The AROS Show

3D, ARESOne, Icaros, Janus-UAE, Ruby

2009-11-02T19:34:00.007-05:00

Of course everyone is wiping the drool from their chin over Deadwood's progress with Gallium3D on AROS. Paolo over at the Icaros Desktop web site has been covering this well. I recommend hopping over there and reading his posts and watching the videos of Gallium3D running in AROS. Deadwood has posted several and they are way cool!

Pascal Papara has put together what appears to be a nice desktop computer that runs AROS. He calls it the AresOne. There are pics to check out over at the AresOne web site. Good luck Pascal!

Since I last posted, Paolo Besser has released version 1.1.5 of Icaros Desktop LIVE! It fixes some bugs that were in the 1.1.4 version. Go to the Icaros web site for more.

Thank goodness o1i is still working on Janus-UAE! He has been posting his progress on his blog and has released another release candidate in October. You can help by downloading, testing and submitting bug reports. o1i asks for the help in his post. So please help! Keep it up o1i!

Last but not least, I was reading AROSWorld.org and noticed a news post about the Ruby programming language now being available for AROS. How did I miss this? I dug a little deeper and found that it is available on The AROS Archives. By the readme, you can see that Dave "MisterDave" Webster worked on the port. Plus our very own Mazze helped him when needed. I'm not a big Ruby fan myself, but it is very cool to have the language available for AROS!

On a side note, have you noticed how awesome Mazze is? I need to get an interview with him on The AROS Show!

Krzysztof "deadwood" Smiechowicz Interview

2009-08-24T21:50:00.003-04:00

Would you please tell us about yourself and how you became interested in computers?
I'm 28 years old and I live in Poland. I started my adventure with computers when I was around 8 years old. I saw a C64 at my cousin's house and played Flimbo's Quest there. From that moment I knew I wanted a computer too, but it was too expensive back then for my family. A couple of years later I finally received my C64. I mainly used it for playing games, but when I ran out of fresh games I started some coding in BASIC and later some simple animations in assembler. When I was around 13, I switched to Amiga 500. Again I used it mostly for games but did some Amos programming as well. The funny thing is that I almost never used 'Workbench' so I understood how powerful AmigaOS was only when I started working on AROS. In the middle of secondary school I switched to PCs and wasn't following the Amiga world anymore from that point (around 1996 I guess).

How did you become interested in AROS?
I first found out about AROS in 2004 while browsing for some Amiga news. I downloaded the ISO and gave it a try (I still have this ISO). It was nice to see Amiga like windows gadgets and the global menu and it brought back some memories of my Amiga times, but AROS somehow did not capture me for long at that time. I also had my last year of studies on my head so I was fairly busy. I returned to AROS in January 2008, seen the progress that has been made in those 4 years and decided to contribute something to the project.

What are you currently working on for AROS?
Mostly I'm maintaining the AROS status information keeping it up-to-date and facilitate AROS 1.0 Roadmap Reviews. Apart from that I do some AROS coding when I feel inclined too. Currently I'm working together with Kalamatee on bringing the Mesa 3D library to AROS. I'm also interested in updating our now-old SDL port. From time to time I return and do some minor changes to Murks. Apart from this, I also plan to finish the Zune review by the time of next Roadmap Review (in December).

What projects have you worked on in the past for AROS?
I started doing AROS coding with Murks. I added some features but mostly I used Murks to learn about AROS API - this was all new to me as during Amiga times I only programmed in Amos. So far I did a few ports, including Eternal Lands client and MPlayer, however I consider review of completeness AROS API as my biggest achievement so far.

Can you tell us more about what you have been doing with Mesa recently?
I'm continuing work started by Kalamatee. My personal goal is to deliver a shared library compatible with GL API so that people could compile GL applications for AROS. This will be only in software rendering mode, but Mesa itself has already an infrastructure for hardware acceleration (Gallium3D). I hope somebody can take up the task of making those drivers run under AROS. Once this is done, all existing applications will automatically switch from software mode to hardware mode.

Do you have any future plans on helping Heinz add some other features to Murks IDE?
Murks IDE was a good way to be introduced into AROS API and I would certainly like to see it being developed further. I think it is important to have at least a basic development environment, especially for people not familiar with command line compiling. In the near future however, I don't see time to work on it further - but the code is open and available and if anyone wishes to continue my and Heinz' work, I would be happy to introduce them into the application. Lately I've seen a bit more new programming-oriented people posting on Aros-Exec - maybe one of them would like to develop Murks IDE further.

How do you feel about the Poseidon USB stack, since you were instrumental in pushing the donations to the $4000 mark?
Are you happy with it now that it is implemented?
I'm very happy with the way Poseidon works on AROS. There were some problems but we had a large team of testers and finally got Poseidon running on an impressive number of hardware configurations. It will never be 100% but the current levels satisfy me. Poseidon itself is also a very mature product and I'm happy it is now part of AROS.
I consider it a platform that we can extend in the future to get better hardware support. I would also like to see Poseidon ported to AmigaOS 4.x so that there would be a common USB system between all Amiga-like systems. I see this as an encouraging factor for USB driver developers - now they will not only have access to Poseidon source codes, but by writing the driver once, they will be able to distribute or sell it to users of all Amiga-like platforms.

What can you tell us about your involvement in bringing the game Eternal Lands to AROS?
With Eternal Lands I had two goals. The first obvious one was for AROS to be the first Amiga-like system to have a 3D MMORPG game available. The second goal was to see how hard it would be to port an application that had a lot of dependencies on libraries, most of them not yet ported for AROS. During doing the port of the game I had to compile those libraries for AROS. Also I had to revive the old Mesa port and make a new one as well as build true cross compilers for C++. Once all of those pieces were in place it turned out that the game was extremely slow due to software rendering and I had to improve the old codes. I managed to get some decent speed but at the expense of quality. I'm pleased with the Eternal Lands client, apart from the game for the users, it brought some improvements to AROS (which were later used by Stanislaw in OWB).

Since you are the one that is keeping track of the status of AROS implementation, how do you feel about the state of AROS at this time?
The overall AmigaOS layer score is about 80% now and the Zune review is not yet done. The 80% however shows the status from programmer's perspective. From a user perspective I would say the score is closer to 90%. There are still obvious missing parts like cursor handling, printing, AppWindow, etc - but the system is already usable and thanks to Icaros this usability is visible to everyone.
Status of AROS Implementation

Are you still working with Staf Verhaegen, Markus Weiss and others on AROS ABI v1?
For those who don't know, can you describe what AROS ABI v1 is?
In short the ABI is a definition on how different code works with each other on a level lower than source code - for example ABI defines which CPU registers are used for what purpose on a said system. The AROS ABI v1 is developed only by Staf, while Markus works more on improving our C library and also on some PPC specific parts. I did not work on ABI v1 as a coder - I only facilitated the review of plans so that it is known what the scope of ABI v1 actually is. Since it's only Staf who is working on this topic the work goes slowly. If anyone however is interested in helping Staf, please do contact him.

Do you plan to do anything else with MPlayer for AROS?
I would like to do the port once again from the latest MorphOS codes and this time do it cleanly. To be honest the first port was meant to be a quick win for AROS. It was around the time that Stanislaw started working on OWB and seeing that most of the work on MPlayer in already done by MorphOS developers, I wanted to deliver a fully featured and up-to-date multimedia player to AROS users and do two little steps at the same time in bringing 'modern features'.

Are there any AROS projects that you are planning to do in the future?
I want to finish the Zune review by the time of the next roadmap review. Apart from that I would like to deliver an updated and working GL and SDL layers so that more and bigger games can be ported to AROS. Once these things are done, I think looking into Gallium3d could be interesting, but I'm not decided on this yet.

In your opinion, are there any features that could greatly improve AROS at this point?
On the system side, I would like to see overlay/cgxvideo support added for at least one driver and also Wanderer bugfixed/improved. On the applications side, I would be happy to see work continued on OWB, especially in topic of rendering speed. Those improvements would be nice, but I no longer see a candidate for a 'great' improvement. The last candidate vanished with Poseidon being ported to AROS. I feel that the majority of work needed for AROS is now about bug fixing, improving performance and stability and adding smaller missing parts.

Is there any particular software that you would like to see available in AROS?
First of all I would like to see Amiga-like software on AROS. I consider ports of GUI applications from Linux world as a last resort. Right now I would be happy to have Cinnamon Writer with support for Word/OpenOffice formats and Ignition with support for Excel/OpenOffice formats. Apart from that I would like to see Murks IDE continued to be developed. I'm also looking forward to the UAE integration bounty being finalized. The screen shots posted on o1i's blog sure look interesting!

How do you use AROS right now, virtual environment or native? Can you describe your setup?
This depends on the goal. For normal user activities (IRC, www) I use Icaros under VirtualBox. The speed is great and sound and network work. I also have a dedicated AROS box (IBM T42) but currently the network driver is not working so it is waiting for better times. For development activities I prefer using hosted AROS. It has the major advantage of catching segmentation faults and allowing debugging with gdb. It's really a faster and easier way to debug than 'printf-debugging'.

What programming languages do you know and what is your favorite?
In my job I mostly code in C#, while on AROS is mostly C. I consider a programming language simply a tool for implementing a solution. Having the solution to the problem is what counts. Then you just select the language that suits the needs of the solution. For example I would not use C to code a tool for text parsing - there are some scripting languages that are ideal for this task. On the other hand I would not use these languages to build any bigger system - I would use C#. In general terms I strongly prefer object oriented approach and I'm quite happy that parts of AROS API are object oriented.

I notice you have the knowledge to discuss projects with developers as well as help non-developers. What are your thoughts on the AROS community as a whole?
I like the enthusiasm and openness of the community. I can see that people with more experience are always trying to help those new to AROS to overcome their problems. I'm also very happy with the trend that has been seen for some time now - people from the wider Amiga-like community trying AROS for the first time. I've also seen some application developers joining the community, which hopefully will mean more original applications or at least some new ports.
One disappointing thing I noticed a few times is that people new to AROS expect that since AROS is x86, it will run on their very own x86 and will support all their current hardware like network, video, sound cards. Once it does not, they tend to judge the whole system from this perspective which is not correct. Hopefully this does not happen too often.

Do you have any thoughts on Amiga OS4 or Morph OS?
I have no user experience with either Amiga OS4 or Morph OS - so there is little for me to comment on. By looking at the screen shots / videos both systems are quite polished and useful. What I have thoughts on, is how some of the users of those systems react to the competing system. The Amiga OS 4 and Morph OS are more or less competitors and it would make sense from a commercial point of view for development teams or manufacturers behind the projects to distinguish one from another. What I observe however, is that it's not the development teams, but users who 'wage wars' - and this really makes me sad as the 'Amiga-like' community should at least accept one another - the community is not going to grow anytime soon, so any wars just make it weaker.

Is there anything at all you would like to add?
Sometimes I see people saying that they 'wish they could help but they are not programmers'. AROS is not only about programmers - even if you don't know how to code, there are many places where you can help out. The first thing you can do is test the nightly builds for regressions - that's what the nightly builds are for actually. If you are not interested in testing, there are still alternatives left. We are in need of creation or updating user manuals. Translations of said manuals or localizations of applications are also much desired. If you prefer working with graphics, create decorations or desktop wallpapers. What AROS also needs is spreading the word, not only to the Amiga-like community but wider, so that we may attract new users.
There are many areas in which a non-programmer can help - just look at Paolo - if not for Icaros, AROS would still be seen as 'nice effort but not really useful at the moment'.

Latest AROS News!

2009-08-12T19:54:00.003-04:00

Whoo hoo, finally another post on The AROS Show! I don't post as much as I have in the past, but I guess after 5 years that can happen. You get busy and interested in other things and pickup new projects along the way. But guess what, The AROS Show is still alive! There is plenty of news to write about, but first I want to say I now have a native AROS box of my very own and I absolutely love it! They were getting rid of a perfectly good old PC at my office and I grabbed it right up for $15.00. It has a 1Ghz Pentium III, 512MB RAM, 40GB hard drive, TNT2 video, and a Soundblaster Live sound card. I installed the latest Icaros distribution on it and it runs very well. I am very happy with the performance. I am mainly using it to program with PortablE. What am I programming you ask? Well, I'll tell you about that later in this post. I don't feel it is important enough to place in the beginning. So on to other AROS news!

First off, I have just contacted Krzysztof "deadwood" Smiechowicz about doing an interview for The AROS Show and he accepted! So another interview will be coming soon to The Show! You don't want to miss this one. Deadwood has done a lot for AROS and continues to do so.

