FSF (Free Software Foundation) 
 

GLUnix (University of California, Berkeley)
Group Members: Thomaas Anderson, Doug Ghormley, David Petrou, et al.
Currently, modern workstation operating systems do not provide support for efficient distributed program execution in an environment shared with sequential applications. The goal of our research is to pool resources in a NOW to provide better performance for both parallel and sequential applications. To realize this goal, the operating system must support gang-scheduling of parallel programs, identify idle resources in the network, allow for process migration to support dynamic load balancing, and provide support for fast inter-process communication.

Grasshopper (University of Sydney) Group Members
http://www.gh.cs.su.oz.au/Grasshopper/index.htm 
Despite the fact that the basic idea behind orthogonal persistence is very simple, research groups are finding it extremely hard to develop scalable and efficient persistent stores. One of the major difficulties derives from the fact that persistence provides a fundamentally different model of computing from that supported by conventional operating systems. In this project we are investigating the requirements of an operating system to support persistence and propose to design and construct a new operating system, known as Grasshopper, which has explicit support for persistent systems.

GUIDE
Guide (Grenoble Universities Integrated Distributed Environment) is an object-oriented distributed operating system for the development and operation of distributed applications on a local area networks connecting workstations and servers. Guide is a joint project of Bull and the IMAG Research Institute (Universities of Grenoble), which have created the Bull-IMAG joint Research Laboratory. It also has strong links with the COMANDOS Esprit Project (Construction and Management of Distributed Open Systems) and the BROADCAST Esprit Basic Research project.

GUI (Graphical User Interface) 

 

If the OS is the interface between the machine and its different users (programmer, system administrator, end-user), then the GUI is the interface between the OS and the end-user.Strictly speaking, the GUI is not part of the OS, but is the operating environment (OE). 
     The generally used GUI today - the WIMP paradigm (Windows Icons Mouse Pulldown menus??) - was invented at Xerox PARC in the project Star. 
    Commercially,  MacOs was the first (??) to fully integrate OS and OE.  MS-Windows including Win98 is still based on a separate MS-DOS (6.0), but this is "transparent", i.e. irrelvant to most of the users most of the time. 
     In  Unix space the distinction is more clearcut, as there are several GUIs to chose from for over your OS. UNIX Windowing Systems include Common Desktop Environment (CDE), Open Windows (Sun's older windowing system), X-Windows (the MIT UNIX windowing system), X11/Motif (not a real GUI, but rather a terminal-multiplexer) and X-Free. 
     The user surface evolved from the 1D command line shell via 2D windows to a first 3D OS (on SGI's O2). 
 

Xerox: Beyond the WIMP paradigm (Windows, Icons, Menus, Point and click)  

Inxight Software, Inc. was established in 1996 by Xerox Coporation as part of the Xerox New Enterprise business initiative. offers two families of products -- LinguistXtm and VizControlstm -- which are, respectively, next generation natural language processing components and visual user interface components that provide the fastest, easiest way to make information make sense. 

Open Group's X Window System 

   X Window System and OSF/Motif 
     http://www.rahul.net/kenton/xsites.htm  

Xfree86,  a free implementation of the X Window System that runs on Unix, Linux, and OS/2, traditionally focused on Intel x86 but now also supports other platforms. 
http://www.xfree86.org    
    
Window Maker, an X11 window manager supporting GNUstep 
http://www.windowmaker.org/ 

Wine (Windows Emulator aka Wine Is Not an Emulator) 
will allow UNIX users to run MS Windows applications on an x86 hardware platform  see Windows
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/comp/os/linux/answers/windows-emulation/wine-faq 

Rochelle Kleinberg: Designing the Social Interface   
http://www.onlineoriginals.com/interfsy.htm 

GGI (General Graphics Interface)
GGI-Home
GGI stands for "General Graphics Interface", and it is a project that aims to develop a reliable, stable and fast graphics system that works everywhere. We want to allow any program using GGI to run on any platform requiring at most a recompile. 

It all started out with some people being annoyed by the fact that graphics in Linux means either X or svgalib, and if you use both at the same time, you can easily crash the graphics card and make the system unusable. Nowadays, GGI development also involves a portable userspace library, 3D graphics, and anything else that is fun to hack :-) 
 

All about OSs