| Author: | Krzysztof Smiechowicz |
|---|
| Date: | 2016-07-17 |
|---|
This month's highlights start with the results of the AROS 2016 usage
survey. The survey was aimed at understanding the ways in which AROS is used
and what is needed to make it more useful. In total 50 people took part and
you can read the results of the survey in this thread . Thank you to all
who participated!
June also saw the release of an update to Icaros Desktop, the leading x86
distribution by Paolo Besser. The update, presented as version 2.1.2, brings
a refreshed 68K environment, new cloud service drivers and a few updated
applications. Visit www.icarosdesktop.org/ to download the update.
As a final highlight, Krzysztof Smiechowicz began work to refresh the
ABI_V0-compatible system files with the latest developments from the AROS
trunk. The last refresh was done at the end of 2014, so it is a good time to
bring the new functionalities to the AROS community. The refreshed version
is expected to be available in Fall 2016.
| Author: | Krzysztof Smiechowicz |
|---|
| Date: | 2016-06-12 |
|---|
As the days finally got warmer on northern hemisphere, the activity of
both users and developers of AROS reached quite low levels in May.
Krzysztof Smiechowicz made the necessary fixes to the source code
and enabled again the x86_64 build of AROS, which was not available for
over three months. Right now nightly build targets for all supported
architectures are available.
In May first version of a new, interesting application has been made
available by Marcus Sacrow. Mapparium is an OpenStreetMap client
working under AROS and MorphOS. Current functionality allows for
example browsing the map and searching for location.
Closing, a new survey has been launched in order to understand how
AROS is used by people and how it can become even more useful. If
you have not done so, please answer the survey questions in this
thread
| Author: | Krzysztof Smiechowicz |
|---|
| Date: | 2016-05-03 |
|---|
This biggest news of April was the release of long awaited, new version
of Odyssey Web Browser by Krzysztof Smiechowicz. Odyssey 1.25 released
after one and half years of development brings updated WebKit engine,
many stability and bug fixes and finally the capability to play HTML5
videos to AROS. While Odyssey is a cross-AmigaNG browser, AROS currently
has the most advanced version.
Nick Andrews continued his work started in March and added more patches
to support AROS being compiled with GCC 6.1.0 as well as Clang/LLVM.
In April Nick also initiated the work on supporting 64-bit version of
ARM platform. We do not yet have a working build, but first important
steps are taken. Finally Nick ported ffmpeg library in version 3.0.1
to AROS and updated the source codes of SMB file system. The later
allows compatibility with Windows 7 created shares.
Icaros 2.1 AROS distribution, released in March, received a small
update in April, bringing component fixes and new version of Odyssey
Web Browser thus increasing the version of Icaros to 2.1.1.
Olaf Schoenweiss released an updated version of his Aros Vision
distribution for AROS 68k. From version 3.1 AROS Vision adds "RTG" suffix,
because in April Olaf also released a new experimental distribution
called Aros Vision PAL which is aimed at lower spec machines.
| Author: | Krzysztof Smiechowicz |
|---|
| Date: | 2016-05-02 |
|---|
March saw tons of activity from all aspects of AROS. First and foremost
Nick Andrews has been working on enabling compilation of AROS with
GCC 6.0. This not only included the porting of the compiler itself, but
also adjusting the source code to the new compiler and fixing warnings
and bugs. While at it, Nick also worked on our build system making it
more flexible and capable of integrating a second compiler - LLVM/Clang.
While AROS cannot yet be compiled with the new compiler, the usage is
already possible.
Continuing work of Nick, he applied many fixes to x86_64 version of
AROS. The fixes were mainly the result of problems detected by new
version of GCC.
Third area that received improvements was the 68k support in AROS. Georg
Steger updated the AROS RGT driver, giving it more performance, stability
and functionality. Toni Willen implemented faster hunk executable
loading, solving the long standing difference between hunk and elf.
Jason McMullan improved the stability of Amiga ATA driver under low
memory conditions. All these improvements contribute to better AROS 68k
which is important in the light of coming Vampire V2 accelerator card.
Wanderer, the AROS Workbench replacement, received also a new file
search capability thanks to Matthias Rustler. This development is
going to be really appreciated by Wanderer users.
A lot also happened in AROS distributions. Pascal Papara released new
versions of AEROS Premium for Odroid XU3 and XU4 as well as AEROS
for RaspberryPi 3. Icaros Desktop, leading distribution for x86 PC
computers was updated by Paolo Besser to version 2.1 bringing updates
to software released in last year.
Closing this update, in 3rd party development, Marcus Sackrow released
version 0.54 of his text editor EdiSyn. EdiSyn among standard editor
features supports also syntax highlighting which is important to
developers working directly under AROS.
| Author: | Krzysztof Smiechowicz |
|---|
| Date: | 2016-03-13 |
|---|
Core AROS developments in February focused mostly on bug fixes. Matthias
Rustler and Neil Cafferkey improved several Shell commands and Michal
Schulz fixed a bug in TLSF memory manager. We also saw a number of
fixes for 64-bit support from Nick Andrews and Michal Schulz as well as
enabling the 64-bit AROS to allocate memory over 4GB barrier.
Lunapaint, a native painting program has been added to AROS
Contrib repository in February which should make fixing it
for compatibilities with different platforms easier.
3rd party developers brought a number important updates in February.
First Yannick Erb updated ZuneView, the image viewing program
to version 0.22. Pascal Papara release updates to AEROS for Raspberry
Pi 1 and 2. AEROS is a distribution of AROS hosted on Linux. Finally,
a interesting development from Norbert Kett has been made available,
namely a Google Drive handler. This handler allows, in basic version,
a read only access to files located on Google Drive accounts. For a
small fee of 10 Euros, the license can be obtained that enables
write access as well as guarantees access to future works from
Norbert, which will include Dropbox and Google Cloud Print.
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