Robert Norris has recently created a Planet AROS at http://planet-aros.cataclysm.cx/. This is a web site where feeds from a group of blogs are placed on the same site. So you can easily check the Planet and get most of the blog news about AROS. You can even read The AROS Show posts there! If you have an AROS blog and want to be added to Planet AROS, use the link in the right side of the site to contact Robert.

The Poseidon USB bounty is now considered complete. Chris is now fixing any bugs that may pop up. It is a huge step for our operating system. We have a nice USB stack now!

The great and powerful Icaros AROS distribution has recently released a new version with Poseidon included. If you haven't heard, Icaros now has the ability to do a live update via Icaros' LiveUpdater 1.5.1 too. Paolo Besser has made many updates to Icaros lately. For more updates and information check the Icaros official web site.

Steril has been working on a small image manipulation program he calls AROS Shotofop. (get it....Shotofop *wink*) It is pretty cool so far! You can read the thread he started over at AROS-Exec.org about it. Here is the web page that explains more. Nice work Steril! Check it out!

Oliver "o1i" Brunner continues to work on UAE integration into AROS. He has named it Janus-UAE and is following features listed in the UAE bounty. To follow his progress, check his blog. He does a good job of updating his blog and works on Janus-UAE when he has time. I am looking forward to him getting further with this one, it will be so nice to have!

If you missed it, Dr. Michal Schulz completed the Port AROS To EFIKA (Phase I) bounty back in June.
Lately, the good Doctor can be spotted on the #aros IRC channel and from what I can gather, he is tucked away in his lab with a i.MX515 board porting AROS to it!

Well, I think that is about it for now. I tried to dig up some stuff that has happened in the last few months. Hopefully I remembered everything. If not, comment and let me know.
I wanted to do something in AROS myself, especially since I have my AROS box going now. I have always loved programming and now have the chance to start a language that is born in AROS. To find out more about Mouser, check out my coding blog.

PortablE r4 released (now runs on Windows)

2009-05-29T20:47:00.002-04:00

Chris Handley has just released the next version of PortablE! PortablE is a programming language and compiler based on the popular Amiga E programming language created by Wouter van Oortmerssen back in 1991. You can read more about the original at Wouter's old Amiga E web site here.

I am proud to say I helped beta test this version of PortablE! Another known AROS user, Olivier "Ball000" Tigreat also helped beta test this version. I have been writing about my adventures in PortablE on my programming blog NovaCode. I have tried to add a lot of information for beginners there too. If you are looking for a great language to use in AROS, this is it. This version adds MUI support for AROS! Without further adieu, here are the other changes to this release of PortablE.

A new version of PortablE has been released. PortablE is an AmigaE compiler, written from scratch in E, and able to compile itself. It supports Windows, Amiga OS3, OS4, AROS, and MorphOS.

The main changes for this release are:
* PortablE now has basic support for Windows, along with some standard portable modules which allow the same program to run unchanged on Windows and Amiga. Documentation and several examples are provided.

* PortablE now comes with an installer (for all supported platforms).

* The PEGCC program runs both PortablE and G++ (GCC) for you, thus producing an executable directly from E code.

* PortablE now runs up to twice as fast.
* Added MUI support for AROS.
* Fixed modules to work with Amiga OS4's latest SDK.
* FastNew() and NEW are now thread safe.
* Fixed FastNew() and NEW, which were previously un-aligned and so could cause crashes under certain circumstances.
* OpenLibrary() could a crash on Amiga OS4. Really fixed this time!
* Numerous other improvements, changes and bug fixes.

If you want to find out more, or wish to download it, then please visit it's home page:
http://cshandley.co.uk/portable

Poseidon USB and AROS-Exec

2009-05-27T22:01:00.002-04:00

If your reading Amiga news lately you surely read about the Poseidon USB bounty being pushed past the $4000.00 mark. http://www.power2people.org/bounty_041.html
Krzysztof "deadwood" Smiechowicz helped immensely by matching contributions. He was the main force behind this. We thank him and his wallet! The donations came from many in the Amiga community. It was nice to see the entire community come together on this.

Poseidon brings a mature, enhanced USB stack to AROS. The following blurb was taken from Platon's web site.

The Poseidon USB Stack is a software solution that unleashes the possibilities of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) and the devices with USB interface, ranging from mice, keyboards, tablets, joysticks, printers, scanners, webcams, digicams, flash card readers, zip drives, floppy disk drives, harddisks, memory sticks, ethernet adapters, scanners and audio adapters to less common things like power supplies, GPS location devices or finger print readers. It is intended to be a solution for all systems.

Since the bounty reached it's mark, the master of Poseidon, Chris "Platon" Hodges has started working on the port. He has been in the AROS IRC channel hanging out with us and asking any questions he might have. It sounds as if he likes AROS and might be sticking around even after the bounty! We like that!
He has been posting his progress on AROS-Exec.org. Here is the screenshot of the Trident Graphical User Interface for the Poseidon USB Stack. Suh-weeet!!!

You might have already noticed that AROS-Exec.org is back up and looking GOOD! Ola "4-pLaY" Jensen and Hogne "m0ns00n" Titlestad worked to upgrade the old site and gave it a brand new design! It looks very fine and people are happy to see it back. It even seems quicker! Great job guys!
By the way, I want to thank AROSWorld.org for being there for us. We are lucky to have two community sites for AROS. Actually, no need to quit visiting AROSWorld.org. The difference between the two sites is AROS-Exec.org is more of a developer site and AROSWorld.org is more of a user site. So give them both some lovin! The more AROS love, the better!

AROS-Exec.org Web Site Down!

2009-05-22T14:39:00.004-04:00

AROS-Exec.org is down until further notice. It has been getting infected by viruses because of the old Xoops code that was used to create the site. It was never easy to upgrade Xoops and believe me we have tried. So here is the latest message from the site's main admin, 4-pLaY.

"The site is currently closed for maintenance, AE wont be back this time until a new site is ready, this can take days/weeks or even months depending on the spare time I can find to dedicate for this, if anyone wishes to help out feel free to email me or message me on irc."

Anyone can feel free to comment here also. 4-pLaY sometimes checks this site. If not, I will bring it to his attention.

There is an alternate AROS forum. The only other one in existence. (wink) It has been available for quite some time and I have wrote about it before. It is of course AROSWORLD.org. Go enjoy and spread AROS!

AROS Powered Computer System - iMica

2009-03-08T23:17:00.002-04:00

Editor's Note: After I found out about the release of this new computer system based on AROS, I quickly contacted the originator of the project, Steve Jones. I asked him if he could provide some more information for The AROS Show about the iMica to help spread the word and he agreed. Steve did a fabulous job of writing the following. I want to add; this is a wonderful idea and a nice system to run AROS natively. As he points out, a lot of users have struggled with making sure their computer has hardware that is supported by AROS. If you buy a system like this, you no longer need to worry about that. If you have the funds, I wholeheartedly recommend getting one!

For those who do not know me

My name is Steve Jones and a long time ago I ran a couple of Amiga companies in the nineties in the UK. I used to sell novel Amiga hardware like Avideo24 from Archos and Cando, Opus and other cool stuff.

However, I also developed our own hardware either by our self or in cooperation with other people. For example the original Checkmate Digital Amiga 1500 was one of mine and a guy in Milton Keynes, forgot his name sorry, the HiQ Power Station and we had an A500-A2000 conversion system with our own bus board including 4 Zorro slots, a CPU and a Video Slot and tower case.

But I am probably most well known for the Siamese System which was developed with Paul Nolan of Photogenics fame. This was like Terminal Services on the PC but way before anybody else did it. It enabled the Amiga display, sound and drives to be mapped to the Windows graphics card using Siamese RTG software which was new then also.

The final spin of the coin was the PCI Amiga project which was going to be sold by Gateway 2000 inc. until they pulled the plug and the project collapsed. The PCI Amiga was part of a transition of Amiga OS using Siamese technology to x86 and would have been the best route IMHO. At this point I left the Amiga market and swore I would never get involved in Amiga’s again.

Oh well, so much for that then but I did have a break for 10 years. Early last year I came back and found Aros one day while looking around and was curious, was this where I left off with PCI Amiga. After nearly a year of playing I decided it was time to dip a small toe back into the Amiga world.

Reasons for iMica System

The one problem I found was that I have loads of PC hardware floating around as I have always been into experimenting and building machines for friends and family, but getting a working system with the right bits was difficult.

Add to this I wanted a small efficient Amiga computer that could run my old software like Lightwave, Adpro, and Brilliance etc. through emulation, and be a modern fast and efficient system that did not need quad core and 4 GB of ram to get the OS to run half decent.

Aros is beautiful in all these respects but it still has work to do, to be where I would like it. However, for most users it is already a viable hobby computer with Internet applications, graphics, music, video and other apps just waiting to be played with.

The real icing on the cake, and I say this not forgetting the huge work done by amazing volunteers in the development cycle, but what makes iMica possible is the work done by Paolo Besser on VmwAros Live. It is polished, professional and worthy of a huge amount of praise.

So the iMica System (I have dropped the One title) was assembled so I could have a small fast and good looking (I hope) new Amiga type OS that could run new Aros software, old Amiga 68k software and not need a degree in engineering and systems integration to build and setup software. In other words plug and go and not break the bank.

Obviously there are driver problems but as the iMica System has a PCI slot we could fit the SoundBlaster live (EMU10k) cards to solve the sound problem, and the vesa driver is really good on the built in graphics chip. This left the network which we did not have a driver and I had no slots left. By luck I met Kalamatee, Nick Andrews on Aros-Exec.org and he said he would write the network driver. So I sent him a board and sound card and he wrote it.

I was then going to release but I decided to wait for the new Origyn Web Browser by Stanislaw Szymczyk. It was worth the wait and now iMica is really a serious contender for a great little hobby computer. I actually think that the new VmwAros 1.1 will be the ideal iMica installation and as soon as it is ready it will be default.

Aros or Amiga or MorphOS

This may get me into trouble now but here goes, firstly I have not tried either AmigaOS 4.1 or MorphOS mainly because I do not want to spend 10 times the price for a motherboard with less than half the performance just to have PPC because the x86 is obviously the devil processor.

This is not moaning at the obvious quality of the Sam boards because small scale means expensive. My argument is that Amiga OS followed the wrong processor path. I knew that in the late nineties so did others but now the Amiga platform has pushed itself into a technology Cu-De-Sac.

I know I will be corrected on this assumption if wrong, but I believe that MorphOS is based on early Aros work, ported to PPC and then turn closed source. This was not a good idea, I hope they are making money but now we have a fully fractured market with three main flavours and only one available to low priced hardware where the bulk of the Amiga market always sat.

Now I know that people will say that MorphOS and AmigaOS may run on Mac PPC hardware, but those boards are no longer being made and again are slower than x86.

I believe that all three parties should work together so that a single merged system can be put onto x86 and modern GPU hardware by next summer for the Amiga 25th anniversary. With a combined approach we may see a rebirth of the Amiga into the hobby mainstream computer market.

If not then projects like iMica System will hopefully fund the development of work needed to surpass AmigaOS and MorphOS and become dominant over the next year and take up the mantle of the NEW Amiga.

Controversial, maybe but the Amiga deserves a future and it is up to all of us to get together and make this happen.

Steve Jones

http://www.clusteruk.com - iMica Information
http://www.amiga25.com

Web Browser for AROS is HERE!!!

2009-02-24T19:45:00.002-05:00

Stanislaw Szymczyk has released the Origyn Web Browser port for AROS. You can now use an actual web browser in AROS! I have posted the link to Stanislaw's web site before, but he has added a lot of information about the OWB port. Javascript, download manager, preferences, OH MY! Please visit his site to read more information.
There is a nice little thread going on at AROS-Exec.org talking about the OWB action.
Thank you Stanislaw for finally bringing us a web browser. It is truly a dream come true for AROS users!

Now go, surf and enjoy!

AROS and Anubis coming to ARM

2009-02-02T21:04:00.003-05:00

If AROS users have not been reading bbrv's blog lately, they should right now. Michal Schulz has proposed the AROS and Anubis operating systems coming to the i.MX515. You can read more here about i.MX515 devices in a post made by bbrv on his blog.

At the end of this post by bbrv he mentions AROS and Anubis for the first time. In the very next post he shines a spotlight on the two proposals made by Michal and mentions the other projects proposed.

Don't miss the post by Matt Sealey on the Power Developer forum. This is interesting information for AROS developers and users.

This is very exciting news for both AROS and Anubis!

AROS Research Operating System for ARM
Anubis for i.MX

Bottom Line

2009-01-26T20:09:00.003-05:00

Have you noticed there is more happening with AROS these days. By the way, we seem to be obtaining more users than ever before! The features of AROS are finally reaching a point where the system is very usable. People are installing it on old and new systems and enjoying it. The bottom line is that it can only get better from here.

