Pyxis 2 is a recently released new embedded operating system. The first Pyxis OS would run on an arduino with a touch screen, and provided a nice GUI. Pyxis 2 on the other hand has departed from most of its predicator, and is now made on top of the .NET micro framework, and natively supports FEZ Cobra and ChipworkX systems. It supports 320×240, 480×272, even 800×480 (if you have the ram), LCDs.

Some of the features of the OS include alpha blended desktop icons, file dialogs, prompts, input, color selection, file box, buttons, all the standard stuff to construct your applications, support for network, USB, SD and Mp3. Since it is .NET you can also use C# visual studio to construct everything without dedicating yourself to hardware until you are ready.

Join us after the break for a short video.

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Since its first debut three years ago, ROS has been gaining some popularity with the robotics folks.  It’s behind the scenes of those impressive quadcopters you may remember from a while back.  ROS helps abstract the lower level functions of a robot by supplying lots of code for commonly used components (wiimote for example). Being an “operating system”  it comes with lots of nice features you would expect, like a package manager.  It’s open source and many of their projects are well documented making it easy get started.

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A new operating system, code named Barrelfish is being developed by Microsoft research labs and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. This operating system is being built with multi core operations foremost in priority. It is supposed to be extremely scalable and able to function on a very wide range of hardware. You can download the current snapshot of it on their site and dig into the source code, released under a 3-clause BSD style license. If you would like to learn the primary differences between this OS and Windows or Linux, you can read this PDF.

[via Engadget]

[Irongeek] has been working on changing the OS fingerprint of his Windows box. Common network tools like Nmap, P0f, Ettercap, and NetworkMiner can determine what operating system is being run by the behavior of the TCP/IP stack. By changing this behavior, you can make your system appear to be another OS. [Irongeek] started writing his own tool by checking the source of Security Cloak to find out what registry keys needed to be changed. His OSfuscate tool lets you define your own .os fingerprint file. You can pretend to be any number of different systems from IRIX to Dreamcast. Unfortunately this only works for TCP/IP. Other methods, like Satori‘s DHCP based fingerprinting, still work and need to be bypassed by other means. Yes, this is just “security through obscurity”, but it is something fun to play with.