If you have the skills to write C code, now would be an excellent time to start developing for AROS. The bounties at
Team AROS are climbing! They total almost 10,000 dollars. (The monthly income is much higher than the total shown on the site, but Olivier will fix it soon.) If you are not aware of the monthly income, let me explain. You can sign up to donate monthly to the AROS project where your money will go to the bounties. This is a great way to contribute! The higher the bounties, the better the chance a developer will accept it and implement it for AROS. You can donate a minimum of 5 dollars a month.
A very gracious donation was recently given to the
Kickstart ROM Replacement (Phase I) bounty by a well known Amiga company. Cloanto, creators of the totally awesome
Amiga Forever, have recently donated. I love Amiga Forever and I have the latest version right here with me. I use it all the time. I highly recommend it! Everyone involved with AROS thanks Cloanto for their support!
Rob Norris has been hard at work on some HIDDs. What are HIDDs you ask? Well, I had the same question. So I was lucky enough to catch Rob in IRC and he was nice enough to take the time to explain them to me. I copied our chat from my logs and cleaned it up a bit. Here it is:
"Essentially they're very very low level drivers, that user stuff inside AROS doesn't see.
Think of Amiga. You had things that would hit the hardware in various ways, graphics.library, aux-handler, input.device, etc.
Obviously if we're going to be compatible we have to have those things, but we're not running on one standard set of hardware like AmigaOS (largely) was.
So, rather than implement multiple versions of (say) graphics.library, which contains both hardware-access stuff and graphics functions (like drawing and scaling), its separated.
The hardware side is the graphics HIDDs.
So we have nvidia.hidd, radeon.hidd, vesa.hidd, x11.hidd and then graphics.library implements the graphics primitives and talks to whatever HIDD is loaded.
We use that model pretty much anywhere the hardware wasn't abstracted under AmigaOS
So we don't use it for example, for network card drivers. Because they already have a nice generic interface defined by Commodore, (sana-ii).
So we just have eepro100.device, tap.device, whatever."
Now that you know more about HIDDs, head over to
Rob's blog and read about what he has been doing with them.
Rob has also setup a couple of interesting items lately. If your a developer, you will be interested to know that Rob has made a
Git repository available. Git is what all the "cool kids" are using these days. I've used it while working on Source Mage GNU/Linux and it seemed to be very easy to work with. Click
this link to read all the posts where Rob has mentioned Git. This explains more about the AROS Git repository he has setup.
AROS now has an
Ohloh page thanks to Rob. Ohloh is becoming very popular lately. It is a cool idea. The description on the Ohloh web site reads: Ohloh is an open source network that connects people through the software they create and use. The AROS Ohloh page has already been rated as Popular! Code statistics are given on the project pages at Ohloh. Georg Steger has pointed out the AROS code stats are not correct, because there is a large amount of code that was imported from somewhere else. If you haven't yet, head over to Ohloh and sign up. Start adding to your Stack and be sure to show your support for AROS by adding it to your Stack!
An_Omymous has developed a nice utility named AFS Util. It is a Windows GUI utility that lets you read AROS formatted OFS/FFS floppies or hard drive from Windows. The latest version is 0.1 and can be downloaded from the
AROS Archives. More information can be found there as well. Here is a
screen shot provided by Coolcat showing AFS Util running in Wine on Linux.
If you haven't heard, AROS will be on display at Pianeta Amiga 2007. It is an Amiga event in Italy and it looks very promising this year with many vendors. Our own Paolo Besser will talk about AROS, it's features and applications on Saturday 22, at 16.00h. So, if you plan to visit Tuscany that day, don't forget to add Empoli (FI) to your plan.
Bill Evans has accepted to do an interview right here at The AROS Show. Bill is the developer who is porting AROS to the
EFIKA. It should be a good one, so watch for it soon right here!
