Singularity RDK 2.0 released

While a lot of hype have been generated for Windows 7, the research operating system Singularity  from Microsoft Research released their certain version into Codeplex. The OS is written on C#, unlike most OSes nowadays written in C/ C++. I heard although it is hosted in Codeplex, Singularity is not an open source OS. So don’t mistaken it for the likes of Linux and HaikuOS. There are a lot rumours about a secret OS project in Microsoft called Midori which is based on Singularity, but then again its all rumours.

This time to help users to get a feel of the OS within learning how to build the OS from scracth, they included a .ISO file download which is actually a Live CD of the OS. The ISO file can be mounted to VPC and it will work. Below are my screenshots, unlike Windows 7, this is a lot more boring.

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Boot loader starting up

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Kernel starting up

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Initialising drivers?

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Singularity command prompt loaded.

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Get a list of available commands using ‘help’

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Like the DOS days, ‘dir’ is working, but not ‘cd’. Maybe there is a new command name. Still at pre-release stage, there is not much functions on this OS yet, but if you are a research on OS technologies it is worth a good look on some of the new ideas around building OSes.

You might want to find out more here

http://www.codeplex.com/singularity

http://research.microsoft.com/os/Singularity/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Singularity

Are you a PC??

I really like Microsoft’s new I’m a PC ad concept. While its a counter measure to Apple I’m a Mac ad, I’m a PC is more approachable than the former. Now they have a website to upload your own ‘I’m a PC’ quote as well! Now I can wait to get my hand on one of those I’m a PC T-shirts.

 

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By the way, while the new Macbook Pro does come with a couple of innovations, doesn’t it in a way looks like a Sony Vaio? And Steve’s mentioned about they not interested in touchscreen? Between the lines, it means, "we are working on something super secretive about touchscreen which I won’t leak out at the moment"

Copy/ Cut & Paste not working in Vista (sometimes in Windows XP too)

If you have such problem, then it is because the chipboard (the place where your cut/ copy content is stored) is opened by another process causing it not accessable from Windows. To fix it you need to shudown the application/ process.

To find out which process is opening the clipboard you can download the following application called GetOpenClipboardWindow.


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Itchy Hand on Kerberos Service

I was setting up a demo for a talk today. Normally my VPC environment will be 1 Domain Controller (DC) and another server for SharePoint and Visual Studio.

Then out of sudden I went to disable the Kerberos service on my DC just to avoid the startup error created by Kerberos service. Note: VPC start up is slower and for DC, normally Kerberos service startup will timeout but eventually it will get started.

Without Kerberos, I still managed to sign in to my SharePoint VPC with no problem whatsoever. It is until I start developing a VS2008 SharePoint Workflow project, then I realize the IIS restart fails to response until VS2008 returns a SharePoint Server not found error.

It took me a few hours to find out what happen until I check my event logs and realize I notice my SharePoint app pool user try to start certain services but hit authentication error. This is when I realize it must have something to do with the Kerberos service being disabled.

Ta! Ta! Once the Kerberos service got started, everything returns to normal and my day got saved!