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New OS from Google – Google Chrome OS »

The web is the platform! Google is introducing a new OS based on the Linux kernel, primarily “designed for the web”. And you are wrong, if you think that we are talking about Android here.

Google is launching a new OS, called Google Chrome OS and this is not targeted at the mobile market. Well, we all know that Google is pretty obsessed in moving our applications to the web. And what else could be a better way than building an OS, that is specifically designed for the web?

Google Chrome OS, from ground up, is built to be secure and fast. Aren’t there times where checking for new emails is quicker and easier on a mobile phone than booting up your laptop? Well, that’s what Google seems to be addressing with Google Chrome OS. It wants to keep the OS lightweighted, so that the boot process does not take too much time.

Before you start wondering on where to download, note that it is not yet PC ready. Google plans to open source the OS later in this year and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Well…I do like this development. I am sure I will set up a boot loader, which will boot the Google Chrome OS as the default option. This will make all web based things easy and quick to load. If I really want to load Windows, I could do that too, but it would then be as often as I go to the BIOS…only when I really need to go there!

Proxies can be a bigger pain »

If you think that setting up a “transparent proxy” is a pain (setting up ACLs, iptables redirect etc), you now have a compelling reason not to use proxy at all

As per Associated Press article, US is considering stiffer sentences for using proxies in a crime, even the common ones we use today. But proxies, just like routers, are so common these days that many of the users don’t even know if they are using a proxy or not. What concerns me is that if a user does some thing unknowingly, even because of some malicious software, this new guideline might cause more pain. You can read the article here.

ext4 file system – Intro and Benchmarks »

I did not use the minixFS, but I did get a chance to use all other Linux file systems as they evolved. With ext4 without the experimental tag, we can see it as the default linux file system in many distros before the end of the year.

Here is an interesting article from Linux Magazine, talking about ext4′s benchmarks. It also briefly covers the history of linux file systems and their size limitations.

Here is the interview with Theodore Ts’o about the design goals for ext4.

Microsoft and Red Hat virtualization deal »

Less than two years back, Microsoft claimed that software like Linux, violates its patents. You can read all about that here. But lately, Microsoft is changing its approach towards the Open Source community. I recently posted about Project Stonehenge here.

Now, Microsoft and Red Hat signed agreements to test and validate server operating systems running on each other’s hypervisors. You can read more about it here. This is a very good development because customers can now get support for the OSs on the virtualization platforms.

Linux, a Seventeen year teenager »

Time just flies by. Linux is now 17 years old and it has turned out to be a responsible teenager. Almost every company today uses Linux one way or the other. It boosted the open-source movement and made almost all big, commercial companies to embrace it in one way or the other. Here is the original post where Linus Torvalds announced Linux on 5th Oct 1991. I am sure Linus would not have visualized this kind of global approval to his OS; but he must be a very satisfied man today and…so am I, for foreseeing the potential in Linux and using it in the last 12 years. I am sure there will be lot more good things to happen to Linux in the next few years, saving us all a lot of money and time.