The Inquirer’s top ten trends of 2008, unshockingly, suggests that virtualisation won’t go mainstream next year.

Simon Collis, editor of esotechnica, expresses no surprise: “virtualisation is gaining slowly among those sort of people who like this kind of thing.  But for those who don’t, it’s no big deal.”

Peter Stringfellow, London nightclub owner and entrepreneur, wasn’t consulted for this post, and didn’t decline not to uncomment.

“Well,” said an unnamed spokesperson for a company that preferred not to be named at some yet-to-be-revealed point in the near-to-distant future, “this doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already not know.”

Spokepeople for companies not mentioned in this article didn’t forget not to uncomment on this article.  Or not.  As the case may be.  Or may not be.

Apparently several people still remain unshocked by this non-unobvious prediction.  “I remember”, says Craig Deeplimaydup, “when they told me that this was true.  It sounded fairly right to me,” said the fictional member of staff of whatever it was.

Source: Brown.  Not HP.  It’s totally different.  Trust me.  Ask anyone who likes sauces.

I remember running OS/2 Warp 3 back in 1994, on the most powerful machine in the company – a 486DX running at 33 MHz with 8MB of RAM – and really enjoying the experience.  And actually using it in anger to do proper work with as well, using the Windows 3 (blue) edition.

The one I bought off eBay is the red one – no built in Windows 3 layer – but it works nicely for me (using FreeTCP, of course).  What is fairly timely (or was, a month ago) is a second round of petitioning from the OS/2 World site to open source OS/2 to be sent to IBM.  Sure, there is still development on OS/2 – Serenity Systems continue to develop eComStation, and have recently issued version 2.0 release candidate 4 – and there’s still a few great OS/2 download sites around as well.  You can still get all the fixpaks and the device drivers from IBM’s ftp site (not available on the website any more), there’s still hobbes (although sadly leo seems to have disappeared), and that’s about 6GB there for your downloading pleasure (or otherwise, depending on your inherent level of patience…  if you’re using Windows, I recommend FTPSync, by the way – not updated for ages but works fine on Vista.)

Virtual PC Guy has an excellent guide to installing Warp 3 in Virtual PC 2004 – in Virtual PC 2007 there’s nothing much changed, except turn hardware-accelerated virtualisation off before you start.   And of course, you can get Firefox for OS/2 quite easily (much easier than IBM Web Explorer, Netscape 2.02 or Netscape 4.61, none of which I was able to find).

A few quick open source links for you today.  First up is darrelljon’s excellent post to the Ubuntu forums, listing Linux distros by size (my favourite of which is Damn Small Linux, personally).

Then there is The Inquirer‘s guide to free operating systems. Told with their normal humour and satire, of course.

Finally – and saving the best to last – there’s the new Open Source Living website, which lists a lot of open source software in a nice, easy to read interface. It’s nearly all quality stuff, though no doubt there will be one or two missing bits and pieces as it’s still very new, so suggest your favourite piece of open source.

Anyway, a belated Merry Christmas to my readers, all both of you, and a happy new year!

The source code for Multics has been released now, “for any purpose and without fee”. The importance of this operating system can’t be underestimated; so many things we take for granted as standard features in modern operating systems were either invented for, or pioneered in, Multics: dynamic linking (DLLs, basically) and online reconfiguration (plug ‘n’ play, but more so: you could even add and remove CPUs while the system was running!) to name but two.

What really set Multics apart though was its security level, which was higher than any system at the time, and is still the only operating system to reach the B2 Orange Book security rating from the National Computer Security Centre (part of the NSA). It was also one of the first – if not the first – OSes to be written in a high level language. PL/I, to be precise (a language notorious for being really hairy).

The significance of the source release is this: Multics, which only ever ran on a specific set of mainframes, may yet come alive again. Possibly the most secure operating system of all time, and certainly one that was beloved by its operators (who call themselves Multicians), may be coming to a PC near you in the next couple of years, but this time as a free, open-source operating system. All it needs is someone to start the ball rolling and start a project on sourceforge… any takers?