Recently Michal Schulz has posted some important milestones on his blog. Mass Storage for AROS and AROS running on EFIKA!

Paolo Besser has just released version 1.0.2 of VmwAROS. It even includes Michal's improvements on mass storage, so you can now plug-in your USB thumb drive! See the change log/download information for all the improvements and visit http://www.vmwaros.org to download the new release.

If you still don't know about the work Stanislaw Szymczyk has been doing to bring a web browser to AROS, you can read all about it at his Cogville web site. Enjoy!

I mentioned users running AROS on old and new systems. There is a nice little post over at Amiga.org by a user doing just that.

VmwAROS 1.0 is released by Paolo Besser

2008-12-16T08:42:00.003-05:00

Paolo sent me the VmwAROS release early, but with Christmas just around the corner, I had family over at my house and I was too busy to thoroughly work with it and give a preview of the release. Instead, Paolo was kind enough to answer some questions I sent to him and give some personal thoughts on the release of VmwAROS 1.0. Paolo has really did a wonderful job with this AROS Distribution. We needed a good distribution and now we have one thanks to Paolo!

What did you feel VmwAROS needed to accomplish to get you to the point of releasing a 1.0 version?

When I started VmwAROS I had a precise idea in mind: tailoring the AROS nightly builds to let everybody use them, focusing on reliability and simple solutions. Many things have changed in AROS since november 2007: we've got a far better user interface and many little - but important - improvements that users love. In the last months many applications have been ported and this made AROS far more usable than in the past. Place these two things together, and you'll get an almost-ready distribution. There were still some gaps to fill, however. People doesn't like to click on icons and give a command to open a file: I felt that some common operations like opening archives and MP3 should be made automatically by the system, and that we should access PDF files to read common documentation. Once I got all these things done, I thoght that it was time to stop bugging people with betas, and release "the real thing". VmwAROS has a duty: demonstrating that AROS *is* a serious project, even with its ethereal project management, and that it *can* be used for daily tasks. Yes, we still haven't a decent browser (but it will come), we still haven't an office application (but Ignition is almost there), but if you do very basic tasks with your PC, VmwAROS is already fine. Going for the "1.0" has been like writing something on the stone: "Hello! This is your new AROS desktop environment, please fill the gaps porting (or writing) new applications. The development chain is here".

Did you think VmwAROS would become this popular when you started the project?

Not at the point of getting more than 5000 visitors on vmwaros.org in the first 24 hours after the release, but it happened! I am really proud and happy for this growing popularity: it means that there is still great interest both in AROS and in the Amiga philosphy. I have received many congratulations here and there, even from people accustomed to far more advanced operating systems. I think that this popularity has been increased by my user-oriented mentality: while developing betas, I always kept in mind feedbacks from the former versions, trying to make treasure of them. I think this is the main job of a "distributor": asking developers to fulfit users needs, keeping track of them. I got also some criticism, mainly from people that basically hoped VmwAROS would be the next Amithlon, thanks to the new 68K support. But that's not the goal of "AmiBridge": as I always said and repeated, its meaning is limited to allow people use an old AmigaOS application, to open and modify files stored on the AROS filesystem, so they could apply the instruments they are accustomed to. But the hope is that they will progressively abandon those old programs in favour of a new, brighter and more modern AROS app.

What do you feel are some of the best features of VmwAROS at this time?

The little, big things that makes life easier for users. From my POV, the best thing in V1.0 are our "Poor Men's apps", the ones which begin with the "Poor" word. PoorPDF and PoorARC are the first implementations, but I'd bet there will be others in the future. It is really annoying that an AROS user can't explode an archive by clicking on it: even the second edition of Windows 95 allowed to do this! And it was more than 10 years ago. PoorARC enables this function under VmwaROS and does it in a simple way. You can even invoke it from a shell. Just write something like

PoorARCx (name of the archive)

and it will ask for a drawer to explode it. It works with many file formats, so you haven't to worry if it's an ARJ, a LHA, a ZIP or a TGZ file. If you want to enhance it, for instance to add other archive formats once they are available on AROS, you have just to edit the PoorARCx2 script in its directory.

But there are many, many things that make this AROS version more sexy and reliable. I love Ken Lester's double state icons: they give a far more professional look to the whole system, and I hope they will be more appreciated by Amiga fans. I am doing my best to let 'em feel at home under VmwAROS, but it's quite difficult.

Lorenzo di Gaetano featured VmwAROS at a Linux meeting in Italy recently. He mentioned he installed it on a laptop. What are your thoughts about him showing this at the meeting?

He's a lucky man, because he has got a laptop supported by AROS. ;)

Anyway, I dedicated a whole news on VmwAROS about this:
http://vmwaros.blogspot.com/2008/12/vmwaros-presented-at-linuxmeeting.html
He has done a great job, because AROS is still a mysterious toy among people. One of the most diffused criticism, when talking about AROS, is "why shouldn't I install Linux instead?". Maybe they test the system on a virtual machine and get a distorced vision of the whole thing, or maybe they even look at the screenshots only. But when you show VmwAROS living on real hardware, you can astonish them in a dozen of seconds: the time needed to boot the system and launch some applications. Linux has become a sort of benchmark: just show them something Linux can't do, and they will give you at least their attention. I had similar results at Pianeta Amiga long ago, and even at Brusaporto the same year.

If other people wanted to install VmwAROS on a laptop, how would they do this?

If the laptop has a EIDE hard drive, and a decent GPU, it shouldn't be a problem to install VmwAROS on it. Unluckily there is a dramatic need of new drivers in AROS, and even the existing ones are getting old. While there is a good attention for Serial-ATA support, with more controllers being added and supported every month, we have an ageing GFX system which doesn't work with more modern video adapters. Some time it's only matter of adding product IDs and vendors to the current driver. For the rest, my hope is that more and more developers will try to install VmwAROS on their laptops (and netbooks): so maybe we'll get all the drivers we need, someday.

Please add your personal views and episodes during development.

I started VmwAROS as a virtual machine, and it ended up in a complete distribution. I had to learn many new things, figuring how to do others, and find simple, but at the same time reliable ways to add new features. I couldn't do all this alone. During VmwAROS development, I had contacted AROS developers many and many times, tracking bugs and asking how to do things. They have always answered and helped me. I've felt the enthusiasm from third-party applications developers: when I needed something, I had just to ask. I've virtually met many incredible people. This made me think that I couldn't really do all this alone. A month ago I asked if there were people interested in betatesting VmwAROS, and many goodies of VmwAROS came in these days. More heads are better than one. An example? While working on VmwAROS betas, I noticed that I could manage many tasks by using scripts, and so the idea of "Poor Men's apps" has born. However I needed some C knowledge I had not. Krzysztof Smiechowicz helped me immediately, making all the changes I asked, and things like PoorPDF and PoorARC were born and... improved!

Stanisław Szymczyk Interview

2008-11-17T21:41:00.004-05:00

Could you tell us about yourself and how you became interested in computers?
My name is Stanisław Szymczyk, I'm 26-year-old computer programmer from Poland.

My interest in computers is a natural continuation of my childhood fascination with technology and electronics. I'd been always taking apart things to see how do they work, sometimes managing to put them back together, sometimes not. I remember that once when I was very young a friend of my father came to fix our TV set - an old vacuum tube model. The magic light of vacuum tubes completely enchanted me. Later I started to build various electronic devices ranging from simple radio receivers through audio amplifiers to quite advanced things like EEG amplifiers and binaural beats generators.

Considering my attitude to technology it's nothing strange that I wanted to have a computer even before I saw a real one. But my wish hasn't been granted until I was in my teens. Before that I've spent countless hours reading about computers in "Bajtek" - one of the first Polish computer magazines. I was also harassing our neighbors, who had Commodore 64 and later various Amiga models. Finally one winter parents gave us (I have two brothers) an Amiga 600 as a Christmas present. We spent a very happy Christmas night playing the only game we had - Motörhead.

How did you become interested in AROS?
I remember reading news about AROS years ago in some polish magazine about Amiga computers, but treated it just as a curiosity back then.
I've came across AROS for the second time only recently. It was kind of surprising that this project still exists after all these years. At the time I've been enjoying a break from work, so I had enough time to make myself familiar with AROS. I tried building Linux hosted flavour, but it was not working on AMD64, so I started fixing it, and then I simply couldn't stop.

What kind of project or projects were you working on before you started programming for AROS?
My first programs were simple games and graphical effects written in AMOS - a BASIC dialect for Amiga, quite popular in early 90s. AMOS was pretty advanced for a BASIC, but not very fast. That's why I started learning assembler, I wanted to write programs working as fast as possible. One of my first early achievements was a clock program written in assembler. It was used by the local cable TV. My clock was on every TV in the town, I was so proud.

In high school I attended some demoscene parties and became a coder in a not very widely known Decree group, and later in Weeds. Then I started working on some demo effects that could be used in our productions, also I coded "The Deep" disc magazine and "Greenday" pack. Near the end of high school I wrote my first programs in C language. One project I remember from that time is vocabulary editor for a conversation simulator program called Denise.

Later I became a Computer Science student at University of Gdańsk and gradually lost contact with most of my demoscene friends. During that time I started using Debian GNU/Linux operating system - at first on Amiga 1200, then on PC. It took me some time to get rid of the prejudices towards PC humbly cultivated during my Amiga days. Even now I still irrationally dislike Intel processors. I've kept my prejudices towards Windows, as they were actually not prejudices, but simply truth. During the studies I've learned Java and some scripting languages like PHP and Perl, that allowed me to earn some money as a freelancer by creating web applications. University studends have lots of free time, most of them are spending it drinking and partying. I spent mine participating in various projects, for example I was responsible for the floppy disk driver and FAT filesystem handling in the experimental operating system created with some guys from the university. I also wrote client-server networking code for the chatterbot project called Aimi.

When the only thing left to do was finishing my thesis, I decided to move to Warsaw and find some full-time job. I started working there as a Java programmer and spent a year and half maintaining financial software. That made me familiar with J2EE technologies, but it wasn't very exciting. I was always interested in artificial intelligence and wanted to see if I can do some research in the field, so I quit the job and started exploring the topic of language learning. During that time I created my first projects in C++: an implementation of the model of object recognition in visual cortex and a robot simulator for my experiments in developmental robotics.

You have accepted the AROS Self-Compiling bounty. What kind of experience do you have that allows you to work on a project like this?
AROS Self-Compiling bounty requires porting of a lot of GNU software to AROS. Knowledge of both Amiga and Unix worlds is needed to do this. I was Amiga programmer for about seven years and I've been programming on Linux even longer. I think that makes me a good candidate for the job. Besides, I'm good at bug hunting, I've been doing that a lot when working on this bounty.

What is the status of the AROS Self-Compiling bounty at this time?
It's almost completed, I've just finished uploading the necessary packages. Now everyone should be able to self-compile AROS using the nightly builds and additional packages from The AROS Archives: Perl, Python, Autoconf, Automake and LZO library. I've built AROS on AROS a dozen of times now, both on native and Linux hosted AROS, so its ability to self-compile should be in pretty good shape.

Could you explain what self-compilation means to AROS? In what ways does this help the AROS operating system?
Self-compilation means that people can build AROS without the need for another operating system, so theoretically it's now possible to live with AROS alone. Theoretically, because some improvements are still needed to make it bearable. I don't expect AROS developers to switch to AROS in force, since it would make their work much harder. A good debugger is needed first and a port of Subversion, but even that won't make AROS a good OS for developers - it has no memory protection, so it's easy to crash the whole system due to some stupid bug in the code.

But even considering that, ports of GNU software created for this bounty will make developer's life with AROS easier, because now it has a fully-fledged GNU development environment with Autotools, GNU Make port, and ability to run configure shell scripts. It's now possible to build a lot of open source software directly on AROS, without the need for making them cross-compilable and integrating into AROS build system. For example recently I had to port a few packages needed for NetSurf and I simply built them on AROS without any changes, it was so easy!

I think that the greatest improvement self-compiling bounty made for AROS users. It freed AROS users from developer's monopoly to port and build software for AROS. In my opinion the border between users and developers shouldn't be that strict. On Linux is a natural thing for users to build software from the source code, I'd love to see the same on AROS. Ability to modify and rebuild AROS also allows users to contribute to their operating system by submitting patches with their changes. Even small improvements like fixing some bugs, correcting wrong spelling or adding new locale are still making AROS better. It's really sad that in the long history of AROS nobody has ever contributed a patch to its SourceForge tracker.

