Xmas update
Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way... ehm! It's Christmas again (enjoy!), and there is some happy news for AROS, too. We're constantly developing new code and fixing the existing code, and there are some new brilliant features to show here. First of all, AROS has finally got a new, faster and smarter file system: Michal Schulz has ported SFS to the Amiga Research Operating System, so opening and saving lots of files won't take ages anymore, but just a few seconds. In order to use SFS on your hard disks, however, you still have to follow a tricky procedure. We're going to fix this. Here you can see some benchmarks, and look at a defrag application screenshot too. Neil Cafferkey has written an Intel Pro/100 NIC driver, allowing support for the i8255x family of network adapters. If you're wondering what to do once you enter the net, you may chat with Nick Andrew's AiRcOS, the first IRC client for our operating system. It's still in alpha stage, but it works! Marcel 'Frostwork' Unbehaun has created an AROS/PPC Live-CD for Pegasos computers. The file is provided as a torrent by Pegasos.org, so a Torrent client is needed for downloading. Last but not least, there is a new Aros-Max distribution for x86 on the works. In the meanwhile, you may download this nice v0.4.8 and report problems here. Well, that's over. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone from us all. Status update
AROS developers has been quite busy in last two months, discovering and fixing bugs, adding new features and so on. Maybe, from a user point of view they are not so noticeable, but you can be sure they are really important as well. There are, indeed, some really BIG news about PPC and 68k portings of AROS. Joe Fenton has been able to run AROS PPC on his iMac using Fedora Core 4. There are still some issues that should be fixed, but Joe and Markuss Weiss are working hard on them, in order to give us a full-rockin' PPC version of AROS. Bernd Roesch has compiled an AmigaOS-68k hosted version of AROS called AFA (AROS for AmigaOS): "AfA OS is a way to use AROS source without changes and compile them on every AmigaOS based operating system. It can run and be build hosted on every AmigaOS compatible system and provides a compatible API to all systems. With AFA, the host Amiga OS is degraded to do things that MS-DOS was doing for Windows 3.11-WinMe. It is easy to check for bugs/errors using testprograms, but the rest of the system is using the old stable functions. You can easily boot with or without the new libraries". More informations and pre-compiled binaries are here. Pavel Fedin has modified the mount command in order to support DEVS:DOSDrivers and SYS:Storage/DOSDrivers foldersa, as like as in AmigaOS 2.1 and later revisions. Many c: commands has been back-ported from MorphOS as well. Michal Schulz has re-vitalized VMware graphic hidd, so running AROS on this famous emulator will be easier. He's also working on a 2D accelerated graphic hidd for Ati cards. Finally, you can download x86 FreeBSD hosted version, and lots of funny interesting software on Back2Roots FTP. Status update
AROS has got its first software repository on the web, The AROS Archives. Its mission is providing a central place where AROS developers can upload their software, and users can find AROS "fresh meat". We strongly encourage coders to upload their creations and portings. For everybody stuck with AROS installation, there are two new intersting HOW-TOs. Mark Carter wrote guides to install AROS on hard disk and to install AROS on a linux-hosted system. Simply click on the links to read! Status update
There is a great news about AROS networking: Michal Shulz has added nForce chipsets network support to AROS, allowing lots of motherboards to be connected directly to a network under our operating system. And in order to simplify our lives, Neil Cafferkey has made ArosTCP compile in every nightly build. From now on, setting up an AROS network will be simplier. You can see nForce driver running here. Michal has also provided a new timer.device supporting UNIT_MICROHZ, a feature some developer has asked for long time, allowing some applications require to be ported. Georg Steger has made some little changes to Intuition, and now it can change window decorations instantly - this also applies to screen decorations (the title bar). Another step towards GUI customization. Georg has also modified X11 hidd, so linux hosted version of AROS can now run fullscreen. AROS on the InternetPolish AROS users and enthusiasts may have a look at this polish AROS portal. It features news, galleries, forum sessions and more. Italian readers may also have a look at TGM Online forums: the Amiga one has just been renamed to "Amiga/AmigaOne/AROS". Ben Armstrong, Program manager on the Virtual machine team at Microsoft, has tested AROS under VirtualPC and Virtual Server, and you can read the results in his Weblog. AROS LaptopIf you are looking for a good laptop computer and you want AROS to run preinstalled on it, you may have a look to the LADBS200. Status update
While AROS developers are constantly fixing bugs and adding features (well... not so many noticeable features from the user point of view, but interesting for coders), we have noticed that our community is costantly growing! New apps are coming and we're very excited to delight your eyes with this pic. Yes, Darius Brewka is porting nice AmiStart to AROS, providing a faster way to access applications (in a really sexy way too!). Recently, two AROS-related blogs are born. Paul J. Beel has set up on the web The AROS Show, which focuses on software releases and documentation: "I plan to make this a place where you can read information about the Amiga Research Operating System (...). The AROS Show will try to answer some of the questions you may have about AROS, while providing you with information about the community, happenings and developers. It will do it's best to update you on current and upcoming applications in AROS". Good Luck Paul! If you are interested in AROS development and in fresh news, you can also visit our talented developer Kalamatee's blog. There is also a new interesting link to follow: if you want to know what software has already been ported and what may need your hand for porting, you can give a sight to The definitive AROS platform capability list, which probably contains most of the informations you need. And please continue visiting aros-exec, with its 400+ users base and its new fresh look! Status update
