Hardware

Michal Schulz has advanced the Pegasos/PPC native port: working bootup.resource, partially written openfirmware.resource, full exec.library, full oop.library (though some conflicts remain with kernel.resource), partial kernel.resource (external interrupts are not handled at the moment, and thus the scheduler doesn't have a timer which could feed it). Unfortunately he won't be able to work much on AROS during the next few months.

Sebastian Heutling has worked on the Linux/PPC hosted port, up to the point where AROS can be nearly built out of the box, except for a couple of math libraries.

Native C/C++ compiler

Fabio Alemagna did it! After a month of hard work to improve our C library (POSIX semantics handling) and to port the huge beast known as GCC, we now have a working port of GCC 3.3.1. Thanks to TeamAROS and to the donors, Fabio won a deserved bounty. No more excuses to not port your Amiga programs to AROS, be them coded in C or C++ :) Help with ports of various *nix utilities is also welcome.

The next goal? Probably to have a POSIX environment complete enough to be able to recompile GCC within AROS itself.

User Interface

Adam Chodorowski and Georg Steger integrated back a recent version of MorphOS intuition library.

Georg Steger implemented a lot of missing Zune (our GUI toolkit) classes: Dirlist, Volumelist, Poplist, Popscreen, Levelmeter, Crawling, Knob. He also implemented help bubbles.

The Installer utility now has a Zune GUI and supports localization, thanks to the work of Henning Kiel.

Fabio Alemagna and Adam Chodorowski have worked on a GUI for UAE (Amiga emulator), which is still work in progress but coming along well :).

Miscellaneous

• Sebastian Heutling fixed the AFS filesystem, which solved many problems under i386-native, eg. during the AROS installation. Also his work has been supported by TeamAROS.
• Staf Verhaegen continued his streamlining of the build system, and also fixed some issues with the diskfont library.
• Iain Templeton is working on BSD based TCP/IP stack. As a side effect, he improved the compatibility of our C library with existing standards.
• Sebastian Bauer is working on an Amiga and AROS port of lwIP, a lightweight TCP/IP stack primarily designed for embedded systems.
• As usual, lots of bugs and other leaks have been corrected here and there. Special mention to Georg Steger for his awesome bug fixing abilities!
• This is only a digest, lots of changes and additions have been silently ignored in this report. Full story is available through our CVS commitlogs mail archive.

Screenshots

As usual, along with this status update there are new screenshots showing some of the new stuff that has been done in the latest few months. You can find them here.

TeamAROS

TeamAROS showed to be a great success, many bounties have been successfully completed and more are waiting to be picked up. Be sure to check their page out and see if there's any bounties you'd like to donate to, or even start a bounty of your own!

Hardware

Michal Schulz is still working on the PPC port, having received the Pegasos board donated by Genesi, and more recently a Voodoo3 card donated by Randy Vice.

Johan Grip is implementing the OpenPCI specification, and also reworking our buggy ide.device, which attempts to write too much data at once instead of splitting the requests in smaller chunks. However this is going to be more a rewrite than a bug fix. If someone just wants to do the bug fix, there is an open bounty (currently 40 USD) for the ide.device bug at TeamAROS.

Build system

GCC 3.2 is now the minimum requirement to compile AROS, which now compiles fine with GCC 3.3, thanks to Stefan Reinauer and others who fixed the various deprecated bits in the tree.

Staf Verhaegen continued to improve and simplify the build system. Lately, he reorganized the kernel build to use only objects, no more static or shared libraries.

Iain Templeton, one of our South hemisphere developers, did his fair share on the build system too, especially on the configure scripts (which now require autoconf 2.53, hopefully a generated configure is kept in CVS for those missing it) and to ensure that AROS compiles and runs fine hosted on FreeBSD.

