Latest updates

Stanislaw Szymczyk has made AROS self-compilable. This means you can now compile AROS (or its parts) on AROS itself, without the need of any external tool. An almost complete development chain is already available on our nightly builds, while some of the needed tools are available through The Archives. You may read more about this straight from Cogville.

Krzysztof Smiechowicz is making many useful things for AROS. He just ported MPlayer, so we can now watch our favorite movie files in many compression formats, including AVI, MPEG, MOV, DIVX, XVID and many others. MPlayer is a good music player, too.

Paolo Besser has released version 1.0 of his VmwAROS distribution, both as a bootable and installable Live-DVD, and as a pre-configured virtual machine for VMware, introducing many new features. VmwAROS is tailored both to end users and developers, since it includes games, applications, network clients and a complete AROS development chain. Former Amiga users might be interested in AmiBridge, a scripting tool which allows launching AmigaOS applications in UAE straight from AROS.

Michal Schulz has found an issue which prevented AROS from correctly booting on VirtualBOX, and he introduced a workaround. Tomasz Wiszkowski has corrected a really annoying bug in our ata.device, and now we can use CDs and DVDs flawlessly again. But all AROS developers are spotting bugs and trying to fix them. You are welcome to help us using the bug tracker when you find one.

Soon (or late) on an AROS box near you...

We generally don't talk about pending projects on this page. We prefer to announce here only the concrete results we have already reached. It's Christmas, however, so maybe an exception would be nice. Here are some projects AROS developers are working on.

Michal Schulz is working on the mass storage bounty, whose goal is "producing a DOS device that we can mount to use a filesystem on a USB stick". Michal has already got some interesting results, which he talks about in his personal blog. Michal Schulz is also still porting AROS to the Efika PPC platform.

Stanislaw Szymczyk is working on the port an open source browser to AROS bounty. He started with Netsurf, but he turned to OWB. He recently posted a very initial, but promising screenshot on AROS-EXEC.

Krzysztof Smiechowicz, Staf Verhaegen, Markus Weiss and others are working on the AROS ABI v1. You can see some progress in its documentation here.

Matthias Rustler is porting Ignition to AROS, a spreadsheet application recently re-released under the terms of the GPL license. He has already made some interesting progress. This screenshot looks great.

Latest updates

Many things happened during the last summer and AROS developers are constantly improving the operating system:

Paolo Besser has released the new 0.9.1 beta version of his VmwAROS distribution, which introduces improvements in the GUI style and all the following enhancements to system files. New software has been added or updated as well. Once again, the distribution is available in two flavours: a live CD which runs on top of any X86 hardware and can be installed on the hard drive, and a virtual environment for VMware.

Pavel Fedin is working on a Windows-hosted version of AROS. You can read something about his progresses here. Michal Schulz has completed porting AROS to the SAM 440EP board and now he's porting AROS to the Efika PPC platform.

Joγo Ralha is helping us translating catalogs to Portuguese.

Krzysztof Smiechowicz has enabled GRUB2 in the nightly builds, changing the bootloader AROS used from the beginning. GRUB2 allows more options and is much more compatible with modern hardware than its old version, so this change should also reduce glitches AROS had on some configurations at boot time.

Nick Andrews has released Sis 900 and e1000 network drivers for AROS. People with these network cards can now connect to the Internet and communicate with local area networks.

Nick Andrews has also enabled a snapshot function in Wanderer, allowing people to fix windows size and behavior.

Markus Weiss has ported GCC/G++ 4.2.2 to i386 AROS Native. This should help other people developing and porting their software to AROS.

Stanislaw Szymczyk has made huge progress towards AROS self compilation. There are still some glitches to fix, but the day AROS can build itself is near. You can read something about his work at Cogville.

Krzysztof Smiechowicz has completed reviewing AROS API completeness, and now he's working on libraries and other system components. Results are available in our status page.

Randy Vice has quit collecting bounties for AROS: TeamAROS has been closed but all the opened bounties are now managed by a new non-profit organization, Power-2-People. We would like to thank Randy for all the support and time he dedicated to AROS in the past, and give P2P a great welcome. Please keep on supporting AROS through the new bounty system.

accomplished missions

Two big news worth a status update, even if the latest one is a week only old.

Michal Schulz has completed his port of native AROS to the SAM440EP "Samantha" motherboard. For the first time, a non-X86 mainboard is completely supported, making AROS "the" operating system of choice of a whole platform, along with Linux. ACube Systems, producer and vendor of the SAM440EP board is now bundling an AROS Live CD with their flagship product. Early buyers of the Samantha platform can download their version of AROS from Michal's page. People interested in buying this alternative platform can get it this summer at discounted price.

