs General Public License, and in 1989 the first program-independent GNU General Public License (GPL) was released. By then, much of the GNU system had been completed. Stallman was responsible for contributing many necessary tools, including a text editor, compiler, debugger, and a build automator. The notable exception was a kernel. In 1990, members of the GNU project began a kernel called GNU Hurd, which has yet to achieve the maturity level required for widespread usage.
GNU is a computer operating system composed entirely of free software. Its name is a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix, which was chosen because its design is Unix-like, but differs from Unix by being free software and by not containing any Unix code. GNU was founded by Richard Stallman and was the original focus of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
The project to develop GNU is known as the GNU Project, and programs released under the auspices of the GNU Project are called GNU packages or GNU programs. The system's basic components include the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), the GNU Binary Utilities (binutils), the bash shell, the GNU C library (glibc), and GNU Core Utilities (coreutils).
Richard Stallman's personal homepage: http://www.stallman.org
GNU's official site: http://www.gnu.org |
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Category : Personality
| By : viral | Comments [0] | Trackbacks [0] |
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