Also mawk (which comes as default on Debian GNU/Linux) will generate incorrect headers while building AROS, but GNU awk (gawk) and FreeBSD awk work fine.

i386-pc Installation

John Gustafsson and Adam Chodorowski earned the first TeamAROS bounty for their "Automated Disk Prep and OS Installer". It will install AROS on the first disk of the first IDE channel. Don't try this on a disk with valuable data anywhere on it, you've been warned. Unfortunately it isn't fully usable yet, due to the ide.device bug: some files get corrupted during installation.

As part of this work, new Format and Partition commands were implemented.

User Interface

We now have a beautiful About dialog, thanks to Pixel Art's logo and Adam for the code, as well as an in-progress Mesa port by Nic Andrews. And before you ask, the beautiful Broken.miho wallpaper is here.

Adam did major improvements to the workbench and icon libraries (which handle much of the "under the hood" desktop work), and also to Wanderer itself. The framework for Wanderer commands is in place, and there is already the Delete tool implemented.

As a bonus, there is now an identification hook in icon.library to display proper icons depending on the file type and take appropriate action on double-click, for files without disk icons.

Sebastian Bauer added arbitrary angled gradients to Zune images.

David Le Corfec, Adam and especially Fabio Alemagna, who came up with a multitude of ideas and algorithms, brainstormed on a "perfectly" MUI-compliant implementation of Zune layout algorithm. Hopefully the new one seems to do the trick.

The Zune string gadget also got a rework and is now slightly more usable, the prefs program got a few more pages, and many Zune classes were put in their own loadable modules.

Georg Steger implemented the Cybergraphics' WritePixelArrayAlpha() and BltTemplateAlpha(), so we can show even more eye-candy, with alpha blending this time :) Adam used this to implement a nice grayed-out disabled effect for Zune gadgets, instead of the usual grid pattern.

Georg is also porting back the intuition.library from MorphOS, and still does a lot of impressive bug finding and fixing elsewhere, which for example led to find and report an longstanding bug in stipple drawing to the XFree86 project. And when you're faced with a strange memory corruption, try his invaluable trick : call a check routine in the scheduler ! This allowed to fix bugs in several Prefs programs.

But maybe the best for the end ... With BltTemplateAlpha() to blend the anti-aliased glyphs, and the work from Staf on freetype2, diskfont and bullet libraries, TrueType fonts now work - and look - great! It also draws upon the work of many others, including the MorphOS team (and especially Emmanuel Lesueur) and the FreeType project. The Bitstream Vera font family is now included in AROS.

Use FTManager to install TrueType fonts in a few mouse clicks, and enjoy the new Font Prefs program.

Localizations

We got a Spanish keymap contributed by Albert Astals Cid, several French catalogs by Olivier Adam and Hungarian catalogs, language and country files by Mark "Bôregér" Balogh.

The applications localization system has been cleaned up a bit, and as a side effect, much more applications are now localized. So if your favorite application has been localized but misses a catalog for your language, don't hesitate to send it to us!

TCP/IP

Will be available next week. Nah, just kidding ;-) One of the most requested features. A couple of people are working part-time on this, so don't hold your breath. This is a huge task, spanning from low-level drivers to interface libraries and support applications. It's currently not the priority for most of the developers. Use another network appliance in the meantime, or come join us :)

Softwares in contrib/

As usual, some new software or updated versions were imported in contrib:

• UAE 0.8.22 (a Zune GUI is planned)
• the free DeluxePaint clone 4P 0.09
• TCC 0.9.19 : you can now directly create AROS executables!
• GNU tools : make 3.80, diffutils 2.8.1, patch 2.5.4, grep 2.5.1, m4 1.4
• abcm2ps 3.7.1
• sploiner 1.0,

Miscellaneous

• After some benchmarking, BOOPSI method calls were optimized using macros, and are now about 20% faster.
• Roughly 2000 CVS commits since the last status update, with a record of 1063 in July. Check it there. So obviously this status update is not exhaustive.