Have you thought about any projects you would like to develop for AROS in the future?
I'm currently working on a NetSurf browser port for AROS. Besides that, I'm going to do some general improvements like fixing bugs, refactoring the code and adding missing documentation. But the first project I want to develop after completing the bounty is taking some rest.

In your opinion, what features could greatly improve AROS at this point?
AROS is still haunted by the problems with ATA driver. A thorough test of the driver on various chipsets and fixing remaining bugs is a must.
The same goes with USB support, I've heard there are still some problems with basic devices like mouse and keyboard. Zune needs a lot of bug-fixing too. As you can see, it's mostly about improving the quality of existing code base, AROS needs that a lot.

Considering new features I'd like to see at least partial memory protection and better exception handling. Currently it's very easy to crash AROS, implementing these features would make a big improvement, especially for developers.

On my personal AROS wish list there is a decent pager working on abc-shell and some new Shell features like scrollable command history and ability to select, copy and paste a block of text. POSIX termios interface is closing my wish list, it would allow to easily port a lot of great console-based software to AROS.

What applications would you like to see available for AROS?
A good debugger. Also I'd like to see a network stack better integrated with AROS - without the need for editing configuration files, with a simple GUI allowing to configure the network. Then a movie player and a modern web browser.

What is your opinion about a web browser for AROS?
It's absolutely necessary to have a modern web browser. Most people won't take seriously an operating system without it. Modern web browser would also serve as a platform for using online applications that could fill some gaps in software available on AROS, like office suite for example.

Do you think it will still take a large amount of work to complete a 1.0 release of AROS?
Unfortunately yes. In my opinion the hardest work needed for AROS 1.0 is completing ABI_V1 changes that Staf Verhaegen is currently working on. It may take many months to finish, I hope that more developers join the effort. Krzysztof Śmiechowicz did an excellent job with the API review, currently he's updating AROS 1.0 roadmap to reflect the current state of AROS, so it should be pretty clear soon what other work is still needed for the 1.0 release.

Do you currently own any Amiga's?
I have an Amiga 1200 with 68040 40 MHz CPU and 8 MB of fast memory. I'm not using it anymore, though. Perhaps the coming Natami project will turn me into an active Amiga user again.

What are your thoughts about Amiga OS 4.1 and MorphOS?
I've been following Amiga-related news only casually until now, so I don't have much knowledge about these operating systems and their capabilities. But I think that it's a good thing that people still want to buy and use them - even considering the high price of hardware needed. That means the spirit of Amiga is still alive in people's hearts. However looking at various animosities between the AmigaOS4 and MorphOS worlds is really saddening. Amiga community has become divided and thus weaker.

What programming languages do you know and what is your favorite?
Currently I'm most comfortable with C, Java, Perl and C++, but in the past I also wrote programs in various assemblers, PHP, Python, Ruby and Prolog. I don't have a favorite language, usually I'm simply using the most suitable one for the given purpose.

Do you plan to learn other languages? If so, which ones?
I'm going to become more familiar with C++, its expressive power combined with C-like performance is very appealing.

Do you admire the work of any specific programmers?
Not a particular one, but I definitely admire the work of all open source programmers for making the world a better place.

Do you still enjoy using Linux? What distribution or distributions are your favorite?
I enjoy using Linux very much, especially due to its rock-like stability and high performance. In the past I used Debian, I liked its flexibility and lack of assumptions about user, it was easy to tailor the system to specific needs. I dislike distributions designed for some imaginary average user, installing a lot of software that I won't ever need and forcing their own choices about GUI frameworks, window managers and system configuration. My current Linux distribution of choice is Gentoo, I switched to Gentoo because of its package management system allowing to easily integrate new software into the system package tree.

Is there anything at all you would like to add?
I'd like to thank the #AROS channel crowd for all the support and interest in AROS Self-Compiling project. Also I want to express my gratitude to all people who donated their money to AROS Self-Compiling bounty.

New Amiga Inspired Operating System

2008-11-08T19:59:00.006-05:00

There has been a secret that a small team of individuals have been hiding for many weeks now. Because of my absence lately, I have only had to hide it for a little over a week. I was lucky enough to be told and included in this team. (Thank you 4_pLaY) I am told that I can say a little about this now. I plan to be involved with this project as much as possible. This new project is the Anubis operating system.

The team right now is made up of many AROS people. The two major programming forces at work here are Michal Schulz and Hogne "m0ns00n" Titlestad. They have already been talking about what direction they would like this to go. There are a lot of decisions that need to be made yet. But here are the basics.

This will not be a fork of AROS. Anubis will not be aimed at an Amiga 3.1 compatible operating system. However this will be an Amiga inspired OS. Dr. Schulz will kick this off by stripping the Linux kernel. As for the API, it will be something that can be programmed by using C or C++. This gives developers a choice.

I don't want to go any further than that right now. I will let Michal or m0ns00n speak more about this when they are ready.

Anubis - "It's not your mummy's operating system!"

Surfing

2008-11-08T15:44:00.003-05:00

While surfing around the net this morning and checking out AROS-Exec.org first, I ran into a post by Stanislaw Szymczyk. He was playing around with porting the web browser NetSurf! Here is the summary:

I've tried building AmigaOS4 NetSurf port on AROS, here are my observations:

* All NetSurf prerequisites (OpenSSL, curl, hubbub, libnsbmp, libnsgif, libpng, libmng, libparserutils, librosprite, re2c, lemon, libxml2, libiconv) are already ported to AROS or can be easily ported - it took only few hours to complete them.

* AmigaOS4 NetSurf port is using ReAction GUI, so it can't be used directly on AROS. Some effort is needed to rewrite the gui for Zune. Any volunteers?

* AmigaOS4 NetSurf port is using new diskfont.library OpenOutlineFont() and CloseOutlineFont() functions not present in AROS diskfont.library. Does anyone know how to replace them?

After disabling most of the gui code I managed to build NetSurf binary. Of course it's crashing with empty gui-related functions.

If you want to read the entire thread you can find it here. Some kind of web browser would be nice to have.

--------

I rode an Internet wave over to the home of VmwAROS.org because I wanted to download the latest build. I plan to do some PortablE programming today. Reading Paolo's latest post I found some interesting news.

"The second big news regards AROS compiling itself. I'm in touch with Stanislaw Szymczyk, who has made this possible, and thanks to his help I hope to transform VmwAROS in the best development environment for AROS. Obviously I'll need all the possible feedback and help from other AROS developers too, because I strongly believe in this area of the project."

I think Paolo showing he is concerned about the development environment of VmwAROS is great to see. I was just wondering the other day if Paolo was concentrating on this area for VmwAROS and this confirms it. Go Paolo!

--------

The last stop I made was Michal Schulz's blog. I always check Michal's blog because he is one of the most active developers we have. His latest post is a little mysterious. Check it out and see what you think. Let Michal know your thoughts.

AROS Future Demoscene

2008-10-30T21:02:00.003-04:00

I wrote this article about one year ago for the diskmag named The Vague. It was a very nice diskmag, but they have not released a second edition after their debut edition. The article I wrote is getting old and I would have to rewrite it if they would release it now anyway. So I thought I would go ahead and post it here. Keep in mind some things have changed since then. Especially two things I mentioned. One, AROS is now ported to the SAM440. Second, PortablE is now available for AROS. At that time, they were not finished, but I mention them in the article.

I have always been fascinated by the demoscene and diskmags. This article discusses a possible future scene for AROS. I hope you enjoy it.
If you would like to comment or have any suggestions, I would love to see them.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

The AROS community has already started pondering about the demoscene possibilties for the operating system. The common questions that are asked are about hardware, languages and software needed to bring the AROS scene to life.

Back in the 80's and 90's Amiga demo coders used Assembly code and used the wonderful Amiga hardware to work their magic for the demoscene. In the Amiga community Assembly is still being used, plus mixing in C. Things have changed on the PC side in today's demoscene. These days for example, PC demo coders have some options. I recently chatted with my favorite PC demo coder, Keops of Equinox and Orb. He said there are different ways of doing it in the PC scene. Some coders like to use the latest high end hardware, while others only care about size limitations. Others want their stuff to run on most PCs, even old outdated machines. He said PC demo coders don't really use Assembly anymore, except for very small size prods. Somewhere around 1kb to 4kb intros or extremely small parts that only represent about 0.1% of the demo. They don't even use it when aiming for 64k restrictions. Today, a mix of C and C++ is used. He states "C++ done the C way".

AROS is already built on C. AROS development is centered around using the GNU GCC compiler in Linux to do the compiling. GCC is also available in native AROS, but not normally used for development of AROS. A Linux hosted AROS environment using GNU GCC is the preferred method.

So this proves that a mix of C and C++ could be used for AROS. Restrictions on size could be set to 1k/4k/64k, etc. The main architecture AROS was developed for was the x86 platform, but it is already in the process of being ported to the EFIKA PPC board. There is a bounty created to port AROS to the new SAM440 PPC board too.

At this point, you may be wondering what other programming languages are available for AROS. With a quick check on the official AROS web site, http://www.aros.org, you can find them. The languages are Python, Regina, Lua, Hollywood and False.

Python is a scripting language which has become quite popular, because of its nice design and features (object-oriented programming, module system, many useful modules included, clean syntax, etc.). A separate project has been started for the AROS port and can be found at http://pyaros.sourceforge.net/. Python for AROS is called PyAROS. It is currently an older version of Python. There has been a bounty created to port the latest version of Python. But it can be useful in it's current state.
Regina is a portable ANSI compliant REXX interpreter. The goal for the AROS port is to be compatible with the ARexx interpreter for the classic AmigaOS.
Lua is a powerful, fast, light-weight, embeddable scripting language. The AROS port has been extented by two modules: siamiga and zulu. The first one has some simple graphics commands, the latter is an interface to Zune.
Hollywood is a commercial programming language for multimedia applications including games. The CD-ROM contains a version for i386-aros.
False can be classified as an exotic language, so it will most likely not be used for serious development, although it can be lots of fun.

There is another language that will no doubt be ported to AROS one day and could definitely be used for demo coding. If you know anything about programming languages on Amiga, you have heard of Amiga E. It was a language created by Wouter van Oortmerssen and was very popular. Amiga E was written in Assembly language for the Amiga, so that makes it very difficult to port. But there is new hope! Chris Handley has developed a language called PortablE. Here is a brief explanation from Chris's web site. "PortablE is my not-quite-finished attempt to recreate AmigaE from scratch, with all the improvements I have wanted - but with backwards compatibility not a top priority (although it IS quite good now), and with esoteric stuff (like Lisp cells) left out, at least for the moment." I have e-mailed Chris and he already has plans to port PortablE to AROS. He has a bug to fix first that is keeping him from porting it at the moment. If you are interested in PortablE, join the Amiga E mailing list at http://www.freelists.org/list/positron. I have already joined the mailing list and tried PortablE myself. It is a great project and I can't wait to see it available for AROS!

Can any of these be used for demo coding? Except PortablE, I don't think any of these would be fast enough to use for a demo. There may be another programming option on the horizon with UAE and AROS integration. This would allow you to run Amiga classic apps natively within AROS. This may allow a demo coder to do some things they were able to do on the classic Amiga within AROS. The UAE Integration bounty is currently the highest bounty on the Team AROS site. The Team AROS web site is where all the bounties are created and maintained. Keep an eye on this bounty, because I expect someone to make it happen soon.

That brings us to audio. Currently AROS supports the AC97 driver and SB Live/Audigy driver. The new version of Hively Tracker has been ported to AROS. That gives us one nice tracker to get us started. But I think the audio capabilities could use more testing in AROS. Developers are working hard on other areas and interest of AROS is gaining. The more developers we obtain, the better and faster things will appear. But I don't think audio will take that much work, because some work has already been completed.

Graphics and 3D support is desperately needed if AROS is to have a demoscene. There has been some work done on porting Mesa3D, but it isn't completed. AROS Developer, Nick "Kalamatee" Andrews has been keeping his eye on a new technology named Gallium 3D. Some of the features are faster graphics, better and more stable drivers, OpenGL3, and the ability to properly accelerate other graphics APIs through the same framework. Kalamatee said he will port this technology as soon as it is stable. This would be a very important addition to AROS and is a very exciting concept.

Speaking of graphics. Paint programs can be used to created art for demos right! Well, AROS developer m0ns00n has created a native paint application for AROS called Lunapaint. Lunapaint is a paint and animation program for AROS, focusing on making the paint process fun and intuitive. Being inspired from DeluxePaint and TVPaint on Amiga, it aims to be a complete graphics solution for AROS users. m0ns00n has made this an open source application and continues to come out with new versions with new features. This is a great application and gives demo artists a way to display some works of art in their demos.

