| Author: | Paolo Besser |
|---|
| Date: | 2008-04-12 |
|---|
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.
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)".
| Author: | Paolo Besser |
|---|
| Date: | 2008-02-18 |
|---|
Michal Schulz is working hard on porting AROS to Acube System's
SAM440 board, and he got some interesting results. Here are some
words from a recent post on his blog: "I have decided to separate
the kernel (and libraries loaded together with it) from user space. The
kernel is loaded somewhere within first 16MB of RAM and then relocated
to the virtual address at the very top of the 32-bit address space. The
bootstrap loader works in the same way as the x86_64 bootstrap did. It
puts all read-only sections upwards from the kernel base, and all
writable sections downwards from the kernel base. Since I'm evil by
definition, my core of SAM440 AROS will greedily take all the memory
below it's physical location for itself. This memory (few megabytes)
will be used as a local pool for kernel and will be excluded from
usermode access of any kind."
Nic Andrews is working on Wanderer, in order to improve it and fix
some annoying bugs. He is now "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". More detailed
informations about his job are published on his blog.
Michael Grunditz has officially released the first SimpleMail 0.32
betas for the AROS Research Operating System. SimpleMail has most of
the features currently needed in a modern email client, and it's still
growing. The AROS port can be downloaded from the Archives.
Robert Norris made a lot of progress with Traveller, his Webkit-based
web browser for AROS. In order to make it work, he still needs to code
some missing features and libraries, however his Cairo.library port is
at a good point and he succeeded in rendering some web pages mostly
correct. A really promising screenshot was published in his
blog.
João "Hardwired" Ralha has recently written some good manuals for AROS.
However, they are not finished, and he is currently looking for help.
Available documents are the AROS User Manual (50% complete), the
AROS Shell Manual (70%) and the AROS Install Manual (25%). The
author can be reached at his website.
Alain Greppin has ported TeXlive to AROS, completing a bounty. More
informations about it at his website.
Tomek 'Error' Wiszkowski has been working on Frying Pan, a CD/DVD
burner application. He posted some screenshots on AROS-Exec.org.
Version 1.3 for AROS (shareware) can be downloaded from the application's
website. In order to make it work, he also fixed some bugs in AROS ATA device.
...and, for anyone that missed this: AROS FFS filesystem recently got
proper validation. No more unusable read-only system partitions!
| Author: | Paolo Besser |
|---|
| Date: | 2007-12-24 |
|---|
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone! It has been an
important year for AROS development, profile and diffusion,
and we'd really like to thank every AROS fan, tester and contributor
for the magnificent results (y)our operating system has gained.
Here are some examples of 2007 AROS "milestones".
January: after years of struggling with shell commands and
DOpus actions, copying files became easy with Wanderer drag'n'drop.
February: a tap interface has been added to AROS hosted,
completing network support.
March: AROS got packet file-systems support, increasing
compatibility and coherency with original AmigaOS, and allowing
AROS to manage FAT partitions. AROS got also an improved TCP/IP
stack, with a new version of AROSTCP, and USB support.
April: Wanderer got a new decoration system, allowing windows to
be customized with themes. Support for LUA and ARexx scripts has
been improved too.
May: AROS changed its name in 'AROS Research Operating System' and
aros.org got an heavy face-lift. Wanderer started showing only icons
or all files, and a new community-driven site has born, ArosWorld.org.
June: AROS users decided the official windows and desktop wallpapers
in an amusing competition.
September: AROS has been presented to the Amiga community
in a conference at Pianeta Amiga. MUIbase and HivelyTracker have been
ported too.
October: AROS got a new installer that made installation on hard
disk easier. Now AROS can safely live on a disk together with
Microsoft Windows.
November: AROS made a huge step ahead with its new 64-bit
flavour.
December: Two new AROS distributions have been announced, Velocity
and VmwAROS.
| Author: | Paolo Besser |
|---|
| Date: | 2007-11-29 |
|---|
Michal Schulz has made the miracle, and a whole new chapter in AROS
history begins. Starting from today, you can grab the 64 bit native
flavour of AROS from our website. This new version is obviously more
advanced than the usual one, and has limited memory protection and
loading boot modules. A initial wall for 4 GB of RAM will be removed
as soon as proper MMU handling is done. In order to run the 64 bit
native version of AROS a 64-bit x86 processor like AMD Athlon 64 or
latest Intel Core2 is needed.
A new AROS distribution has born. VmwAROS is a pre-installed and
pre-configured AROS environment for VMware, compatible with Windows
and Linux versions of VMware Player, Server and Workstation (v5 or 6).
This distribuion is still far from being complete, however a initial
beta has been released for everyone daring to download and test it.
VmwAROS targets everyday's users and coders, and anyone interested in
trying AROS, but don't want to jeopardize the data on their hard drive.
Click here for more.
Aros-Exec's user Fishy_fis has announced a new AROS distribution
called Velocity. An initial beta should be released soon. "Velocity
will come initially in both a live booting installable CD and a VMWare
hard disk image and contains considerably more (and custom configured)
software than the nightly build ISOs". Screenshots are included.
Robert Norris is working on an AROS Web-browser based on Webkit, called
Traveller. While working on it, he has updated lots of AROS libraries
and already ported some useful pieces of code, like libxml2, cURL,
OpenSSL, SQLite and more. Some informations in his blog.
| Author: | Paolo Besser |
|---|
| Date: | 2007-11-15 |
|---|
AROS has gained lots of bugfixes and improvements in the lastest
weeks. For istance, Neil Cafferkey has corrected some important bugs
in his beloved AROS Installer; Nic Andrews has worked on his
RTL8139 network driver; and Robert Norris has fixed file
notifications, which previously broke preferences, just to name
three.
Robert Norris has added a SDL driver for linux hosted AROS. This
lets you build a hosted AROS that doesn't require X (you don't even need it installed to build anymore). In theory this could help with getting hosted running on other platforms (anywhere SDL exists), however it's a little slower than the X driver.
Matthias Rustler has ported ptplay.library to AROS. It renders
Protracker modules into sound samples. Additionally he also ported
ShellPlayer, a simple example player. They will be in nightly
builds, in Extras/MultiMedia/Audio drawer.
Matthias Rustler also made an initial port of Alain Thellier's
Wazp3D to AROS. Wazp3D is a library intended to be compatible
with the famous Warp3D.library for AmigaOS 68040, and it makes easier
to port some 3D Amiga games to AROS. Wazp3D can also work as a
software renderer, fooling applications looking for a 3D hardware
driver.
Michal Schulz has made some big steps further with his
x86-64 port of AROS. The day of 64 bit AROS computing is
getting near. In the meanwhile, Michal added also SSE instructions
support to AROS.
Petr Novak has translated aros.org in Czech.