Web

You may be interested in this OSNews interview posted on 2003-08-05.

Hardware

Johan Grip received the Pegasos board at the end of April, installed Debian GNU/Linux on it, and started working on the hosted AROS port. However he was no longer able to continue for personal reasons, so he sent the board to Michal Schulz, another talented hardware hacker.

In the meantime, Michal, who already had a PPC PReP board, worked on the native PPC port. He merged his sources in the AROS CVS tree, creating the new 'arch/ppc' directory. To this day, he went as far as implementing task handling and scheduling. Congratulations Michal! Sources as well as a PReP boot image can be found at http://home.tu-clausthal.de/~misc/AROS.ppc.tar.bz2

Michal is also reworking exec.library to make it hardware/platform-independent, by moving dependent stuff in resources like kernel.resource, OpenFirmware.resource ...

Build system

No fundamental changes to this sometimes hated system, but lots and lots of little bug fixes and improvements by almost every active AROS Team member in tools, config files, makefiles ... So much activity caused quite a few broken nightly builds, but it seems now stabilized.

Also the newer gcc 3.3 that got installed on the build machine led to some problems, but nothing that couldn't be handled.

We now use bzip2 instead of gzip, and a custom, simpler package format than tar to create the AROS floppy and squeeze every possible byte. In the quest to more space, some less useful programs were removed from floppy. Thanks to Adam Chodorowski for the cleanup and optimizations!

i386-pc Installation

The installer for the i386 native port, install-i386-pc, is currently broken, but a graphical bootsector installer is in work, as well as a bootmenu editor, courtesy of Sebastian Heutling, who also still works on the HDToolBox partition editor.

User Interface

Adam Chodorowski began to work on the Zune custom class PreferencesWindow.mcc which implements the AROS standard prefs window buttons and look.

Paul Smith continued his huge work on the next iteration of Wanderer and the underlying desktop.library. It draws icons, and different views are possible (large icons, small icons, details).

Fabio Alemagna added horizontal and vertical color gradients to Zune images. Take a look at the obligatory screenshot!

By default, the Boot Shell is now closed after Wanderer is started. To open a new shell, use the Wanderer/Shell menu item, or use Amiga-W shortcut (Amiga key is the right Win key on pc105 keyboards)

Localizations

Thanks to Olivier Adam for his French translation of dos.library catalog, and to Paulo Silva for the Portuguese keyboard description (which Georg Steger implemented).

Miscellaneous

Some miscellaneous things that have happened:

• Staf Verhaegen continued to work on diskfont.library.
• Stefan Berger worked hard on ports of gtlayout.library and term 4.7, which can be found in contrib.
• Adam Chodorowski imported AHI 5.8 in AROS CVS, following Martin Blom's release of the AROS port.
• Georg Steger worked on the unix hosted kernel to allow nesting supervisor, so that signals occuring during a signal handler execution are not ignored. It should improve the stability of the serial device.
• and of course, lots of fixes here and there by many developers : for a rough idea, already more than 350 CVS commits this month (although we won't beat the record of 890 last month, according to the AROS-CVS mailing list archive).

Documentation

AROS documentation, in source and HTML-rendered form, is now available on the download page.

Web

Randy Vice set up an AROS support site, TeamAROS, at http://thenostromo.com/teamaros/

Be sure to check their bounty program if you want to sponsor AROS development.

Hardware

User Interface

On the user interface front, there has been discussions about using render.library and guigfx.library in Zune, picture.datatype and other places that would benefit greatly from them. The author was very positive to this, and render.library already has been ported long ago (although it has some endianness issues).

There was also a heated discussion on the mailing list about which buttons should be available in prefs programs, since there was a feeling that the traditional Save/Use/Cancel triad of AmigaOS is not enough. After a lot of discussion, it was finally decided on a compromise where the Save/Use/Cancel buttons where kept but the additional Test/Revert buttons (which don't close the window) was added.

