[SGVLUG] some news about AROS, a partial status report of June 23, 2009.

[simonebernacchia at yahoo.it]

HI, i don't know if anybody here is interested about AROS; in case there is some curiosity, guess it is time to give some insight on what is happening on the project lately.

So let's summarise first that AROS is an open source reimplementation on multiple platforms of the Amiga OS structure and API, and source code compatible with Amiga OS 3.x.

It is distributed mainly through both the main aros.org website (as nightly builds that contain the system software) and its main distro Icaros Desktop available at icarosdesktop.org in live (to be installed or run in qemu) DVD and Virtual Edition, ready to be used in vmware or virtualbox.

Being a reimplementation of Amiga OS, most of the technologies used in AROS are originally born under Amiga OS, such as the zune window manager, an open source rewrite of the original amiga MUI 3.8;

Recently some of the most used external MUI classes such as texteditor.mcc and betterstring.mcc have been made cross-compile on AROS and now are aligned with the amiga mainstream versions. Previously zune used some forked versions that were not aligned with mainstream and used to have severe bugs. Of course the improvement of those classes made emerge some zune glitches and implementation failures that were so far either worked around or attributed to the outdated classes themselves.

Of course this means that at the moment developing for AROS is still a moving target considered that some of the older workaround used to overcome some classes limitation now might break applications, but thanks to the fact that the API is quite stable the breakages are not critical like in other systems.

Beside that,the reconjunction with mainstream MUI classes versions is among the factors that brought another open source well-known program in the Amiga world, YAM, is going to be soon available for AROS; Mathtias Ruster is working at the port and is being helped from the original YAM team on it.

The recent developments of AROS have increased the number of former amiga users; important steps have been the beta release of OWB and the ongoing development of Janus-UAE, a specific UAE version that brings an almost-transparent integration with the AROS user interface, opening amiga applications in AROS windows and screens, and using aros menu system instead of the amiga one where possible. 

The same OWB browser, based on the Webkit engine and ported by Stanislaw Sszymczyk, now is out in the 0.9.7 version; since the first exit it gained in rendering speed,stability, and also got a simple bookmark manager.

Also graphic and network drivers seen an improvement; a new developer recently joined AROS and started its work extending the support of ATI drivers and fixing bugs in some of the network drivers, RTL8138 among all.

Another good improvement came from a further improvement of the ata.device responsible for accessing drives and CD-ROMs and for improving the vesa driver to allow, where graphic card and BIOS are compatible, to recognize the best high resolution and aspect ratio available on the machine.

Furthermore, the completion of the Network preferences control panel is an improvement fro the old approach of editing configuration files and allow to get ocnnected to the net with DHCP within seconds even from live CD just selecting network card and the use of the DHCP stack.

And last, the Poseidon stack bounty, that will allow AROS to both have a modern USB stack and also to open source its code under APL license, has been contributed from the three Amiga OSes community members that understood the importance to have an open source system such as AROS that allow common code sharing resources that permit common growth outside the closed source philosophies of the two other commercial Amiga OSes; in a similar fashion, money has been founded to the GPL licensed Gnash port on Amiga OS 4 that, once finished, can be ported on the other Amiga platforms.

A little parenthesis on the Bounty system:
It is known that some of the major open source projects such as the linux kernel in example or Apache or even mozilla receive strong funding from corporate or governative entities interested in their advancement and mantaining; usually in small open source projects such as AROS or even Haiku this is not possible and the funding and therefore major advancements are achieved mostly through bounties.

Usually a non-profit organization (power2people in case of AROS) handle and accept a bounty submission that consists of a target project, some requirements and a deadline. 
People then can donate money to some bounties and of course the more money a bounty has the more the project is appealing (but also is a sign that the job might be non trivial and that the requirement is particularly strong). 

If any programmer is interested he takes the bouinty and try to deliver within the allocated time span according to the specs and the requirements. In case the deadline is reached but the programmer hasn't yet finished the project he can ask for an extension. 

If the programmer finishes the project within the allocated time span of the bounty he will receive the money.

But despite this, resources are still limited and AROS still lack drivers for important devices and programs, such as office suite or productivity ones; even a printing subsystem is still mostly lacking and a port of Samba  from the Amiga OS or linux is, if not in the immediate priorities, still quite high in importance.

This report is my own personal initiative and if you do not like to know more about AROS just let me know.

For further informations just refer to the main aros.org web site or the distro website icarosdesktop.org

Simone Bernacchia