In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look Google’s new open source operating system, Intel’s VR HoloLens device, Microsoft open sourcing PowerShell, and more.

Open source news roundup for August 14-20, 2016

Google building Fuchsia, a new open source OS

Google is building an open source operating system called Fuchsia. It’s based on the Magenta kernel, which is designed for embedded devices, mobile devices, and desktop computers. Tech blog Android Police thinks “it will have potential applications in the Internet of Things.” You can find Fuchsia on GitHub.

An interesting detail on Fuchsia, covered by the Inquirer, is that it will run on 64-bit ARM chips and Intel-based systems. And is also expected soon for the Raspberry Pi 3. “The key message here is universality. This could be an all-in-one solution.”

Intel’s Alloy, the first open source HoloLens

Intel will be the first third-party hardware developer to bring a HoloLens VR device to Windows 10. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich introduced Project Alloy at Intel’s Developer Forum in San Francisco last Tuesday. Intel plans to open source the hardware and provide open APIs, allowing everybody to create their own branded products.

Linux kernel 4.7 first point release

This week, kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the first point release for Linux kernel 7.4, version 4.7.1. This comes a month after Linus Torvalds announced 4.7. With version 4.7.1., the kernel will move from the maintenance channel to stable. This release includes enhancements to ARM, MIPS, and x86 hardware architectures, as well as a variety of fixes for the EXT4 and FUSE filesystems.

Greg Kroah-Hartman also announced the 4.6.7 kernel, the last of the 4.6 kernel to be released. He urged users to move to 4.7.1.

Microsoft open sources PowerShell

Microsoft announced it is open sourcing PowerShell, bringing it to Linux and OS X. Available on GitHub under the MIT license, Powershell is introduced as follows:

PowerShell is a cross-platform (Windows, Linux and OS X) automation and configuration tool/framework that works well with your existing tools and is optimized for dealing with structured data (e.g. JSON, CSV, XML, etc.), REST APIs, and object models. It includes a command-line shell, an associated scripting language and a framework for processing cmdlets.

So why did Microsoft open source PowerShell? You can read about that in detail at CIO.com. If you want to have a look at some examples of PowerShell running on Ubuntu, check out this article on Petri.com.

In other news

Thanks, as always, to Opensource.com staff members and moderators for their help this week. Make sure to check out our event calendar, to see what’s happening next week in open source.