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.

Latest updates

Sorry for this status update being so late, however the AROS team is really working hard "under the hood" in order to bring you a better operating system. There is much important news to talk about.

Stanislaw Szymczyk has completed the port of linux hosted flavour on the x86-64 platform, and is greatly helping AROS self-compilation by porting the needed tools. The last one has been the abc-shell, and he's gaining some encouraging results.

Krzysztof Smiechowicz is reviewing AROS API completeness, in order to keep track of AmigaOS compatibility and the whole project's status. You can see the results whenever you want in our updated status page.

Pavel Fedin has greatly improved HDToolBox functionalities: now it can move and resize partitions. These new features, however, still need some testing. Pavel has also ported BHFormat and activated Wanderer options to format disks.

Pavel Fedin, Krzysztof Smiechowicz and Tomasz Wiszkowski are also working hard on our ata.device and ATAPI-related files to get rid of compatibility problems which disallowed AROS to boot properly on some configurations.

Michal Schulz is still working on his SAM440EP porting of AROS. He recently released a working initial beta that SAM owners may try by themselves. Don't place it on other PPC architectures, though, as it won't work.

Gianfranco Gignina has helped detecting and fixing many Zune bugs, and started to work on a portable and more independent version of Wanderer. The project's goal is to allow easy porting of Wanderer to the other AmigaOS-like platforms.

There's a new, valuable implementation of the E language on AROS: it's PortablE, and you should definitely give it a try!

Nick Andrews is writing an Intel Gigabit E1000 NIC driver for AROS, which will allow networking on a wide range of motherboards that integrate it.

Paolo Besser has released the new 0.8b version of his VmwAROS distribution, which introduces improvements in the GUI style and a new dual-kernel feature to allow booting on some configurations. 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.

Distributions

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.

Latest news

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)".

Latest news

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.

Internet made easy

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.

Other news

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!