Krzysztof Smiechowicz has completed his efforts to review actual libraries completeness and compatibility with original AmigaOS 3.1 API, with an overall score of 89%. This means that one of the AROS goals is almost reached. You can see the current status here.

Latest updates

Sorry for this status update being so late, however the AROS team is really working hard "under the hood" in order to bring you a better operating system. There is much important news to talk about.

Stanislaw Szymczyk has completed the port of linux hosted flavour on the x86-64 platform, and is greatly helping AROS self-compilation by porting the needed tools. The last one has been the abc-shell, and he's gaining some encouraging results.

Krzysztof Smiechowicz is reviewing AROS API completeness, in order to keep track of AmigaOS compatibility and the whole project's status. You can see the results whenever you want in our updated status page.

Pavel Fedin has greatly improved HDToolBox functionalities: now it can move and resize partitions. These new features, however, still need some testing. Pavel has also ported BHFormat and activated Wanderer options to format disks.

Pavel Fedin, Krzysztof Smiechowicz and Tomasz Wiszkowski are also working hard on our ata.device and ATAPI-related files to get rid of compatibility problems which disallowed AROS to boot properly on some configurations.

Michal Schulz is still working on his SAM440EP porting of AROS. He recently released a working initial beta that SAM owners may try by themselves. Don't place it on other PPC architectures, though, as it won't work.

Gianfranco Gignina has helped detecting and fixing many Zune bugs, and started to work on a portable and more independent version of Wanderer. The project's goal is to allow easy porting of Wanderer to the other AmigaOS-like platforms.

There's a new, valuable implementation of the E language on AROS: it's PortablE, and you should definitely give it a try!

Nick Andrews is writing an Intel Gigabit E1000 NIC driver for AROS, which will allow networking on a wide range of motherboards that integrate it.

Paolo Besser has released the new 0.8b version of his VmwAROS distribution, which introduces improvements in the GUI style and a new dual-kernel feature to allow booting on some configurations. Once again, the distribution is available in two flavours: a live CD which runs on top of any X86 hardware and can be installed on the hard drive, and a virtual environment for VMware.

Distributions

Two AROS distributions have been recently released. VmwAROS LIVE! and a new WinAROS version. The former is a bootable and installable pre-configured environment based on the VmwAROS virtual machine, the latter is a QEMU-tailored virtual machine complete with IDE and updated development environment. More details are available in our download page. Users and application developers are encouraged to download them.

Latest news

Krysztof Smiechowicz and Alain Greppin have provided a public binary native i386 package of gcc/g++ 3.3.1 - based on Fabio's patches, downloadable from the Archives. This is obviously a good news for anyone interested in developing or porting software to AROS, but it is not the only one: on the Archives you can find also the new C++ supporting version of Murks!IDE, AROS' best Integrated Development Environment, brought to us by Krysztof Smiechowicz and Heinz-Raphael Reinke.

It's also time for serious bugfixing. Krysztof Smiechowicz has started reviewing API completeness, while Barry Nelson reviewed, filtered and started managing our bug tracker. Lots of already-fixed bugs have been removed from the list.

Nic Andrews and Alain Greppin have finally implemented grub2 in AROS. Nic showed a nice screenshot on Aros-Exec too. The great news about this, is users can finally get rid of slow FFS partitions and boot system files from SFS ones. This option isn't encouraged yet, however, due to some still existing compatibility flaws with some AROS applications.

Alain Greppin has completed AROS DHCP bounty with his dhclient command. AROS can now get automatic IP address configuration. He also ported TeXlive.

Tomasz Wiszkowski and Michal Schulz are working on the ata.device in order to improve it. Initial support has been added for some Serial ATA chipsets: "SATA controllers supporting legacy operation mode should now be operational (this means we don't have AHCI at this moment)".

