The AROS Research Operating System is a lightweight, efficient, and flexible
desktop operating system, designed to help you make the most of your computer.
It's an independent, portable and free project, aiming at being compatible
with AmigaOS at the API level (like Wine, unlike UAE), while improving on
it in many areas. The source code is available under an open source license,
which allows anyone to freely improve upon it.
Distributions are preconfigured, and tested, versions of AROS. They
contain a lot of useful 3rd party applications that don't come with the
default AROS.org binaries, and will be of great interest to users.
They often may not have the latest core system components, but should
offer better stability and user-friendliness than the nightly builds. If
you are a user interested in checking what AROS has to offer, you are
highly recommended to use distributions, to get the most complete
AROS experience.
As a new year begins, its time to reflect on some of the things that have
happened since the last news entry - which is a shocking 3 years ago!
Firstly, the main AROS development has now migrated to GitHub. It has
been a contraversial decision/move but in the long run is better for
the developer community, and AROS as a whole. Along with this has been
the migration of the nightly builds to use Azure Pipelines, so that as a
developer team we can all contribute to the maintenance/monitoring and fault
resolution that is frequently needed in a project such as AROS, and in a
more timely manner. You can find details about GIT usage in our documentation.
There's an experimental version of AROS x86_64 which can make use of multiple
CPU cores. The scheduling code was rewritten to enable it by sharing a common
task list of waiting tasks to run, and allowing the tasks to specify which
core they can run on. Exec and other core components have been adapted to
properly lock access to resources they use so that tasks running on other
cores can safely access some things.
For a long time the m68k port has played only a minor role. This has changed
recently because of the Vampire turbo cards where AROS will be the standard
operating system. Various improvements have been done for the graphics drivers,
the screen composition, ATA device, keyboard handling, MMU support etc.
The source code of the AHCI device has beeen refactored to work more
similarly to ATA device, exposing hidd controller/bus/unit classes that can
be viewed in SysExplorer.
A massive amount of refactoring has been done to make sure only the correct
flags are used when building components, and to make sure flags are used
consistently. It has beeen made sure object files from different components
don't pollute each other when they are made in the same mmakefile. Changes
have been made to allow modules to be built for different flavours (e.g. cpu
types) of a target. The flags used when compiling c++/objc code have been
cleaned up.
November saw a fair amount of changes in AROS system. Neil Cafferkey
provided further improvements to MUI and made 3D acceleration on
the IntelGMA video driver work again. Krzysztof Smiechowicz fixed
Windows-hosted AROS port, enabling Windows users to enjoy AROS again,
and was making final changes to ABIv0 system refresh. Olivier Brunner
fixed a memory trashing problem in AROS MUI List class and Miloslav Martinka
made a small but usefull improvement to Wanderer's Info tool, which from now
on shows the path at which the icon is located and allows opening that
path in separate Wanderer window.
Paolo Besser, who is working on next version of Icaros, announced that
it will support also hosted flavors of AROS which is a welcomed
development by AROS community. It means Linux and Windows users will be
able to enjoy Icaros without a need to install virtual machine.
Third party development also provided new, interesting software. Marcus
Sacrow prepared versions of his EdiSyn and Maporium applications for AROS
ARM platform, which is a very welcomed development as ARM platform has very
few 3rd party applications at the moment. Yannick Erb provided a new
version of MAME (Multiple Arcade Machines Emulator) which can be downloaded
from AROS Archives.
In October the AROS repository breached the 53,000 commits mark thanks
to contributions from multiple developers. Neil Cafferkey continued
his work on improving MUI as well as fixing the IntelGMA video driver.
Miloslav Martinka contributed further Czech localization as well as a
localized WiMP tool. Yannick Erb and Marcus Sackrow contributed fixes
to AROS programs and we saw the introduction of a new AROS GUI theme.
Lastly, the ARM Linux-hosted version of AROS has been fixed to compile
again as part of the ABIv0 refresh by Krzysztof Smiechowicz.
After September's explosion of distributions, October was quiet on
that front. Third party developers however continued their work.
Yannick Erb released an updated version of the ZuneView tool and Joerg Renkert
released a new version of his ModExplorer application for playing online
and offline music modules. AROS archives also saw the upload of two
interesting Zelda-type games, 'Time to Triumph' and 'Navi's Quest'.
September was definitely a distro month. First, the AEROS distribution
was refreshed by Pascal Papara and brought to version 4.2.1 on all
supported platforms (Raspberry Pi 1/2/3 and Odroid XU3/XU4). The
changes include integration of EmuLa, installation of the Chrome browser
supporting Flash, SDL2 libraries, ScummVM 1.8 and the game 'Amiga Racer'.
Staying on the ARM platform, September also saw the first release of an
AROS distribution targetted at the Orange Pi platform. The distribution,
called PiAROS, uses the hosted version of AROS, similar to AEROS.
Lastly, Icaros Desktop, the x86 distribution by Paolo Besser, received
an update and is now available in version 2.1.3. The new version brings
updates to several applications, including Odyssey Web Browser, PortablE,
SimpleMail and Mapparium.
In core AROS development we had two activities. While Neil Cafferkey
continued making improvements to MUI, Miloslav Martinka added Czech
localization to a number of applications as well as implementing
localization in Appearance preferences.
Opening this news summary is the announcement of a public, read-only access
for AROS repository. So far such access was only provided via the AROS
GIT-mirror but now it is also available on the main repository.
Also last month, a first full developer pack for AROS 68k has been
released by Krzysztof Smiechowicz in cooperation with the Apollo/Vampire
team. The dev-pack contains a ready-to-use native development environment
for 68k as well as scripts that will download and build AROS 68k on a
Linux host, delivering system and cross compiler.
In the AROS core there have been a few notable developments. Nick Andrews
continued making fixes to AROS to allow compilation under GCC 6.1.
Krzysztof Smiechowicz updated the OpenSSL library to version 1.0.1t and
started porting the OpenSSH 7.3 package, releasing the first, alpha version.
The work on the ssh client was triggered by the results of June's usage
survey. Neil Cafferkey continued making fixes and extensions to MUI's List
class and finally a number of programs received new or updated Czech
localization thanks to Miloslav Martinka.
Outside of the core team, Pascal Papara continued releasing updates to his
AROS distributions. In August AEROS 4.0.1 has been released with support for
Raspberry Pi 1, 2 and 3, containing updated kernels and an update for the
UAE4ARM emulator.
Closing this update, there have been two interesting third party developments
in August. SimpleMail 0.42 with SSL support has been released and a new
OpenGL-enabled port of the classic 'Elite 2: Frontier' has been made available
by David Douglas.
Latest ARCHIVE submissions: The AROS archives contains the latest system content submitted by our community, and is the primary location for user applications, themes, graphics, and additional documentation.
Latest AROS-EXEC forum posts: AROS-EXEC is the AROS primary community site. Get help with AROS, find out what is happening in the community, and post your thoughts.
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