Hardware

Michal Schulz has completed the new PCI driver, thus earning the TeamAROS bounty #10. It is hardware independent and currently has linux-i386 and pc-i386 (native) drivers. This is a good foundation for the future PCI device drivers. He also made a little tool that allows one to browse a list of all PCI peripherals attached to the computer.

Michal is now working on a nVidia graphics card driver (TeamAROS bounty #9). Let's wish him good luck. :)

Johan Grip fixed some IDE bugs and is planning to do a rewrite of the floppy and IDE drivers. Let's wish him good luck too, as these are not the easiest pieces of hardware to code for, given their various quirks and other chipset issues.

Nic Andrews, a welcome addition to our resident hardware hackers, is working on CPU detection, cpu.resource and ACPI support on i386, maybe the first step on a long road to SMP support. :)

User Interface

Adam Chodorowski changed the name of the PreferencesWindow class to the shorter PrefsWindow and improved its implementation. He also added a dedicated preferences application for Wanderer, our Workbench(TM) lookalike, implemented by using the PrefsWindow class. It allows you to test and set your Wanderer backgrounds in a much user-friendly way than before. :)

Adam Chodorowski and Georg Steger finally completed the integration of the MorphOS modifications to our intuition.library.

Georg Steger reworked the graphics driver subsystem to allow better optimization, most notably under X11. As a consequence, antialiased fonts render faster and are actually quite usable now.

He also added PNG support to the icon.library, which now can use plain PNG images as icons. The format used is the same as MorphOS' or AmigaOS' with PowerIcon patch, with a little extension: it also allows to use a PNG image to represent an icon's selected state.

David Le Corfect fixed many bugs and visual quirks in Zune. For example, now relayouting a group doesn't cause the whole window to relayout, which makes for a much better visual experience.

Georg Steger also improved intuition.library so that resizing a window would not redraw the whole window borders if not strictly needed. This, coupled with opaque window moving, again provides a much better visual experience than before.

Miscellaneous

Olivier Adam added French catalogs for all the applications in the main tree, as well as some apps in contrib.

Nic Andrews is working together with Olivier on a multiuser permissions library (MuFSv2 compatible), for which he did a GUI login Zune class. As if it was not enough, he's also devoting some time to the following ports: lwIP network stack (with help from Adam Chodorowski and earlier work from Sebastian Bauer), ODBC library, Bochs and finally Mesa 6.

Nate Downes is now working on TeamAROS bounty #12, FAT32 filesystem.

Michal Shulz and Frederic Requin started working on TeamAROS bounty #11, which aims at rewriting the device driver that is in charge of handling ATA/ATAPI devices, to make it faster and more reliable. Johan Grip will be helping them out along the way.

Wez Furlong, a long time lurker of the AROS-Dev mailing list, has finally decided to come out of the bag and show up what brave man he is: he has taken up on the TeamAROS bounty #3, which requires him to write a complete TCP/IP stack!

Iain Templeton committed his usual fixes to make AROS hosted compile and work also on FreeBSD, and he also fixed a bug in the timer.device.

Fabio Alemagna fixed some bugs in the libc, and made the necessary changes to the AROS system header files so that C++ programs can use them seamlessy. He also fixed a bug in dos.library/ExAll() and did some improvements to the build system.

Documentation

David Le Corfec wrote some documentation about AROS debugging, and began a Zune developer guide.

CVS Stats

As usual there were still many other changes in AROS, in the build system, the libraries, the headers...

Since 2003-11-25, 18 people committed changes in the CVS repository: Olivier Adam, Ali Akcaagac, Fabio Alemagna, Nic Andrews, Stefan Berger, Adam Chodorowski, Martin Gierich, Johan Grip, Sebastian Heutling, Henning Kiel, David Le Corfec, Jack Patton, Kalle Räisänen, Michael Schulz, Georg Steger, Iain Templeton, Staf Verhaegen and Markus Weiss.

There was a total of 1080 commits, the top 3 committers being Adam (250), Fabio (229) and Georg (150).

Screenshots

Finally, not even this time we could miss to provide you with a couple of nice screenshots to show off some of the more visually appealing features implemented during the latest months, so here they are, enjoy them!

Conclusion

You may drool now. See you in the next status update! ;)