Author: | Paolo Besser |
Date: | 2008-12-21 |
First of all, we wish you a Merry Christams and a Happy New
Year 2009! 2008 has been an important year for AROS development, since
many things happened during the last 12 months and many projects
have been started in the meanwhile. Here is a summary of them...
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.
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.
Author: | Paolo Besser |
Date: | 2008-10-22 |
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.
Author: | Paolo Besser |
Date: | 2008-07-26 |
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.
Author: | Paolo Besser and Saimon69 |
Date: | 2008-07-18 |
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.
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!
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