CONCLUSION:

Some things are still needed before a scene could emerge around AROS, but it is maturing and excitement is building. Many people have already mentioned that AROS would make a good platform to create demos for. I hope this article gave you some insight on the tools that AROS has and that are needed to develop a thriving demoscene with AROS. Some amazing demos could be made, because AROS is small and fast itself. I think it could be very popular with demo coders and today's demoscene reassures us of this. I will relish the day when I can download an AROS specific demo on http://www.pouet.net!

Some links of interest:
http://www.aros.org - Official AROS web site
http://www.aros-exec.org - popular AROS forum
http://cshandley.co.uk/portable/PortablE.html - PortablE programming language
http://www.tungstengraphics.com/wiki/index.php/Gallium3D - Gallium3D information
http://www.sub-ether.org/lunapaint/ - Lunapaint
http://strlen.com/ - Wouter van Oortmerssen

Deadwood Vice

2008-10-29T23:02:00.002-04:00

Krzysztof "Deadwood" Smiechowicz has been analyzing AROS API completeness. Some interesting graphs of his findings can be found on the official AROS.org web site.
Deadwood also mentioned he has ported a cool game named Eternal Lands recently. If you want to try it out, just download version 0.9.1 of VmwAROS. A screen shot of the game can be found here. You can read more about Eternal Lands at the official web site at http://www.eternal-lands.com/.

Prolific VICE Emulator developer Marco van den Heuvel aka "Blacky Stardust" told me he is busy working on the next version of VICE with the other VICE developers. One major change is with VICEplus. VICEplus is a fork of VICE. Its most important feature is that it provides C64DTV support. Blacky mentioned that the VICE Team is merging VICEplus into VICE. This is a very cool addition and it will be available for AROS. Blacky is the one who works on the AROS ports of VICE. If you are interested in reading more about Blacky, you can find The AROS Show interview with him on the right navigation of this site or click here.
VICE has a brand new IRC channel too. It is on irc.freenode.net at #vice-dev. The VICE guys are very friendly and I encourage everyone to hang out in the channel if you enjoy VICE.

Keeping it Rolling

2008-10-28T20:26:00.003-04:00

I received an interesting e-mail from AROS advocate Simone Bernacchia. He asked me to keep The AROS Show rolling. I have been busy with many other things in real life. I'm sure you all know how that is. I'll see if I can still keep up with AROS. I'll start by including some of Simone's e-mail where he mentions some of the happenings in AROS land since August. Then I'll add some of the latest news. Thank you Simone!

Well you know, we had minor improvements, such as the support for wide screen brought to us by Michal Schulz and we also had applications such as autodoc ported to AROS; Gregory John Casamento (bheron), chief maintainer of GNUstep accepted the bounty for the Kickstart Integration Phase I and is around and started working on it. (note: This is awesome to have Gregory working on AROS! I was very pleased when I heard this. -PJB)

Michal is also working on its efika port and so far is been able to boot exec. (note: More has been added to his blog lately. -PJB)

Paolo besser released the vmWaros 0.91 live version (0.90 has been immediately scrapped for a problem with wanderer and the icon menu) and Micken brought back Amosaic to work; last but not least we have the new Locale preferences panel by o1i and the attempt (gone bad for now but hopefully might go better in the future) of Mazze to compile SDLBasic, meant also to be part of the LLVM package and tied to Mattathias Basic.

Simone usually does his own articles concerning AROS and the general open source trend in his personal blog. In italian: scarabocchibinari.ilcannocchiale.it, and have an english version (actually less evolved but slowly recovering) in binarydoodles.ilcannocchiale.it.

The biggest news lately has of course been Stanislaw Szymczyk working on the Self-Compile Bounty. This guy has been doing amazing work. He has even been writing about it on his web site. His work includes new ports of the popular programming languages perl and Python. Work is still ongoing, but he has created a demo CD.

"Work on AROS self-compilation is still in progress, but as you can see there's already a lot of new software not present in AROS nightly builds. Moreover Perl and Python ports can't be build in AROS nightlies because it's currently not possible to cross-compile them, they have to be built on AROS. There are also still some changes in my local copy of AROS sources waiting to be polished and commited. That's why I decided to create an ISO image with AROS Live CD containing new ports along with other programs needed to compile open source software (including AROS itself) on AROS to demonstrate opportunities opened by these ports."

This news was posted on OSNEWS recently too. Please donate to this bounty and support Stanislaw's work. We are blessed to have another talented developer working on AROS!

Many Changes for VmwAROS

2008-08-22T13:18:00.006-04:00

Paolo Besser has been extremely busy working on VmwAROS. He sent me the following changes happening to the web site and the distribution. Check it out! If you want to know more about VmwAROS, go to the web site.

1. I have changed look to VmwAROS Site, choosing a far more professional one. I hope this new design, with a top navigation toolbar, will be more reliable for users and will help me publicize the "new mission" of VmwAROS: too much times, even today, when other people talk about VmwAROS treat it as an "AROS installation for VMware", while this information is now obsolete. VmwAROS is now more focused on the Live! edition, the one that can be installed directly on the hard drive and run on top of real hardware. For this reason the main description is now "WmwAROS is a pre-configured AROS desktop envirnoment available in two formats: a bootable live-CD installable on the hard drive, and a disk image for VMware." and the official slogan "VmwAROS is the leading distribution of the AROS Research Operating System.".

2. I have changed look to the distribution itself. I've dropped the
MOS-like decoration theme for a new one based on the AOS4-like AROS
theme by Damir. The new theme is practically identical, except for the
top boing logo replaced by VmwAROS logo in the top bar. I hope this new look will be more accepted by former Amiga users and Amiga fans.

3. The new version will be far more reliable for final users, thanks to
all Nick Andrew's improvements to Wanderer. AROS is now able to fix
window and icon positions, and view as well. VmwAROS will obviously
follow this path.

4. The new version should be stabler, too: no more FFS partitions in the
VE version, while GRUB2 will be used for the Live! version. This allows
the use of SFS system partitions to boot AROS, but it will be likely
incompatible to the "emergency mode" of v0.8. That will be removed, if I
don't find a way to make them coexist.

AROS SAM440 ISO Released!

2008-07-24T21:54:00.003-04:00

The ISO is released and the bounty is finished! Michal has posted to his blog today that he is releasing the AROS SAM440 ISO after about 6 months of very hard work! Please visit his blog to read the entire post.

Here is a small paragraph from his post:

"Has been marked as completed. I have been working on AROS port for SAM440 for half a year. It was an extraordinary experience. I have never been working on such "young" hardware before. I have never been cooperating with board developers at this degree before. Thank you all for letting me do it! :)"

It is good to see a bounty like this completed. From reading Michal's post, it looks like he had fun working on this one. Great stuff!

PortablE is Released!

2008-06-15T19:37:00.001-04:00

PortablE is an AmigaE compiler, written from scratch in E, and able to compile itself. It supports Amiga OS3, OS4, AROS & MorphOS.

It attempts to improve on the AmigaE language, and also to make it portable across various OSes. Backwards compatibility was not a top priority, although I feel it is pretty good now.

PortablE is not a traditional compiler, because it doesn't output machine code, or even assembler, but rather it translates your code into another language (not just C++) for a chosen OS (not just AmigaOS). You would then be expected to give the output code to a 'real' compiler.

When PortablE is generating the target code, it tries to preserve most of the formatting & layout of the (original) source code. The aim here is that someone could edit the target code instead, and perhaps even use it instead of the source code.

If you want to find out more, or download it, then please visit it's home page:
cshandley.co.uk/portable

SAM440 AROS Port Alpha

2008-05-19T22:45:00.002-04:00

Today Michal Schulz announced an alpha version of AROS on SAM440. He has posted to his blog and you will find the link to download it there. This should bring a smile to the faces of SAM440 children everywhere.

Eric Schwartz Interview

2008-05-07T01:15:00.005-04:00

Hello Eric, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this interview. I have enjoyed your work from way back in the 80's when I was still a kid. I'm glad your still doing your thing.

For people who don't know who you are, could you tell us about yourself and what you do?
My name is Eric Schwartz, and I currently work in the freelance illustration field. I'm not sure there's much I can do to elaborate on that.

You have always had fans in the Amiga community based from your past animations on the Amiga, your support for the Amiga computer and Amy the Squirrel. I enjoyed your Aerotoons in the 80's myself. Your recent animation was very inspirational. What made you decide to create your recent animation that is on YouTube?
It all started with the song "Still Alive" written by Jonathan Coulton for the ending sequence of the game "Portal". (ironically, I don't own or play the game, though I did buy the music) The lyrics are by a computer (the enemy in the game) singing about itself being defeated, but still very passive-aggressive and defiant about it, which seemed to fit the attitude behind the Amiga and its users. I started thinking more and more about how an Amiga-themed animation might work to that song, until it became an idea that would not rest until I had produced it.

I went through a lot of experimentation and trial-and-error to design the method of the animation. The main thing was I wanted to be able to work quickly, as three minutes of full animation with lip-synced vocals could take months if not years to complete if you don't have a staff working for you. The result was a mix of 3D and drawn animation designed to make the most of black and white line work. It could have looked more refined, but I was able to put the whole thing together in a little under two months.
Still Alive Animation

Do you have any other plans to do more with the Amiga computer character you used in the recent animation?
I don't have any specific plans yet, but I would like to do more with her, as I have put a lot into the development of the character, and the Lightwave objects that help make her up.

Do you have any other animations planned?
Pretty much the same answer as the previous question. I would like to do more hobby animation work like I used to. It's just a matter of finding the free time and the inspiration for new projects, as well as taking the time to teach myself to use newer animation software on newer systems.

What are the specifications of the Amiga you used to create the recent animation?
I use an A4000T with a 68060, CybergraphX 64 video card, 128 mb RAM, and a 9 gig SCSI hard drive.

I still use the Amiga for much of the graphics work that I do, along with a Pegasos 2 running MorphOS, a Mac, and a laptop running Linux.

What software do you use to create your animations?
On the "Still Alive" animation I used the following:

Photon Cel Animator (a very old program, but still useful for breaking down and reading audio tracks for lip-sync purposes)
Lightwave 3D v5 (for modeling and rendering the 3D elements of the animation)
Disney Animation Studio (for drawing the 2D line animation elements)
DeluxePaint 4 AGA (for extra animated effects and finishing touches
Axiom ANIM Workshop (for converting anim files between formats)

For the final compilation and saving I used a Mac, but the files are not too demanding for most Amigas to play directly, so I'm looking into options for an Amiga-playable version.

Most of my 'classic' animations made heavy use of a program called "Moviesetter" from Gold Disk, which was valuable for making complex animations with sound using relatively small amounts of memory or file space.

Do you still keep up with Amiga happenings?
Perhaps not as well as I probably should, but I try to.

What are your thoughts on the current state of the Amiga?
I think there are still a lot of good people doing good work out there, but it's definitely at a low point. Hopefully the community can find a way to move forward from here.

If you could buy a new Amiga type of computer tomorrow, could you describe what you would want it to be like?
My experiences with systems like the Pegasos and with emulation have shown me how strong and fast the Amiga and Amiga-style operating systems can be when put together with the kind of processor power and RAM/storage found on even a low-end system today. I'm not picky about exactly what hardware is used, as long as it works. What I would really like is to see an Amiga-like operating system become a strong alternative platform with a good software and development base behind it, like the various flavors of Linux. With it's open architecture, I've mentioned various places that I feel AROS has the best chance of achieving that goal.

Did you ever see anything happen from The Amiga Grassroots Campaign you initiated many years ago?
Over the years, I've seen my Amiga "Survivor" image reused a lot in various places, but I haven't noticed anything more ambitious than that - not that I was shooting for anything that high-profile to start with.

You created the mascot Kitty for AROS. How did that happen? What made you decide to use a cat for the mascot?
As I recall, I was asked to draw a cat character, so I wasn't the one who made that decision.

Kitty still remains the AROS mascot after all these years. However, we only have a couple of poses of her. Would you consider possibly drawing her in a few other poses for us some day?
It's a matter of finding the time with my normal work load, but I really should.

AROS has come a long way. Have you checked it out lately?
I've been watching with interest, and intend to make AROS one of the multiple operating systems on my laptop. I've been hoping to see some 680x0 emulation and 'legacy' software compatibility, as that would quickly put AROS on an equal or better footing next to Amiga OS4 and MorphOS, at least for me.

I always enjoyed the fact that Sabrina was an Amiga fan in your Sabrina-Online comic. Do you think there is any chance we might see Kitty make an appearance in Sabrina-Online?
I hadn't thought of that before, but It's a possibility.

