Introduction

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. Read more...

Distributions

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. Read more...

GitHub Commits

News 2017 to 2019 Summary Author: Nick Andrews, Matthias Rustler date: 2020-01-01 Github migration 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. SMP 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. m68k 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. Raspberry Pi Some progress has been made on the port for the card-sized computer. An USB driver has been written and a big-endian target has been added. AHCI Device 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. Build System 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 2016 Highlights Author: Krzysztof Smiechowicz Date: 2016-12-29 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. October 2016 Highlights Author: Krzysztof Smiechowicz Date: 2016-12-04 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 2016 Highlights Author: Krzysztof Smiechowicz Date: 2016-10-25 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. August 2016 Highlights Author: Krzysztof Smiechowicz Date: 2016-09-12 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.



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