Other developments of interest:

• David Le Corfec, Georg Steger and Sebastian Bauer continued to code on Zune and made the Test button in the prefs program work, added a bitmap preview in the imageadjust dialog and worked on a experimental feature to reduce the flickering when resizing windows.
• David Le Corfec managed to dig up some artistic skills and created some new def_Tool and def_Project icons to replace the 4-color ones. Some days later, Martin "Mason" Mertz contributed several more icons, including ones for def_Tool and def_Project. ;-) Some nice striped patterns were also created by David. Have a look at the screenshot.
• Georg Steger fixed a bug in the hosted flavour which meant that the X SHM extension always was disabled. The graphics performance should now be a bit better.

Datatypes

Thanks to Martin Gierich who wrote jpeg.datatype based on libjpeg and Georg Steger who wrote png.datatype based on libpng, AROS now supports most popular image formats! The png.datatype supports transparency with indexed (256 colors or less) images. You can see them in action in the screenshot.

Miscellaneous

Some miscellaneous things that have happened:

• Staf Verhaegen merged the diskfont.library sources with the MorphOS version, and then continued with reworking it in several ways.
• Georg Steger fixed a bug in Locale Prefs which caused random crashes on i386-pc (but oddly enough not on hosted).
• Fabio Alemagna fixed several bugs all over the place, after Martin Blom reported them during the course of porting AHI.
• Stefan Berger worked some more on the port of gtlayout.library in contrib, aiming on being able to port Term in the future. He also ported another contrib program: MUImine (a rather nice minesweeper game clone).
• Fabio Alemagna ported LBreakout 2, which is a very nice and polished breakout style game that uses SDL. There are however some problems when running in windowed mode or in 16bit screen depth (works fine in 24bit modes though). Take a look at the screenshot!
• Olivier Adam wrote French translations for many programs.

Repository Cleanup

During the last month there has also been an effort to clean up the CVS repository, mostly spear-headed by Adam Chodorowski. Basically there are two parts to this effort:

1. Make sure that all software in the main tree follows the licensing policy (which entails checking the copyright and making sure the license are compatible with the APL, and make sure it is documented).
2. Moving software that we want to be part of the standard AROS distribution from contrib to the main tree, and moving things that don't belong in the main tree to contrib.

The following things have resulted from this effort:

• The authors of FlexCat, which we use in development, have been contacted to clarify the license since the documentation is very vague about it. They confirmed that it is indeed licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

• GRUB (our bootloader for i386-pc), libjpeg, jpeg.datatype, libbz2 (bzip2 compression library) and JanoEditor (nice text editor which will become the standard one in AROS) have been moved from contrib to the main tree. On the other hand, liblcc (part of the LCC compiler) has been moved from the main tree to contrib. Aaron Digulla did the actual moving directly on the CVS server, to avoid loosing the CVS history.

  In the near future more software will most likely be moved to the main tree, like Regina (to provide ARexx compatibility), FreeType 2 (support for scalable TrueType fonts), libpng and png.datatype.

Documentation

After a consensus had been reached in the discussion about buttons in prefs programs, Adam Chodorowski decided to write the first part of the AROS User Interface Style Guide about this topic. It's still a long way from being a comprehensive guide on user interface issues, but at least it's a start.

Website

To avoid redirection and better handle the load, www.aros.org now directly points to the SourceForge web server.

New Site

Let's begin with what you can see right now: the new site. As already announced a few days ago, AROS has gained a new and awesome web site, thanks to Adam Chodorowski and Daniel Holmen. The new site has a set of nice features which make it easier to navigate and get the informations one is looking for.

In a not particular order, the new site features:

• new and updated documentation, which should greatly help people understand what AROS is really about (believe me, there's a widespread general misconception about this issue) and provide with useful references about development for AROS and of AROS itself, together with information more geared towards users.
• a much better download section, from which nightly builds and CVS snapshots of the AROS sources can be downloaded.
• our new mascot, Kitty, whose father is the great Eric W. Schwartz: isn't she cute? ;-)
• a set of new screenshots.