Could you take us through the process you use to create a Sabrina-Online comic strip?
Each strip starts with an idea and a layout sketch to rough it out. The comic strips are mostly drawn by hand, pencil, ink, and lettering. The final comic line-art is scanned on the Amiga, and the titles and other finishing touches are added with Cloanto's Personal Paint. The graphics are scaled to the sizes used on the website and plugged in for each monthly update.

What projects are you currently working on?
I have my regular website projects, Sabrina Online being the primary ongoing one. Other than that, I'm doing commissioned illustration work for various clients. The most recent work being for Bill Panagouleas of DiscreetFX, for his documentary film "Oil Change".

Have you ever thought about creating a new comic strip with all new characters?
I haven't really. Sabrina Online is mostly a hobby project, and I've put a lot or time and work into the characters and the world they inhabit. I don't think I'm ready to start over from scratch.

You have created some characters for DiscreetFX. What characters have you created for them?
It almost seems like there's too many to count at this point. The majority of the software and art packages from DiscreetFX have some kind of 'pinup mascot' from me connected to them. One particularly memorable example would be "Amizilla", a pinup-girl-style version of Godzilla, as the mascot for the bounty project to port the Mozilla web browser family (Firefox and others) to Amiga OS, MorphOS, and AROS. I enjoy the DiscreetFX projects because they give me the opportunity to be creative and try a lot of different ideas and techniques.

If someone wanted to hire you to do some artwork, what is the best way to contact you?
The easiest way to reach me is to write me at ericschwartz (AT) woh (DOT) rr (DOT) com.

I know your a huge Transformers fan. Did you enjoy last year's movie?
I enjoyed the film very much, though I didn't go see it ten times or more like some people I know.

Would you like to add anything at all?
I like to collect Transformers toys (which is not surprising), and I like to play the 'retro' video games. I often play Atari 2600 and 7800 games, or arcade games with MAME on my Pegasos. Another favorite is "Worms: the Directors Cut" on my Amiga, which I play frequently.

Thanks everyone! and Amiga forever! (not just the emulator package)

Eric Schwartz

Sabrina-Online
Eric Schwartz Web Site
DiscreetFX
Oil Change
Cloanto

AROS on SAM440

2008-04-30T21:58:00.002-04:00

Michal Schulz posted a new update about his work on the SAM440 on his blog a couple days ago. He states, "USB Stack is as usable as on a x86 architecture: USB - mice, keyboards, tablets and hubs are supposed to work.". Michal goes into much more detail on his blog. On the #AROS IRC channel, Michal confirmed that anything he does for the SAM440 will also be committed to the main AROS repository.

Acube Systems posted some news about Michal and AROS on the SAM440.

Acube Systems has a very nice web page dedicated to the SAM board. You will notice AROS listed under operating systems.

Michal continues to show what a reliable and talented developer he is. I enjoy how Acube Systems is keeping track of his progress and are posting news items about the port of AROS to their board too. I think the combination of AROS and the SAM makes an attractive package. It will be interesting to see the final product.

VmwAROS LIVE! Beta 0.7.1 released!

2008-04-26T22:28:00.002-04:00

Paolo Besser has released a new update for VmwAROS LIVE! The announcement follows:

I will happily "spend" my 600th message to this board announcing that a new, mantainance version of VmwAROS LIVE! is available here:

http://live.vmwaros.org

This version should fix the boot problems someone complained about in the last days. Users who have already installed VmwAROS LIVE! 0.7 on their hard drives DO NOT NEED to upgrade: the only difference is a fixed kernel that won't make any difference on their already working hardware.

Webmasters who whish to put a link to the newer version on their site should use this address: http://live.vmwaros.org. Do not link the archives again, because download URL may change without advice (and others will be added too).

Traditional VmwAROS beta 0.7, which is intended to run on VMware products, won't be updated because it wasn't affected by the issue.

Torrent seeders for LIVE! version 0.7 are encouraged to cease support for version 0.7 and start seeding 0.7.1: thanks for your effort.

VmwAROS 85,000 Downloads

2008-04-24T11:59:00.006-04:00

Paolo Besser posted today about VmwAROS statistics. He states that VmwAROS has been downloaded about 85,000 times. VmwAROS has been a huge success since it's release. We needed a nice AROS distribution for users and Paolo has really did a wonderful job on VmwAROS.

In his post he also mentions two new domain names for VmwAROS.

http://vm.vmwaros.org
for the classic VMware hosted version of VmwAROS

http://live.vmwaros.org
for the new Live-CD version (VmwAROSLIVE!)

You can read the entire post here.

Keep up the good work Paolo!

Bounties: Changes to TeamAROS

2008-04-22T18:59:00.002-04:00

Randy "Damocles" Vice has posted a news item on AROS-Exec.org that I felt was important to post here on The AROS Show. So here is the entire news item.

"Major changes are going to be happening with TeamAROS. After long consideration on the path for TeamAROS, I've decided major changes are needed after losing technical support that has driven TeamAROS forward over the past couple of years.

The requirements I set forth was that current bounties, either open or unassigned, will remain as is with their current funding. I owe that to the donors and developers. So when developer finish their assigned bounties, they will be rewarded with their bounty. Bounties will still be OPEN for donations during this time period. Finished bounties may not be shown as closed, I simply do not have the technical capabilities to manipulate the mysql db to show it.

What will change is the benefactors monthly donation will be disabled starting May 1st. I'll deal with the benefactors vote for April as soon as I have the mailing list repaired which I hope will be this week.

Target date for the new home for TeamAROS will be mid June under the umbrella of Power2People.org. By going with Power2people.org, I give TeamAROS something I've always wanted for it, tax exemption status (501(c)3). Funds will change hands at that point in time. I will continue to be with TeamAROS after this hand off.

Thanks for so many years of support!

Randy aka Dammy"

AROS Show Update (4-21-2008)

2008-04-21T21:07:00.005-04:00

Well, if you haven't already heard, Michal Schulz updated his blog today giving us a nice status update on getting AROS running on the SAM440 system board. He has a nice screen shot to show for it too. Check out the details over at Michal's blog.

Damocles has reported that Bill Evans has sent confirmation that he plans to meet the due date of the port of AROS to the EFIKA system board. It will be pretty neat when we can see some screen shots of it running.

There have been several developers working on keeping track of AROS bugs, filing them, and checking on the progress of old bugs. We are now receiving bug notifications from the bug tracker on the AROS-dev mailing list. It is sure to improve the stability of our nice little operating system. Great job guys!

If you are looking for software to run in AROS, there is no better place to look than The AROS Archives. It has become the main repository for AROS files of all kinds. I still see people posting about where to find a certain program. Well, this is the place you should check first.

If you are an Amiga fan, I'm sure you know who Eric Schwartz is. If you don't know, he is a very talented artist that has always a consistent supporter of the Amiga computer. He also created the AROS mascot, Kitty. She is at the top of this blog, if you want to know what she looks like. He recently has created a fantastic new animation devoted to the Amiga computer. I asked him if he would do an interview with The AROS Show and he accepted. This interview will be coming soon to The AROS Show.

Still Rocking!

2008-04-07T20:09:00.003-04:00

There have been some turbulent times lately with AROS. A lot of issues have been discussed on the AROS-dev mailing list, but I'm not going to go into details because it has been discussed enough. Developers are really stepping up to improve the project in my opinion. We seem to have several new developers that are very helpful and active as well. The excitement and activity on the developer list is nice to see. So to sum it up quickly, AROS will be just fine. Now that we have that out of the way, on to the latest and greatest news for the AROS operating system!

Have you been looking for an AROS distribution that would live up to the once heralded AROS-Max? Well, look no further, because it is here! Paolo Besser has just released VmwAROS LIVE! Here is the announcement from Paolo:

"Starting with the new version 0.7, published today, VmwAROS has turned into a complete AROS distribution. From now on, it will be available in two flavours, pre-installed in a virtual machine as usual, and live-CD.

Users of VmwAROS LIVE! will be able to boot their computers straight into a enhanced AROS environment, with DHCP network support and preliminary web browser. A complete list of new features is available at the site vmwaros-beta-07-and-live-07-released.html

VmwAROS VM beta 0.7 can be downloaded from:
VmwAROS VM beta 0.7

VmwAROS LIVE! 0.7 can be downloaded from:
VmwAROS LIVE! 0.7

Please check your hardware for AROS compatibility before trying to install VmwAROS LIVE!"

Heinz-Raphael Reinke has just released a new version of WinAROS. He has added some nice features. Heinz really keeps improving his development environment. It is very handy if you are a developer or want to start developing. Here is the news and screenshot from Heinz:

"A new version of WinAROS is available.
The virtual Harddisk contains two partitions.
A 100MB Partition with Fast File System (FFS), that contains only the Boot Files.
And a 400MB Partition with Smart File System (SFS) that contains a fresh AROS setup.

This WinAros Version comes with a complete C/C++ Compiler Setup and Murks!-IDE.
If you want to Install extras Apps, you can use

WinArosStart

WinAros comes with a Windows typical setup program, that creates shortcuts on the desktop and in the start menu. It also comes with an uninstaller.

WinAros Download

Screenshot"

Nic "Kalamatee" Andrews posted on AROS-Exec about AROS now able to use Grub2. Alain Greppin had a big hand in this too. This is great news!

Speaking of Alain Greppin, he has agreed to do an interview with The AROS Show! It will be coming in the near future. I had mentioned that Alain accepted the DHCP bounty in my last post. I think the very next day he completed it. So now we have DHCP in AROS, whoo hoo!

Daniel Oberhoff has been making some progress on hosting AROS in Mac OS X. He is running into some issues at the moment, but continues to work on it. Keep up the good work Daniel!

To close I wanted to mention the Natami project. I have been following this new project and I am excited about it's potential. The people involved with Natami would like to see AROS be available for it. It seems the best and most logical choice. I would love to see it happen myself. Check a post on AROS-Exec.org from one of the Natami developers.
This involves the Kickstart replacement bounties one and two. The Natami project is really hoping a developer will accept and complete these bounties. I know at one time there was some discussion about a team of developers working on these bounties. They chatted about it on the AROS-dev list, but I don't think they ever formed a team. So hopefully someone with the skill will come forward sometime in the near future.

Still rocking!

PortablE and Stuff

2008-03-16T01:38:00.005-04:00

As you can see from my programming blog, I started following the progress of Chris Handley and his rewrite of the Amiga E programming language back in October of 2007. I was impressed with the language and tried it out using Amiga Forever. I asked Chris back then if he planned to bring it to AROS and he assured me that he was planning to do that. Well, he just recently posted on AROS-Exec.org with a question. So this means he is working on porting it now! This is exciting news. I know many people have wished for Amiga E to be available on AROS. Well, this is it folks! If you follow the link to my programming blog above, you will see why we cannot have the original Amiga E programming language. But in short, it was written in Assembly and tied to the hardware of the Amiga. So, PortablE is the next best thing! I wish Chris good luck with the port. I may interview Chris when it is completed. Hopefully the AROS community will embrace this and make this a popular language for AROS. It is very cool! Read about all the features at the PortablE web site.

In other recent news, Alain Greppin. has accepted the DHCP bounty. How awesome is that! This is something we definitely need in AROS. I was glad to see Alain grab another bounty after finishing the LaTeX port. I need to ask him for an interview!

There hasn't been any news that I know of about the UAE integration or the port of AROS to EFIKA. The developers working on these projects still have time to complete them, so hopefully they are doing well.

Unless you have been living somewhere without a computer (shame on you!), you probably already know about Robert Norris releasing a nice little teaser of the Traveller engine in action! Here is the post on his blog that kicked it off.

The consistently productive Michal Schulz is still hacking away at the AROS port to the SAM440. He has really grown to like this board a lot. He has talked about it many times on the AROS IRC channel. That is a good sign! Whenever there is something major to report, he always updates his blog to cover it. So check there for more information.

Traveller and TeX Update

2008-02-17T23:45:00.003-05:00

Rob has posted a pretty exciting screen shot over on his blog. He is making enough progress now on WebKit that he is able to show us some visual proof. He states there is still a long way to go, so don't get too excited. We won't have a full featured web browser by the end of the week or anything. But still, the progress he is making is very exciting at this point. So go read a Cow Launched!

Alain G has officially completed the TeX bounty. I mentioned this bounty earlier on The AROS Show. Congratulations to Alain because it is great to see another bounty completed for AROS!

AROS Manuals

2008-01-27T11:03:00.000-05:00

Many people keep asking for AROS manuals. The rumors are true, they do exist. João "Hardwired" Ralha has recently worked on writing some good manuals. He wants to remind everyone they are not finished. But what is written so far looks very good to me. I should have posted this sooner, but I forgot. So anyway, here is where you can find the recent manuals by Hardwired.

