Author: | Matthias Rustler, Staf Verhaegen, Neil Cafferkey |
Date: | 2014-01-12 |
2013 was mainly a year of internal improvements and fixes to AROS, so
there were fewer new bells and whistles added to it than in previous
years. However, there were still a few notable components introduced
that should be mentioned.
After a long journey a cleaned up and split C library was commited to the
ABIv1 branch. Next to a clean up and some improved documentation, the main
part of the patch is a split of the ANSI standard part from the POSIX
part. This allows using standard C functions everywhere in AROS without
having a POSIX emulation overhead added.
In 2012 we reported that AROS was running on the Raspberry Pi, but
hosted on top of Linux. In 2013 a native version of AROS for this
compact and ubiquitous platform emerged, with support for USB, SD card
and graphics (at least with the aid of the proprietary binary blob that
Linux also relies upon).
The Wanderer/Workbench replacement Scalos has been ported to AROS.
Currently it is only available in nightly builds of ABIv1 of the
i386 platform. Scalos can either be started like an application from
Extras:Scalos or it can replace Wanderer by exchanging
Wanderer:Wanderer by Scalos:Scalos EMU in S:Startup-Sequence.
Three new drivers were added for VIA audio controllers, namely some of
their Envy24, Envy24HT and AC97 chipsets. Compatibility of our HD Audio
driver was also increased, and it now supports a wider range of
controllers and codecs.
Lots of smaller improvements were also made, including bug fixes and
refactoring to components such as ATA and SATA drivers, filesystems and
partitioning, EFI support, and system shutdown. User interfaces received
some attention too, with the Zune GUI system gradually becoming more
complete, and new preferences utilities for GRUB and theming options.