GUI

On the Graphic User Interface front there have also been many improvements.

• Zune [1], for instance, has been greatly improved, and its skinning features are just brilliant. Have a look at the screenshots page to get an idea of what I'm talking about.
• freetype 2 has been ported to AROS, by Staf Verhaegen, on the basis of the work already done by the MOS Team.
• Wanderer [2], while still being mostly experimental, has finally got smooth window scrolling, which should improve its usability a lot. It must be said, though, that the current Wanderer was meant to be more a proof of concept than anything, and apart from the initial development, which lasted only a couple of days, not much has been done about it. A more powerful incarnation of the Wanderer concept is in the work by Paul Smith.
• Many more Mason Icons have been included in the AROS builds, making the overall wanderer experience more pleasant. Many thanks go to Martin "Mason" Mertz for providing us with his excellent work!

Drivers

There are news also from the device drivers front, thanks to Johan Grip.

• The ide.device has finally seen solved the geometry recognition issue: now it should be able to detect the geometry of your hardrive correctly in all cases. Unfortunately, what seems to be an easy job at a glance, shows to be a dirty one when looking at it more deeply, due to problems related to CHS/LBA representation. Or so Johan says. :-)
• We've got a VESA2 driver, which makes it possible to use high resolutions and high depth values in the native flavour of AROS. Georg Steger has, moreover, optimized the drawing routines a lot, making the whole experience of using AROS at full resolution and full depth a very pleasant one. Try it by yourself, by running a few demos.

Applications

AROS doesn't have a wide set of applications yet, however it has a few cute ones, and some of them have seen great improvements during the last months.

• HDToolBox [3] has seen many bugs fixed and its GUI improved. For the ones that don't know yet, thanks to the partition.library [4], HDToolBox handles both RDB and MBR partitioning models, and it allows for nested partitions, even of different models.
• Staf Verhaegen has managed to port Regina, a free and portable REXX interpreter, to AROS, making it fully compatible with AREXX.
• The AROS port of python, maintained by Adam Chodorowski, has a site of its own now, and got the name of PyAROS.

Miscellaneous

A lot more things have been improved in AROS in the latest months and many bugs have been fixed, in many modules, so it would be rather hard listing all of them. However, there are a few things really worth mentioning which don't fit in any specific category and which I am going to list here.

• The ELF [5] loader has been completely refactored, all of its bugs are now gone and it's significantly faster and cleaner. AROS has also obtained official recognition by the SCO group, and thus got an official ELFOSABI [6] number: 15.

  The ELF loader is a work of Fabio Alemagna.

• Martin Gierich has continued his work on the picture.datatype, after a very long pause, and made it finally handle true color pictures. He also updated the ilbm datatype accordingly.

• Always on the datatypes front, Daniel Holmen has developed a bmp datatype. However, when the bmp datatype was made Martin hadn't updated the picture datatype yet, so the bmp datatype doesn't handle true color pictures.

• The FreeBSD port is now working, after a long period of time during which AROS would not compile or would not work properly on FreeBSD. Thanks to Iain Templeton for fixing it and Georg Steger for doing his usual bug hunting. :)

• Fabio Alemagna has begun working on an SDK for AROS, including a set of cross and native development tools, with specific AROS optimizations. So far the cross-binutils are almost ready, and patches have already been submitted to the binutils crew, expect an AROS SDK to be released to the public soon.

Conclusions

Although in the past months we've been really silent, development has continued without interruption. However, progress is not as fast as we all would like it to be, and this is mainly due to lack of developers: "AROS - So much to do, so little time" is the motto that has been invented in the #aros IRC channel on freenode to describe this situation. :-)

So, as we always say, we need more developers! Come on guys, AROS is fun, let's have fun together!