Here are the links:
AROS User Manual (50% complete):
http://www.mediafire.com/?2wyfczygxvt
AROS Shell: Manual (70% complete):
http://www.mediafire.com/?ezgcp2bot9p
AROS Install Manual (25% complete):
http://www.mediafire.com/?ey1mnggbtjt

You can find Hardwired's blog here:
http://aros-wandering.blogspot.com/

Enjoy!

Simple Sam Frying Pan

2008-01-22T22:14:00.000-05:00

Michal Schulz has been busy with the AROS port to SAM440. He has updated his blog with two new entries. In the first he describes the steps he will take to make the port a reality. He has even opened a new project on SourceForge.net for the first portion, the U-Boot Second Level BootLoader. In the second post he shows us a nice screen shot of the boot menu. He also explains the config file for PPC AROS. It is nice that Michal has started blogging about this and showing us the steps he will be taking to do this kind of a port. I think a lot of people are interested in how something like this is done. So keep up the good work Michal!
If you want to know more about the board itself, go to the official SAM440 site.

Michael Grunditz has officially released the first SimpleMail beta for AROS. You can download it and read more details about the beta at the AROS Archives. If you want to know more about SimpleMail, visit their website. Great stuff!

Tomek 'error' Wiszkowski has been working on Frying Pan. Frying Pan is a CD/DVD burner application. Error posted screen shots on AROS-Exec.org. He mentioned to me on IRC that it did write CDs now and was working. But it was not ready for the public yet. He also said there is still no ATAPI support. This is another useful application for AROS. Tomek's work is appreciated. If you want to read more about Frying Pan, head to their web site.

Staf Verhaegen Interview!

2008-01-16T00:17:00.000-05:00

Hello Staf, thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. Could you tell us a little about yourself and how you became interested in Amiga's?
I have a long history in electronics and computers: it started with some hand held game machines, followed by a Philips Videopac G7000, Commodore64, Amiga 2000, Amiga 1200 and now also some Linux machines.

The Commodore64 and Amiga's came here because I had friends that also had these computers. I enjoyed the C64 scene with several of my friends for a lot of years, copying disks, playing games etc. When I had a friend that had an A500 computer and saw the graphic capabilities in demos and games, I knew I had to have one of these machines myself. When I was at the university we were allowed to use some HP UNIX machines and there I fell in love with the UNIX way of doing things. This was also the time that the WWW (World Wide Web) materialized starting with the Mosaic browser. Ah, those memories of these amateur web sites full of blinking text and animated GIFs, hidden areas in other university websites, ...

I also started programming on my C64 mostly in Basic. First by typing in program listings from magazines and trying to change them. Later on a program to print leaflets for cassette tapes, a computer version of the Marble Solitaire board game, a program for a running contest for youngsters organized in our village. The latter I started after a discussion at the counter of the local pub after a guy, a DB admin said he could not do it. I said I could do it with my C64 and I succeeded. :)
Later on I converted this program to AmigaE on Amiga and I also started investigating the C programming language.

Unfortunately computers is only one of my hobbies often leading to very limited time I can spend on this. I am also a supervisor of the local chiro, a Flemish youth moment analog to scouting. I also love to taste Belgian beers socializing with friends to taste new or rare beers. Analog to wine tasting not to socializing by getting drunk together, ...

How long have you been coding for AROS? Why did you decide to work on AROS?
Like I said in my previous answer I did get used to the UNIX environment while at the university. But I saw some things done more efficiently in the Amiga OS; especially the message passing through pointers and the Amiga shared libraries and devices architecture.

After the banktuptcy of Commodore I also felt that this nice technology should not die an ungrateful death. So I think I almost from the start in 1994-1995 have been following AROS closely on Usenet groups and mailing lists and then also gradually started fixing bugs or implementing new features for AROS.

What work have you completed for AROS up to this point? Please feel free to include details.
I have been doing bug fixes all the time all over the code. Then ported the Regina Rexx interpreter and tried to make it as compatible as possible to the ARexx on Amiga OS.

Afterwards I have been working on cleaning up the AROS build system. This was actually a (very) frustrating period for me and the rest of the AROS developers. I was not at the university anymore and only got a slow Pentium-II machine with not enough memory in it. Changing in the build system often leads to build failures so ideally one would test a full fresh build of the native and the hosted build. But on the machine I had this would take several hours for each of them. So I often commited code that would break the build on the server and for other people. I think due to this I earned the mark as a sloppy programmer by some other AROS developers (which of coure IMHO is totally wrong :) ).
Also this work is actually not finished yet as the current implementation still lacks certain features and the usage in all the mmakefile.src files in the code repository is still a mess.

In your opinion, are there any major improvements that still need to be added to the core of the AROS operating system?
I don't think it is so much things need to be added but work needs to be done to work out all the quirks and incompatibilities in the core. I would love to have a few more people that want work on this. Rob is likely going to work on DOS in the future but I think he is already doing too much work in too many areas. Some additional low-level developers would speed up this development process more. But doing low-level stuff is often considered non-sexy and does not earn much recognition.

About the Regina Rexx port for AROS, are you still maintaining it? How compatible is it to ARexx?
It's been a long time ago since I committed something to this code. It is still in a kind of maintenance mode as I may have a look at it when people complain about it. But due to lack of complaints, I don't think anybody is actually using it on AROS.

Up to now there hasn't been a m68k version so the real compatibility with ARexx is untested. I added the ARexx extensions to Regina and tested it with a few scripts of mine, but no real in depth compatibility testing was done.

I would still love to develop it further in a fully compatible replacement for ARexx on AROS/MOS/AOS4/OS3.x but I think there will always be a higher priority AROS needs in the coming months/years.

What AROS specific projects are you working on now?
Currently I am working on stabilizing the ABI for AROS on i386. I left the build system in a somewhat working state for this ABI work because I think this is currently the highest priority. Up to the point that the ABI is fixed we can't guarantee backward compatibility and I can now already say that once we switch to version 1 of the i386 ABI all programs available on the AROS Archives will stop working.

So when might this change happen? Will there be some kind of workaround that will allow us to run the programs already written for AROS? Is there something current AROS application developers can do to prepare for this change or should they just continue what they are doing and everything will be fine?
The change will happen when it is ready and I can't predict now when that will be. I hope to do it sometime this year though. I always found that development for AROS was already targeting higher level and more sexy things before we had some solid ground. I guess, this is now the price we have to pay for that.
I think it is almost impossible to program a workaround as some very basic things will be changed and I think it would be best to go for the short pain of forcing an update to everything. Changing to the new ABI will only be a recompile of your program and I do plan to set up a nightly build of the new system some time before the big change will be carried out.

Have you thought about what projects you would like to do for AROS in the future?
Sure, I have a TODO list ranging from low-level to higher-level stuff. I think I can easily fill up my free time in the next century with it.

But the biggest project I am thinking about is an Amiga development environment. This would be an environment based on the AROS development files and build system that allows you to write Amiga programs for all amiga-like systems (AROS/MOS/OS3.x/AOS4) without any change needed in the source code. It should also be integrated in several IDEs (Golded,Murks, eclipse, ...) so people can build Amiga programs on any system they like; for all Amiga-like OSes.

I noticed you recently posted suggestions on a package manager for AROS on AROS-Exec.org. Some say AROS doesn't need a package manager. Why do you think AROS would benefit from one?
I was one of the persons being very skeptical about a package manager. I am convinced that package managers as they exists in the UNIX world (like rpm and dpkg/deb) are not the way to go forward. They actually don't solve the problem, are bloated, unnecessary divide users in camps, ... People can read the post themselves if they want to. I do think it should be very easy to install, de-install and upgrade software on AROS. I do think some standardization is needed so that all programs use the same mechanism to indicate dependencies and version number for upgrading. But I do also think that if this standardization is done well the program overviewing the packages just needs to scan what is installed on the disk and what is available on web sites and just need to download updated programs and start the installation procedure that is delivered with the package.

Are you an Amiga OS4 developer as well?
I am porting ScalOS to OS4, yes. I started this port after I read an interview with Jürgen Lachmann where he declared that he did not understand people limiting the OSes that a program should run on. In a reply I offered him to port Scalos to OS4 :)
As they say, the rest is history.

For me this was a nice occasion to get familiar with the OS4 ABI. This was also done in the light of the possibility of making AROS in the future, OS4 compatible.

Unfortunately this OS4 porting has already been used against me by some close-minded people to paint me as a traitor to the AROS cause. I hope I have shown in the last months that this is not the case.

There has been discussion about OS4 compatibility built into AROS. What are your thoughts about it? How much does it differ from AROS? How difficult would this be to implement?
I don't think it is so much different then OS3.x or MOS and that compatibility can be easily added by adding support for it in a few build tools. Of course this may change in the future if the extended library interface system will be used for things as object oriented programming. If this is done we can then see if we want to support that also in AROS.

Have you used MorphOS at all? Do you have any thoughts about it?
No, I haven't used MorphOS yet. The only PPC equipment I have at home is an A1SE and AFAIK it does not run MorphOS. I don't want to stir up old fights here but I personally stayed away from the blue camp because I don't like the hard and confrontational business tactics of BBRV. But I don't let this personal reference get in the way of collaborating with or helping the users of MorphOS. They are also part of the big Amiga family.

How did you learn how to do the low-level coding that you do for AROS?
By browsing the code that was available and trying to understand how it all fit together. Also I'm not programming at the lowest level of AROS, these are the hardware driver writers, which is not my cup of tea.

Do you have any advice for beginners who want to learn to code for AROS?
I find this the most difficult question. I think it will depend much on the person, but things I advice to do:
- learn C it is a necessity
- try to get familiar with the Amiga way of doing things and not try to force other ways of working (like for example POSIX) into AROS.
- wander around on the AROS website, especially the developer section. Although parts are behind times it will teach you how to get started.
- find something you want to improve or add
- try to understand what already is available and discuss your ideas with other AROS developers on the maillist, aros-exec.org or on IRC
- implement it and finally wait for an AROS Show interview ;)

What programming languages do you know?
Already a lot of languages have passed my way; for programming C64 basic, Amigabasic, AmigaE, C, C++; for scripting ARexx, perl, python, csh and currenty I'm also using matlab a lot at work for data manipulation. I think any good programmer can adapt quickly to a new programming language. From the other side, certain languages are more lethal in the hands of bad programmers then other languages. This is also one of the reasons I'm wary of switching to C++ for lower level stuff in core AROS.

Are there any particular applications you would like to see available for AROS?
A good debugger. Me and gdb never have been good friends; even when run through a GUI like DDD.

What other operating systems do you use?
I'm a big linux user at home (Centos 4.6 on my Pentium 4 1.7 GHz desktop machine, Debian 4.0 on my A1SE, Ubuntu server on my sun ultra 5 used as
a firewall) and at work. I sometimes need to boot into Win2000 at home because the IT people at my company can't get their head around and make the VPN infrastructure linux compatible.
Of course I also use OS4 on my A1SE most of the time when working on the Scalos port.

What are your thoughts on the progress of AROS in the last couple of years?
Although recently the activity has increased again there have been dark times with some major developers leaving or becoming inactive. I hope it will increase even more in the future.

Is there anything at all you would like to add?
We should all be good members of the Amiga family and let the business people fight their fights. We should take over with AROS if they can't clean up the mess and otherwise be a good companion. Be open minded!

Quick Update and Round Things

2008-01-12T18:39:00.000-05:00

I was just in the #AROS IRC Channel and Michal Schulz said he booted the first SAM440 Kernel. So Dr. Schulz is already making progress!

Tomek 'error' Wiszkowski has officially completed the Disk Validator bounty. Congrats Tomek and thank you!

If you are curious about the current status of the EFIKA bounty. Bill "Tigger" Evans has been extremely busy with his day job and has asked for an extension. Since it took about six weeks for him to receive his EFIKA board, he now has an extra six weeks to finish the bounty. See the details of the bounty for more information.

Now, you are probably wondering why I put "Round Things" in the title. Well, I have two sites I would like to mention and I guess you could say they relate to round things. Hey, give me a break, I couldn't think of anything else!

The first is a web site that is fairly new to AROS named AROSWorld.org. Vince "Amigamia" Ruggiero has created the site for the AROS community. The definition of the site reads, "This community site is for all current AROS fans and the new ones. You can post news, forum topics, pictures, share thoughts and collaborate on the future development of the OS.". I think it is a nice community site and Vince has been doing a good job of keeping it updated.

