New year, more AROS goodness!

Happy New Year AROS fans! People are already talking about this being the year for AROS. There is a poll happening right now on AROS-Exec.org about that very thing. It could very well be the year for AROS. Although for me, last year was an awesome year for AROS. To name a few, Michal Schulz brought us USB and 64-bit AROS! Tom Richard brought us AROS Amp and updated the AROS.org web site! AROS Developer Robert Norris first made his appearance! Darius Brewka and Damir Sijakovic made AROS pretty by bringing us Decorations! Neil Cafferkey gave us a brand new Installer!

This is just a few I noticed while flipping through my posts in 2007. I mean, if this year is anything like last year, bring it on! I can't wait to see what happens next.

Lately, Michal Schulz has accepted the Port AROS to SAM440 bounty. This may come in very useful for some. It gives AROS fans another option and with Michal working on it, you can count on it to be finished.

Alain Greppin has been working on the Port TeX bounty for AROS. His status report follows:

Regarding this bounty, I have:
- TeXlive: web2c, tex and Metafont running
- pdf creation from simple tex source (latex not tested)
- fonts are created automatically

Still to be done / open issues:
- pdftex need the regex functions. I opted to integrate them from the FreeBSD libc (this requires also having the libc/locale functions and I'm still fighting)
- pdftex need a C++ compiler to build - I'm using Rob's devkit. Thus, nightly builds of TeXlive isn't possible, atm (the same would apply for WebKit).
- web2c also needs ... web2c on the build host to compile
- I still did not contacted the TeXlive maintainers to integrate some of my changes in the their source tree

As a bonus, I also have a ShowDVI version from Pastex in alpha stage.

Regards,
Alain

If you are wondering what TeX is, you can read all about it, just search for it or read this.

There has been a big discussion about a package manager for AROS. You can read the interesting thread on AROS.Exec.org.

Tomek 'error' Wiszkowski has been working on a disk validator. Check out his message to the AROS dev mailing list.

I just wanted to announce that from now on AROS is equipped with AFFS disk validation routines. The routines have been successfully verified on a 2GB partition; the test revealed that validator is capable of recovering the invalidated disk holding elements of invalid type or having invalid checksums.

As of the fact, that structure repairs and validation is a process altering the disk structure (in positive way, but still), I decided to prompt user to decide
- whether validation should be performed
- whether it is okay to strip invalid elements from directory structure

Validator is not able to handle extreme situations (such as when bitmap blocks are unavailable), but frankly speaking - all these blocks are allocated during format and i can't think of a situation where they would be removed.

If validation is stopped along the way (user cancels disk-altering validation) disk is turned to unvalidated regardless of its previous state (if disc contains invalid directory entries or checksum errors, the validation flag will be cleared).

finally, validation procedure can be launched upon write to invalidated disk, thus write to invalidated disks may actually be completed, once validation process restores disk validation.

I would like to claim the bounty #59, but before it happens, I would like to ask you to give me about a week, maybe two, to ensure the compatibility of the validation procedures with current system and afs handler itself.

Error was talking about some screenshots on IRC, but I didn't catch the link. I'll see if I can gather them from him and post them soon.

Michael "Micken" Grunditz continues to work on SimpleMail Light for AROS. I have noticed a recent screenshot from Micken. A nice one here.

Heinz-Raphael Reinke has been working on Murks and uploading updates to the AROS Archives. He has many translators helping to translate docs into different languages which is very nice!

Paolo Besser has recently uploaded a muimaster.library selector for applications in AROS. There was a change to this library that caused problems with certain older applications running in AROS. Read more details here.

I just chatted with fishy_fis on IRC and he is nearing completion of Velocity. Velocity is a new AROS distribution. I will post more information on The AROS Show when it becomes available.

Don't forget to read Rob Norris' blog to keep up on the latest happenings with the "work in progress" AROS internet browser, Traveller.

As far as I can tell I need support for both blitting objects (like images) to the screen, but also need drawing primitives, both simple stuff like lines, circles and rectangles as well as complicated things like Bézier curves and arbitrary paths. It needs to be able to apply a transformation matrix to both paths and images. It needs compositing support. It also needs to be able to operate on screens of arbitrary size and depth.

I’ve studied the problem in some depth, and I’ve decided to port the cairo graphics library to AROS.

Keep up the great work Rob!

I have recently asked a long time AROS developer to do an interview for The AROS Show. You may have seen his posts on AROS.Exec.org under the name FATS. His real name is Staf Verhaegen and he works on low level code in AROS. It is very important to AROS, but the normal user may not realize it. I appreciate Staf accepting the interview and it will be coming soon to The AROS Show!

One quick note, I have now started adding titles to the posts here on The AROS Show. I have also added a new section on the right navigation for all the interviews. Enjoy!

*Raises beer mug*
Here is to a new year of AROS! Here! Here!