Τελευταία νέα

Ο Michal Schulz δουλεύει σκληρά για να μεταφέρει το AROS στην πλατφόρμα SAM440 της Acube System, και έχει να επιδείξει μερικά ενδιαφέροντα αποτελέσματα. Ακολουθεί ένα απόσπασμα μιας πρόσφατης δημοσίευσης του στο blog του: "Αποφάσισα να διαχωρίσω τον πυρήνα (και τις βιβλιοθήκες που φορτώνονται μαζί του) από το χώρο χρηστών. Ο πυρήνας φορτώνεται κάπου μεταξύ των πρώτων 16MB της RAM και κατόπιν επανεντοπίζεται στην εικονική διεύθυνση στην κορυφή του 32-bit χώρου διευθύνσεων. Ο φορτωτής bootstrap δουλεύει με τον ίδιο τρόπο όπως ο x86_64 bootstrap. Τοποθετεί όλες τα τμήματα μόνο-για-ανάγνωση πάνω από τη βάση του πυρήνα, και όλα τα εγγράψιμα τμήματα κάτω από τη βάση του πυρήνα. Επειδή είμαι διάβολος από τη φύση μου, το βασικό σύστημα του SAM440 AROS μου καταλαμβάνει λαίμαργα όλη τη μνήμη κάτω από τη φυσική του τοποθεσία. Αυτή η μνήμη (μερικά megabytes) θα χρησιμοποιηθεί ως η τοπική δεξαμενή για τον πυρήνα και θα αφαιρεθεί από τις λειτουργίες πρόσβασης των χρηστών παντός τύπου."

Ο Nic Andrews εργάζεται πάνω στο Wanderer, με στόχο να το βελτιώσει και να διορθώσει κάποια ενοχλητικά bugs. Αυτή τη στιγμή ο Nic "slowly hacking away at reworking the rendering code for wanderer iconlist class. The intermediate goal is to allow icon windows to buffer the icon/background rendering so, for instance, using the tiled rendering mode for iconlist backgrounds won't cause noticable icon flickering as it currently does". Περισσότερες και πιο λεπτομερείς πληροφορίες σχετικά με το έργο του δημοσιεύονται στο blog του.

Το Internet γίνεται εύκολο

Ο Michael Grunditz έχει επίσημα εκδόσει τις πρώτες δοκιμαστικές εκδόσεις 0.32 του SimpleMail για το AROS Research Operating System. Το SimpleMail έχει τα περισσότερα από τα χαρακτηριστικά που χρειάζεται ένας μοντέρνος client ηλ.ταχυδρομείου, και ακόμα βελτιώνεται. Μπορείτε να κάνετε λήψη της μεταφοράς του στο AROS από τα Αρχεία.

Ο Robert Norris έχει σημειώσει μεγάλη πρόοδο με το Traveller, τον βασισμένο στο Webkit περιηγητή σελίδων web για το AROS. Για να το κάνει να λειτουργήσει, χρειάζεται ακόμα να γράψει κώδικα για κάποια υπολειπόμενα χαρακτηριστικά και βιβλιοθήκες, εντούτοις η Cairo.library μεταφορά του είναι σε καλό σημείο και κατάφερε επιτυχώς να εμφανίσει μερικές ιστοσελίδες σωστά. Ένα πολλά υποσχόμενο screenshot δημιοσιεύθηκε στο blog του.

Αλλα ειδήσεις

Ο Joγo "Hardwired" Ralha έγραψε πρόσφατα μερικούς καλούς οδηγούς χρήσης του AROS. Παρόλα αυτά, δεν είναι ολοκληρωμένοι, και αυτή τη στιγμή ζητά βοήθεια. Τα διαθέσιμα έγγραφα είναι ο Οδηγός Χρήστη του AROS (50% ολοκλήρωση), ο Οδηγός Κελύφους του AROS (70%) και ο Οδηγός Εγκατάστασης του AROS (25%). Μπορείτε να επικοινωνήσετε με το συγγραφέα μέσω της ιστοσελίδας του.

Ο Alain Greppin μετέφερε το TeXlive στο AROS, ολοκληρώνοντας ένα bounty. Περισσότερες πληροφορίες για αυτό υπάρχουν στην ιστοσελίδα του.

Ο Tomek 'Error' Wiszkowski εργάζεται στο Frying Pan, μια εφαρμογή εγγραφής CD/DVD. Δημοσίευσε μερικά screenshots στο AROS-Exec.org. Μπορείτε να κάνετε λήψη της έκδοσης 1.3 για το AROS (shareware) από την ιστοσελίδα εφαρμογών. Για να το κάνει να δουλέψει, διόρθωσε επίσης μερικά bugs της συσκευής ATA του AROS.

...και, για όποιον έχασε αυτό το νέο: Το σύστημα αρχείων FFS του AROS απέκτησε πρόσφατα κατάλληλη πιστοποίηση. Τέρμα πια οι άχρηστες κατατμήσεις συστήματος μόνο-για-ανάγνωση!