Latest updates

It's been a long time since the latest status update, however many things happened in the meanwhile.

First of all, Chris "platon42" Hodges has opened the sources of his Poseidon USB stack under the terms of the APL, and ported it to AROS: after some weeks of tweaking, adapting and bugfixing, AROS can now handle USB 1.1 and 2.0 controllers. Any USB device should be correctly detected by the operating system, while mice, keyboards and other input devices should be correctly handled as well. Most USB pendrives and storage devices work, while others don't yet, due to some fat.handler issues we're investigating about. Other devices will be supported in future, when someone will write the necessary drivers.

Thanks to Poseidon, AROS can now boot from USB CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives. This allows installing AROS on a wide range of notebooks and netbooks like the Acer Aspire One A150. This netbook is now a fair good hardware platform for AROS: Steve Jones and Davy Wenzler wrote a HD Audio driver for the iMica computer which covers also this one and a wide range of Intel-compatible mainboards, and the Icaros Desktop distribution introduced a way to get correct 1024x600 resolution on the GMA9x0 video chip.

Przemyslaw "Qus" Szczygielski's TCPPrefs utility has been fixed and added to the AROS prefs utilities: pokeing with script and configuration text files is not required anymore to connect to the Internet. Matthias Rustler has ported Scout to AROS, so closing offending windows and crashed applications should be easier than before. Kernel stability has improved a lot thanks to many fixes from Neil Cafferkey and Pavel Fedin.

Neil Cafferkey vastly improved our ata.device, which now supports many SATA controllers. Any SATA enabled computer which can be turned to work as 'IDE' in the BIOS settings, however, should work with AROS.

Stanislaw Szymczyk continued to update OWB, fixing bugs and problems, and adding new features like bookmarks, application menu, splash screen, the ability to open HTML files and so on, and he's now heading to release version 1.0 of his modern, CSS and JavaScript enabled web browser. OWB is a quite flexible tool, since allows AROS to run most web-enabled applications.

Yannick "Yannickescu" Erb has ported to AROS some interesting games like Open Tyrian, Super Methane Brothers and SDL Ball, and wrote ZuneARC, a standard and customizable Zune frontend for command-line archivers already available for AROS. You can find these and other interesting stuff on his website. Some nice games have been ported also by AROS_EXEC.org user Fishy_fis. Don't miss his DOSBox port to AROS!

Simone "samo" Bevilacqua ported his Amiga game BOH to AROS, and it behaves nicely! BOH is the first commercial game available for the new Amiga platforms.

Krzysztof "Deadwood" Smiechowicz ported version 7.5 of MESA to AROS, and is adding hardware 3D acceleration capabilities to AROS with his ongoing port of Gallium3D. For now, he has just released an alpha demo of this technology running on GeForce FX, 6 and 7 series video cards. A nice video showing the GLExcess demo running on AROS is here.

Paolo Besser has released version 1.2 of the Icaros Desktop distribution. The new version includes the ability to run old Amiga games straight from their ADF files, thanks to some new AmiBridge scripts and a old version of E-UAE. In the meanwhile, Oliver Bunner has improved Janus-UAE integration, allowing AROS to run AmigaOS 3.x applications inside AROS windows. To do both things, however, users must provide a working installation of AmigaOS 3.x and original kickstart, maybe using Cloanto's Amiga Forever.

Behind the scene Staf Verhaegen is still working on a new standardized ABI for AROS. Hopefully the moon and the sun will be right one day this year and the ABI can see the light of day.

Latest updates

Since the last update before Christmas, AROS has gained a lot of improvements, both in system components and applications: AROS is getting really close to being suitable for daily usage.

Oliver Brunner recently released version 0.3 of Janus-UAE, the AROS-specific version of UAE required by phase 1 of the UAE Integration Bounty. Now AROS can open AmigaOS applications in their own AROS screen or window. Oliver is currently working on integrating menus.

But the most important news is that AROS has finally got its own modern web browser! Thanks to the hard work of Stanislaw Sszymczyk, OWB is available for AROS, delivering full CSS and Javascript compatibility, tabbed browsing and a download manager. OWB is at version 0.9.3 Beta, and in order to run correctly requires recent versions of muimaster.library, arosc.library and codesets.library. OWB can be downloaded at its own page at sand-labs. Stanislaw has also finished work on allowing the compilation of multiple versions of AROS using a single copy of the source tree.

