A status update is on the menu for today, because there are tons of things going on with AROS currently. M0ns00n is working on the next version of Lunapaint. He states on the Lunapaint web site that he found some nasty bugs in the last release. He was saying on IRC today that he may have the next version out very soon. This will be the last release that will be an AROS only release. M0ns00n has released Lunapaint as open source. He has placed it on BerliOS. Marcin 'MiniQ' Kielesinski has already started porting Lunapaint to the classic AmigaOS.

Mithrandir has recently posted a status update on AROS-Exec.org about the AROS mp3 player, AROSAmp. Here is the full post:

Just a quick status update on AROSAmp 0.20 alpha.

There were a few holdups (bugs that appear while coding for no obvious reason takes time to correct!) that has kept the next release from coming out sooner, but these are now worked out, and I am now moving forward with finishing up the skinning system. After that I will be adding the new features I want to add before the upcoming release.

AROSAmp 0.20 Alpha will be out A.S.A.P.

Heinz-Raphael Reinke has released a new version of WinAROS. WinAROS is a preinstalled AROS environment that runs under Windows, using QEMU. You can download it here.

Matthias Rustler has successfully ported Wget to AROS. You can download it here. This is a port of the very popular GNU Wget that is used to retrieve files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP. If you don't want to use the command line, Camelek has released a GUI for Wget.

Since my previous story here about browsers and the EFIKA, things have moved a little on both. First, there has been talk of a new bounty being written for a browser. Nothing yet, but the AROS Show will keep you posted.
Next, BBRV has just recently donated more money to the EFIKA bounty. There has been several developers interested in this. So this one may be picked up sooner than I thought.

Michal Schulz is still working on the USB stack. He has been very busy obtaining his PhD. He is known as Dr. Schulz to us now! Congratulations Michal!

Robert Norris is still heavily involved with DOS Packets. I'll keep you posted.

Pavel "Sonic" Fedin is porting his Extended parallel.device API to AROS. This will allow usage of a parallel port on Amiga family systems for a wide range of devices like scanners, external drives, homemade electronics, JTAG adapters, EPROM programmers, etc. A more detailed description is posted in the forum at AROS-Exec.org. The AROS Show has actually lined up an interview with Sonic, coming soon!

I have recently been trying to work on my porting skills specifically with PyAROS. Which is the Python Programming Language for AROS. It really needs to be updated to the latest version of Python, so I'm working on that. Hopefully if all goes well, I will be able to maintain it in the future.

On a side note, Menthos from the Swedish Amiga Demo group Nukleus has asked me to write about AROS for their disk magazine called Cows 'n Snakefights. I have accepted and I will let you know when the next issue will be available.

I hope I didn't leave anything out. There are so many projects going, it is getting hard to remember everything. I love that! The more the merrier! If I did leave something out, I'll be sure to post about it soon. Enjoy!