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.

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.

Distribuciones

Recientemente han sido lanzadas dos nuevas distribuciones de AROS: VmwAROS LIVE! y una nueva versión de WinAROS. La primera es un entorno preconfigurado (de arranque o instalable) basado en una máquina virtual VmwAROS; la otra es una máquina virtual completa adaptada a QEMU, con IDE y entorno de desarrollo actualizado. Más detalles en nuestra página de descargas. Se invita a usuarios y desarrolladores de aplicaciones a descargarlos.

Últimas noticias

Krysztof Smiechowicz y Alain Greppin han provisto un paquete gcc/g++ 3.3.1 de código ejecutable específico para i386 - basado en los parches de Fabio, que puede descargarse desde nuestros Archivos. Obviamente, son buenas noticias para aquellos interesados en desarrollar o adaptar software a AROS, y no son las únicas: en los Archivos también se encuentra la nueva versión del Murks!IDE con respaldo para C++, el mejor Entorno de Desarrollo Integrado de AROS, provisto por Krysztof Smiechowicz y Heinz-Raphael Reinke.

También es hora de hacer grandes correcciones. Krysztof Smiechowicz ha comenzado a revisar la completitud de las API, mientras Barry Nelson revisaba, filtraba y comenzaba a administrar nuestro rastreador de errores. Muchos de los errores ya corregidos han sido removidos de la lista.

Nic Andrews y Alain Greppin finalmente han implementado grub2 en AROS. Nic también expuso una agradable captura de pantalla en Aros-Exec. Lo bueno de esto, es que los usuarios podrán desahacerse finalmente de las lentas particiones FFS y cargar los archivos de sistema desde otras en SFS. Sin embargo, no recomendamos aún esta opción, debido a incompatibiliades todavía existentes con algunas aplicaciones AROS.

Alain Greppin ha obtenido la recompensa del AROS DHCP con su comando dhclient. Ahora, AROS puede obtener una dirección IP automáticamente. También adaptó TeXlive.

Tomasz Wiszkowski y Michal Schulz están trabajando para mejorar el ata.device. Se ha agregado cierto respaldo inicial para algunos chipsets Serial ATA: "Los controladores SATA que respaldan el modo de operación heredado (legacy) deberían estar operativos (es decir que no tenemos AHCI por el momento)".

Últimas noticias

Michal Schulz está trabajando a pleno en la adaptación de AROS a la placa SAM440 de Acube Systems, y ha obtenido resultados interesantes. He aquí algunas palabras publicadas en su blog: "He decidido separar el núcleo (y las bibliotecas que se cargan con él) del espacio del usuario. El núcleo se carga en algún lugar de los primeros 16MB de RAM y luego es reubicado a la dirección virtual en lo más alto del espacio de memoria de 32 bits. El cargador funciona de manera similar a como lo hacía el de x86_64. Pone todas las secciones exclusivamente de lectura (read-only) por encima de la base del núcleo, y todas las secciones de escritura por debajo de la misma. Dado que soy malvado por naturaleza, mi núcleo de AROS para SAM440 acapara toda la memoria debajo de su ubicación física para sí mismo. Esta memoria (unos pocos megas) es utilizada como un depósito local para el núcleo y queda excluído de cualquier tipo de acceso desde modo de usuario".

Nic Andrews está trabajando en Wanderer, para mejorarlo y arreglar algunos errores molestos. Actualmente está "trabajando a los ponchazos en reescribir el código de presentación de la clase iconlist de Wanderer. El objetivo a corto plazo es permitir que las ventanas conserven la presentación de íconos y fondo para que, por ejemplo, el uso de presentación en mosaico para fondos de iconlist no produzca un notorio parpadeo como lo hace ahora". En su blog puede encontrarse información más detallada sobre su trabajo.

Internet fácil

Michael Grunditz ha lanzado oficialmente sus primeras betas de SimpleMail 0.32 para AROS. SimpleMail cuenta con la mayoría de las características necesarias para un cliente de correo electrónico moderno, y sigue creciendo. La adaptación a AROS se encuentra en la sección Archives.

Robert Norris hizo montones de avances con su Traveller, su navegador basado en Webkit. Para hacerlo funcionar, aún le quedan por escribir algunas opciones y bibliotecas. Sin embargo, su adaptación de Cairo.library está bien encaminada y ha logrado presentar mayormente de manera correcta algunas páginas web. Una captura de pantalla prometedora se publicó fue publicada en su blog.

Otras novedades

Recientemente, João "Hardwired" Ralha ha escrito varios buenos manuales para AROS. Sin embargo, aún no están terminados y actualmente anda buscando ayuda. Los documentos disponibles son el AROS User Manual (50% completo), el AROS Shell Manual (70%) y el AROS Install Manual (25%). Se puede contactar al autor en su página.

Alain Greppin ha obtenido una recompensa, adaptando TeXlive a AROS. Más información sobre el tema en su página.

Tomek 'Error' Wiszkowski ha estado trabajando en Frying Pan, una aplicación para quemar CD/DVD. Publicó algunas capturas de pantalla en AROS-Exec.org. La version 1.3 para AROS (shareware) se puede descargar desde la página de aplicaciones. Para hacerlo funcionar, también corrigió algunos errores en ATA device de AROS.

...y, para aquellos que se lo hayan perdido: el sistema de archivos AROS FFS recientemente incorporó una rutina de validación adecuada. ¡Se acabaron las particiones de sistema inutilizables!