Pavel "Sonic" Fedin is still working on the Windows Hosted version of AROS and, in the course of this work, is also trying to solve several problems in the way AROS talks to the hardware, in order to abstract it; this led to his modifying components that require an abstraction layer in order to work in hosted AROS versions, such as file systems and hardware; this includes a packet handling method for SFS. Also, Pavel, together with Jens Langner, is trying to cross-compile the most up-to-date versions of the mcc.BetterString and mcc.TextEditor MUI classes so that they will be taken straight from the mainstream source instead of being included in the AROS source tree.

Matthias "Mazze" Rustler has released an alpha version of the Ignition spreadsheet application. At the moment data cannot be saved but it is still a good occasion to have a look at this application, underestimated on AmigaOS but quite powerful and well realised. There are just a couple of major glitches: the applicaiton is only partially translated from German; in order to be used in English the file ignition_english.prefs has to be renamed to ignition.prefs.

Nik "Kalamatee" Andrews is improving Wanderer: in recent months his work delivered better stability, he added a status bar to windows, and he experimented with a directory tree in the left-hand side of windows. In the future, besides the introduction of the much awaited list view, he plans to make Wanderer more modular, so that various components can be added or subtracted at will and implemented also with third-party modules.

The well known VmwAROS distribution has changed name to Icaros Desktop; version 1.1 (updated recently to 1.1.1) delivers updated system files and better stability. Almost all applications were recompiled in order to use the most recent muimaster.library build - finally getting rid of the old switchmuimaster application. As usual, Icaros is available as both a Live DVD and a virtual environment (VE). The VE version has been installed on top of Windows XP on a netbook, running at a reasonable speed with full audio and wireless networking support. More info here.

Michal Schulz still continues to work on his Efika port and, in parallel, on the USB mass storage bounty. In December AROS was able to mount USB sticks and boot from an external CD-ROM drive. Progress on the Efika port brought a more robust kernel, a detailed debug report and a feature quite similar to Grim Reaper on AmigaOS 4 that prevents the machine from freezing in case of a crash.

Neil Cafferkey has been working on improving the compatibility of the ATA driver, so that it works with a greater variety of PCs and drives. These changes were not ready in time for Icaros 1.1.1, but they will probably be included in the next release.

Some changes also occured in the way AROS boots: it is now possible to install 32-bit and 64-bit versions of AROS side-by-side on the same computer. As a result of this, all bootable AROS partitions are required to have a file called AROS.boot containing the architecture type of the AROS system files on that partition. If you want to upgrade the kernel on a system installed prior to March 20, you need to manually copy this file to the root of your system partition, or create it yourself (e.g. run the command "Echo pc-i386 TO DH0:AROS.boot" for a 32-bit system).

And, last but not least, the coming of Steve "ClusterUK" Jones: a Siamese System developer in the past, he now comes back to Amigaland proposing his AROS box for sale. The iMica is an Intel Atom-based small desktop system with Icaros Desktop pre-installed. iMica currently offers one of the best AROS experiences on real hardware, due to the inclusion of a Creative Labs SoundBlaster card with EMU10k chipset that is supported by AROS, and an RTL8168 Network card, supported by Kalamatee's new driver.

Latest updates

Stanislaw Szymczyk has made AROS self-compilable. This means you can now compile AROS (or its parts) on AROS itself, without the need of any external tool. An almost complete development chain is already available on our nightly builds, while some of the needed tools are available through The Archives. You may read more about this straight from Cogville.

Krzysztof Smiechowicz is making many useful things for AROS. He just ported MPlayer, so we can now watch our favorite movie files in many compression formats, including AVI, MPEG, MOV, DIVX, XVID and many others. MPlayer is a good music player, too.

Paolo Besser has released version 1.0 of his VmwAROS distribution, both as a bootable and installable Live-DVD, and as a pre-configured virtual machine for VMware, introducing many new features. VmwAROS is tailored both to end users and developers, since it includes games, applications, network clients and a complete AROS development chain. Former Amiga users might be interested in AmiBridge, a scripting tool which allows launching AmigaOS applications in UAE straight from AROS.

