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!

64-BIT AROS!

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.

VmwAROS

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.

Other news

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.

Latest news

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.