Celebrating Genode's 7th Anniversary Jul 24, 2015

Join our anniversary party at the river Elbe.

It has been 7 years since we officially published the first version of the Genode OS Framework. Like every year, we want to celebrate our anniversary together with you! Every year of our company's history was special. But this year, Genode has finally reached the point where we started using it as our regular day-to-day OS (see below). When we started our company, this was our dream. You can imagine our excitement about our dream having become true.

Let us get together to celebrate our past achievements and the many prospects that lay in front of us! Following the tradition of the past years, we invite you to a barbecue and campfire at the river Elbe (http://goo.gl/maps/C0luj - Google Maps) at the 25th of August, 6 pm near Drachenschänke in Dresden.

Please note the location that changed from last year!

We will accommodate you with a beautiful scenery at the river, a choice of beverages, grilled vegetarian or non-vegetarian food, and the company of the local operating-systems community. If you are going to attend, we would greatly appreciate a short note to info@genode-labs.com from you to ease our preparations.

Genode as day-to-day operating system Jul 24, 2015

Genode has reached the stability and performance needed to be used as a productive and enjoyable OS for daily computing work.

For several years, we have nourished the plan to eventually use Genode as our primary general-purpose operating system. Finally, during this year's Hack'n'Hike event in May, we laid the groundwork to move our daily computing routine from Linux to Genode, with me (Norman) playing the role of the guinea pig. The Hack'n'Hike took place at a magnificent place called "Turmvilla" in Bad Muskau. Hence, we picked Turmvilla as the codename for this undertaking.

Since the beginning of June, Norman is exclusively using a Genode-based operating system on his Lenovo ThinkPad laptop. The key ingredients to make this possible are the NOVA microhypervisor, VirtualBox, the Intel Wireless Stack, Rump-kernel-based file systems, and the Noux runtime. VirtualBox runs GNU/Linux (aka the "Rich OS") as guest OS, which is used for those applications that are not yet directly available on Genode. Thanks to the sophisticated integration features of VirtualBox, the rich OS world and the Genode world are able to interact in a very comfortable way. Noux is used to execute command-line-based GNU software such as coreutils, bash, and Vim directly on Genode. Thereby, it covers the fundamental needs with respect to managing and editing files.

We are happy to report that the system runs stable and fast enough to be productive and to enjoy the daily computing work. The transition was actually much smoother than expected. Given this overly positive experience, the other members of our team will likely follow the precedent very soon. For those of you who are eager to follow this line of development, the Turmvilla system scenario is discussed in more detail at GitHub.

As a word of warning, the current state should be considered as highly experimental. Once it reaches a state that is ready for a broader user base than us regular developers, we plan to publish a proper guide for using it.

Meet us at the Chaos Communication Camp in August Jul 24, 2015

The Chaos Communication Camp will take place during August 13 to 17 in Mildenberg.

Every four years, the Chaos Computer Club holds a hacker camp located at some place in the middle of nowhere. This year, the Chaos Communication Camp will take place during August 13 to 17 in Mildenberg in Brandenburg. A huge crowd of technology enthusiasts will gather to enjoy the company of creative people, learn about all kinds of technology, and work on their projects. Tickets for the event are still available until the end of July.

Among the attendees, there will be a few Genode developers such as Stefan Kalkowski and Norman. If you happen to attend the CCC camp and like to catch up with us, we'd be delighted to hear from you!