Michal Schulz has found an issue which prevented AROS from correctly booting on VirtualBOX, and he introduced a workaround. Tomasz Wiszkowski has corrected a really annoying bug in our ata.device, and now we can use CDs and DVDs flawlessly again. But all AROS developers are spotting bugs and trying to fix them. You are welcome to help us using the bug tracker when you find one.

Soon (or late) on an AROS box near you...

We generally don't talk about pending projects on this page. We prefer to announce here only the concrete results we have already reached. It's Christmas, however, so maybe an exception would be nice. Here are some projects AROS developers are working on.

Michal Schulz is working on the mass storage bounty, whose goal is "producing a DOS device that we can mount to use a filesystem on a USB stick". Michal has already got some interesting results, which he talks about in his personal blog. Michal Schulz is also still porting AROS to the Efika PPC platform.

Stanislaw Szymczyk is working on the port an open source browser to AROS bounty. He started with Netsurf, but he turned to OWB. He recently posted a very initial, but promising screenshot on AROS-EXEC.

Krzysztof Smiechowicz, Staf Verhaegen, Markus Weiss and others are working on the AROS ABI v1. You can see some progress in its documentation here.

Matthias Rustler is porting Ignition to AROS, a spreadsheet application recently re-released under the terms of the GPL license. He has already made some interesting progress. This screenshot looks great.

Latest updates

Many things happened during the last summer and AROS developers are constantly improving the operating system:

Paolo Besser has released the new 0.9.1 beta version of his VmwAROS distribution, which introduces improvements in the GUI style and all the following enhancements to system files. New software has been added or updated as well. Once again, the distribution is available in two flavours: a live CD which runs on top of any X86 hardware and can be installed on the hard drive, and a virtual environment for VMware.

Pavel Fedin is working on a Windows-hosted version of AROS. You can read something about his progresses here. Michal Schulz has completed porting AROS to the SAM 440EP board and now he's porting AROS to the Efika PPC platform.

João Ralha is helping us translating catalogs to Portuguese.

Krzysztof Smiechowicz has enabled GRUB2 in the nightly builds, changing the bootloader AROS used from the beginning. GRUB2 allows more options and is much more compatible with modern hardware than its old version, so this change should also reduce glitches AROS had on some configurations at boot time.

Nick Andrews has released Sis 900 and e1000 network drivers for AROS. People with these network cards can now connect to the Internet and communicate with local area networks.

Nick Andrews has also enabled a snapshot function in Wanderer, allowing people to fix windows size and behavior.

Markus Weiss has ported GCC/G++ 4.2.2 to i386 AROS Native. This should help other people developing and porting their software to AROS.

Stanislaw Szymczyk has made huge progress towards AROS self compilation. There are still some glitches to fix, but the day AROS can build itself is near. You can read something about his work at Cogville.

Krzysztof Smiechowicz has completed reviewing AROS API completeness, and now he's working on libraries and other system components. Results are available in our status page.

Randy Vice has quit collecting bounties for AROS: TeamAROS has been closed but all the opened bounties are now managed by a new non-profit organization, Power-2-People. We would like to thank Randy for all the support and time he dedicated to AROS in the past, and give P2P a great welcome. Please keep on supporting AROS through the new bounty system.

accomplished missions

Two big news worth a status update, even if the latest one is a week only old.

Michal Schulz has completed his port of native AROS to the SAM440EP "Samantha" motherboard. For the first time, a non-X86 mainboard is completely supported, making AROS "the" operating system of choice of a whole platform, along with Linux. ACube Systems, producer and vendor of the SAM440EP board is now bundling an AROS Live CD with their flagship product. Early buyers of the Samantha platform can download their version of AROS from Michal's page. People interested in buying this alternative platform can get it this summer at discounted price.

Krzysztof Smiechowicz has completed his efforts to review actual libraries completeness and compatibility with original AmigaOS 3.1 API, with an overall score of 89%. This means that one of the AROS goals is almost reached. You can see the current status here.