It's web day! The month of july couldn't begin better: thanks to Olivier Adam, AROS has moved its first steps on the world wide web. He has adapted his porting of Mosaic to use ArosTCP, so now we have a basic but working browser on our platform. You can download binaries here Status update
There is a new network card supported by AROS: Prism2 wireless adapters driver had been added yesterday by Neil Cafferkey. So now you can use also cards based on this chipset in order to connect an AROS computer to a network. AROS is already compatible with 3com and NE2000 cards. Status update
Summer is a great time for coding, but also spring has brought to us lots of new stuff. We are so busy porting software and adding new features to the OS, that we always forget to update this site. Well, we hope it won't never happen again in the future.. There are so many things to talk about, that's even difficult to begin. First of all, we have to announce that future versions of Hollywood will be available also for AROS. Hollywood is a Multimedia Application Layer for Amiga(tm) and compatible operating systems. It offers you a script language and advanced functions that allow the creation of multimedia applications, ranging from a simple slideshow to a complex game. Airsoft Softwair is not the only commercial believer in AROS: AHT Europe has announced support for AROS in their upcoming PPC Ariana set-top boxes. According to their press release, "AHT Europe Ltd. want to provide their customers an additional slim operating system with an intuitive user-interface design for simple home-computer functionality". AROS-MaxA new improved version of AROS-Max is on the way! This is a nicely configured bootable CD image with a lot more snacks than the regular snapshots and builds. Stay tuned... Improved sound supportMartin Blom has released a new version of AHI. You can find it at his homepage. NetworkingNic Andrews, Jack Patton, Olivier Adam and Adam Chodorowski are still working on integrating lwIP into AROS with some assistance from Staf Verhaegen. But the big news is that Neil Cafferkey has ported AmiTCP. This finally gives AROS a TCP/IP stack and the power of networking! There is already a simple FTP client available, and a porting of nice old Mosaic is on the road. Well, maybe it's not Mozilla, but at least we can setup an http page with Cheetah and browse html pages (offline) with a real browser! Status update
Let's start off this status update with some fireworks and a great big HAPPY NEW YEAR to all you AROS fans out there! There is obviously a lot more of you than we had thought, with 241 members registered at AROS-Exec. This update should have been written a long time ago - but as usual, the developers are too busy writing code to do tedious status updates :). Anyway, let's get down to business. A lot has happened since the last update here, so I'm afraid this little update merely scratches the surface. AROS-MaxAROS has gotten its first distro - AROS-Max! This is a nicely configured bootable CD image with a lot more snacks than the regular snapshots and builds. FreeBSD Hosted AROSJack Patton made AROS compile and run cleanly under FreeBSD. He also set up a nighly build for the FreeBSD hosted version. We now have a build for both Linux and FreeBSD, as well as numerous fixes to the build system. Self-hosted build statusJack Patton set up a page to keep track of the current status of the self-hosted build. To sum up, most of the tools are now ported, but lack testing and bugfixing. Sound supportAROS finally has sound support! Martin Blom ported his AHI system to AROS. Together with a Sound Blaster Live! (emu10k) driver (GPL'ed) ported by Georg Steger and an AC97 driver for Intel chipsets (works on nForce) by Michal Schulz, AROS is no longer mute! Jack Patton also ported SDL_mixer to AROS so lbreakout2 amongst others get a bit of sound. StorageMichal has also been busy writing a much-needed new ATA.device with DMA support while Johan Grip is still working on his trackdisk.device rewrite. Adam Chodorowski has been hacking away on an eagerly awaited FAT32 implementation. NetworkingNic Andrews, Jack Patton, Olivier Adam and Adam Chodorowski has been working on integrating lwIP into AROS with some assistance from Staf Verhaegen. In parallel, Neil Cafferkey, has been working on porting AmiTCP aswell. So there's not one - but two - stacks in the works. Nic Andrews is working on a mail application aswell as helping Daniel Holmen out with an IRC client for AROS. Being the busy boy Nic is, he also ported a lightweight web server called Cheetah together with Jack Patton. PreferencesFabio Alemagna implemented Screenmode Prefs, so now you can finally change screen resolution from within AROS itself! This also meant a lot of changes and bugfixes to the graphics system. Build SystemAswell as the bug fixes and changes needed for the BSD build, Fabio Alemagna implemented a source fetch, patch and compile mechanism - similar to the port system of BSD fame - to the AROS build system. Basically, it allows you to make a one-line makefile to fetch a source archive, apply patches to the files, build it and prepare a binary distribution of the installed files. OtherGeorg Steger, Fabio Alemagna and Staf Verhaegen have done a marvellous job cleaning up and bugfixing an enormous amount of code (as usual). There has been so much happening to both the AROS code base and external applications that I can't hope to cover it all in this update. Needless to say, there have been a lot more updates, enhancements and bugfixes to AROS than the ones described here. Download a build and try for yourself! |
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