The next site is not only a site but actually a podcast. I had the chance today to check out Amiga Roundtable and I really enjoyed it. They do include happenings about AROS in their podcasts, plus news about the entire Amiga world. Their about page reads, "Amiga Roundtable is the Amiga Community’s version of This Week in Tech, and the flagship show of AmiZed Studios. A panel of Amiga users that discuss the current events of the Amiga community in a moderated format. Highlighting the important issues as well as bringing some of the fluff as well. You can’t expect to have your meat and potatoes without some dessert now can you? Your hosts are Rich Lawrence, Sean Fitzgerald and Mike Blackburn. All are Amiga enthusiasts and love the platform and all it’s incarnations.". The CEO of DiscreetFX, Bill Panagouleas has also been involved in several episodes. I thought it was very cool to listen to a nice little radio show that included our beloved AROS. Nice job guys!

New year, more AROS goodness!

2008-01-08T22:36:00.001-05:00

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!

2007-12-22T22:47:00.000-05:00

DiscreetFX recently announced: For the first time AROS customers will have a professional native 3D animation application for their operating system to show off it's true potential. AROS has never had any commercial 3D software released for it.

This is regarding Discreet's Aladdin 4D acquisition.
"On December 17, 2007, DiscreetFX completed the acquisition of Aladdin 4D from Nova Design for an undisclosed sum of money. All remaining inventory of the current version is being shipped to DiscreetFX and Nova Design will no longer be selling this application. DiscreetFX is a leading developer of 3D digital video effects technology. This acquisition extends DiscreetFX's reach into 3D software development in the hobbist and beginner 3D animation industries. This also marks the first time DiscreetFX 100% controls an application. Before today we were always a 3rd party developer for other companies."

The AROS community is definitely excited about this, but there were some questions about Aladdin 4D actually coming to AROS and if the AROS version would be one of the last ports to be worked on. So I went straight to the CEO of DiscreetFX, Bill Panagouleas and asked him. He was gracious enough to answer promptly. Here is his response.

"We are also excited about the AROS version since AROS is a lot easier to get and setup than Amiga OS 4.0 or MorphOS (No "hard to get hardware" required). We also feel this will encourage other developers that might be on the fence to start releasing commercial software for AROS. Something you can do to help. Point me in the right direction for an AROS SDK & IDE.

Also, how does AROS handle OpenGL or some other type of 3D hardware assisted acceleration? We hope the A4D release on AROS will help strengthen the operating system and get more people excited about it.
The AROS version will be worked on as much as the other ports. It might be one of the first versions done since developer systems are in plentiful supply. So far it's looking like the first versions that will get done is the Mac OS X & AROS versions of Aladdin. Great things coming in 2008."

That sounds very promising. As for the help, I can provide information on the AROS SDK and IDE. The AROS SDK can be found here. For an IDE there are only two options I know of. One is Murks for AROS found at the AROS Archives. The other is AmiDevCpp for Windows.
I would suggest that DiscreetFX apply for access to the AROS Developer mailing list and ask questions there. All of the developers read the list and are very responsive to questions.
I think your 3D question needs to be answered by someone more qualified.

I want to thank Bill and DiscreetFX for including AROS in their endeavors and I look forward to seeing Aladdin 4D on AROS!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

In other news, Bill Evans is nearing completion of the AROS port to EFIKA. Read his reply to the request for a last 30 days status report for the bounty.

Marco van den Heuvel aka Blacky_Stardust has finished porting VICEplus to 64-bit AROS. He has uploaded it to the AROS Archives. It is great to see Blacky consistently making VICE available for all flavors of AROS! I love VICE and use it all the time.

Nathaniel "Downix" Downes is porting AROS to run on both OpenBSD and the Sparc. He is making progress and is close on the OpenBSD port. He warns not to expect anything quickly, because he is only working on this in his spare time.

VmwAROS is becoming quite popular already. There is a buzz in the AROS community about it.
Many are hoping to get Velocity in their stocking for Christmas, but no word yet on it's release.
See recent posts on the The AROS Show for more information about these two.

There have been several new bounties created lately at Team AROS. Be sure to check there for more information and please donate if you can!

You might have noticed a new link over on the right hand side of The AROS Show listed as NovaCode. This is my personal programming blog. I have not ever listed it here because it wasn't anything AROS specific, but that has changed. I have made a personal goal to contribute to the future AROS web browser, Traveller, one day. So I am posting about my adventures towards that goal now.

Lastly, I want to wish a Merry Christmas to everyone out there in AROS land! May your stockings be filled with AROS goodies!

2007-12-15T12:57:00.000-05:00

Paolo Besser has released a new version of VmwAROS! This is what has changed since the last beta.
Go here to download.

This preliminary version of VmwAROS is still in beta
stage, this means not all the software contained in
the virtual hard drives have been completely tested.

HISTORY

From VmwAROS beta 0.1 something has changed:

+ Added more games, including Doom, Quake and the
freeware version of Beneath a Steel Sky, running on
top of ScummVM

+ Updated Murks! Ide to version 0.5.2, with a newer
icoset for toolbar

+ Updated ConfigIP to a newer version, which works
correctly and does exactly what is meant to do

+ Added and re-configured AmiStart.

+ Added a general application icon, which should
make easier running interesting files. It applies
both to executables and shell scripts.

+ Memory size reduced from 256 to 128 MB.

+ Default english locale and keymap.

There are still some known issues:

- AmiStart calendar does not appears correctly

this is due to the way AmiStart is called
at VmwAROS startup. It will be fixed in
next releases.

- Amistart crashes by pressing TAB in a shell

Pressing the TAB key into a shell causes
Amistart to crash with a CON: window on the
screen. This problem has been reported to
Amistart author, but it hasn't been yet fixed
in the version stored on VmwAROS.

In order to workaround this, please exit
Amistart whenever running a shell, or avoid
pressing the TAB key for auto-completion.

- Date and Time are wrong

After some testing, it seems AROS has
problems getting the right time and date
from some system BIOSes. This is not an
AmiStart or VmwAROS related problem.

- ConfigIP still requires restating

In order to change the IP address, a reboot
is still needed. So please cnhange IP only
when you're doing nothing else.

- VmwAROS doesn't run on some filesystems

Some filesystems can't access to files larger
than 2 GB. VmwAROS virtual disks are wider,
so the best option is to store the virtual
machine on a host partition formatted with a
modern filesystem, such as ext3 or NTFS.

- Some old WB themes still doesn't work.

2007-12-06T22:21:00.000-05:00

To continue introductions for new AROS distributions, Velocity is set to make it's debut very soon in a lite version called whatelse, Velocity Lite! I wanted to find out more about Velocity and Velocity Lite, so I asked Velocity creator Fishy_fis to provide us with more information.

"Velocity and Velocity Lite are fairly similar. The main differences are that Velocity has more software and is a bit more flashy in terms of presentation (introduction videos after 1st install and whatnot). Actually, I guess the biggest difference is what I've been calling EUAE "mock integration". Which is basically a combination of AROS scripts and some 68k Amiga software, launching software I wrote and EUAE in a semi invisible way. Obviously I cant include the Kickstart ROMs or Amiga OS files, so I've just made a simple to use installer that does all the work and prompts you when it needs to. It's far from proper integration, but its an easy way to take advantage of some of OS3.x's software for now. That is the main differences I guess. As for what Velocity itself is, its basically my attempt to give people an idea of where AROS, and it's software is at these days. Aimed at both end users and developers, it contains a reasonable mix of software types,... gcc dev env, gfx programmes, audio software, irc clients, editors, games, emulators, etc, etc."

Velocity Lite is set to be released soon. Fishy_fis had this to say about it's debut.

"I've been busy tinkering away trying to get Velocity finished, but as it progresses it also evolves. It is still going to take a little time to get completed to a level I'm happy with, even as an early beta release. Because of this I've decided to make a Lite version. Despite the "Lite" suffix it still contains a considerable amount of pre-configured software and it definitely gives the flavor of what Velocity will be. Expect to find it available for download before the end of the weekend."

Velocity Lite screen shot

If you want to keep track of Velocity development there is a forum on AROS-Exec.org devoted to it. With two new AROS distributions being released, it is a win win situation for AROS lovers!

2007-12-05T22:01:00.000-05:00

VmwAROS was just recently released by Paolo Besser. It is a VMWare AROS distribution. Paolo has been keeping the web site for VmwAROS very active. He just posted about a fun contest today. He is asking for your VmwAROS screenshots! This is your chance to show off your favorite backgrounds and apps. Paolo would like to gather a nice collection of screenies, so please help him out and make some good ones for him.

VmwAROS is a great way to play around with AROS. I just downloaded it myself and had it up and running in VMWare within minutes. There is a nice little pdf included that will help you set it up. It also includes instructions on how to share files with VmwAROS. If you want to play with an AROS application you have heard about or just want to play with AROS for the first time, this is an easy way to do it. Please keep in mind, this is a beta version of VmwAROS. There is a VmwAROS forum on AROS-Exec.org for any suggestions or bugs you may have to report. Feel free to ask any questions there as well.

Stay tuned to The AROS Show for information coming from VmwAROS as it develops.

2007-11-24T18:11:00.000-05:00

It has been exciting around AROS lately. There is a lot of coding happening, plus many other things.

Rob Norris has started his journey with Traveller. Thankfully he likes to write, so he updates his blog frequently. I read it everyday and am fascinated by it. I really wish the C programming language and I were not enemies. I would love to contribute in some way to the Traveller project. But anyway, be sure to check his blog to follow Traveller closely. What, you don't know what Traveller is? Check the post below this and you will be enlightened!

Michal Schulz continues to work on 64-bit AROS. He also keeps us informed of his progress on his blog! In his latest post Michal tells us about his fight with a nasty bug. He provides a link to the most recent AROS64 ISO too! Keep in mind, this is a beta version.

The resourceful Paolo Besser has opened a new web site! He is offering a new product for AROS, named VmwAROS. Here is an excerpt from the site.

"Welcome to the VmwAROS official website. VmwAROS is a pre-configured AROS environment for VMware, a reliable way to test and use the AROS Reasearch Operating System on your computer without really installing it on your hard disk, but without the limitations of read-only live-CDs."

Michael "Micken" Grunditz has been porting SimpleMail. He is in need of alpha testers for the application. You can contact him on the AROS irc channel on the irc.freenode.net network at #aros or you can PM him at http://www.aros-exec.org. Screen shot here.

Federico Stango has been working behind the scenes to update AROS-Exec.org. 4Play and I have been managing the project. Nice changes are on the way!

João Ralha has been working on some documentation for AROS. I've read through what he has written so far and it looks really good. He has been doing a fantastic job on some much needed documentation. This documentation will no doubt help new users.

Alain G. has accepted and is working on the Port TeX bounty. Read more about TeX here.

Hopefully I didn't miss anything on the latest happenings. If I did, please feel free to let me know, so it will be included. I love seeing all of this AROS activity!

2007-11-14T19:55:00.000-05:00

Robert Norris Web Browser Interview

When do you plan to announce the name?
Right here, right now! The browser will be called "Traveller" (that's British spelling, with two ells). I had already thought of this as a potential name before asking for ideas, and when a couple of people suggested it too I knew it was good.

The reasons I like it are threefold:
- Its a good companion for Wanderer.
- It carries on the tradition of giving browsers a name related to finding the unknown: Navigator, Explorer, Konqueror, Safari, etc.
- It references an in-joke among the members of my team at work, so its just a little bit personal too.

Have you been surprised about the response you have received on naming the new web browser?
I confess that part of the reason for asking for name ideas was to drum up a little hype, but the response was totally unexpected. People poured from the woodwork to offer an opinion, and I notice the big Amiga sites also linked, which was weird - I've never really considered myself to be any kind of Amiga person. Maybe I am, just a little bit :)

Do you have a master plan on the creation of this new browser yet or are you mainly concentrating on the bounty requirements right now?
I've split the work into two stages. The first is the port of WebKit. This requires porting the two WebKit components, JavaScriptCore and WebCore, and writing a minimal "launcher" application that basically brings up single browser window so the engine can be tested. This stage also requires porting the various libraries that WebKit depends on and filling gaps in AROS itself.

The second stage is integration of the engine in AROS itself. This involves creating a Zune widget that wraps WebKit, and will allow any Zune application to use the engine if it chooses. Finally, the development of Traveller proper, the Zune-based browser, can begin.

Do you plan to add things like tabs or bookmarks?
Not initially. My goal for completion of the bounty is for just a basic browser UI: location bar and forward, back, stop and home buttons. Features like tabs, bookmarks and whatever else can be added later.

I don't yet know whether it will be me doing this or someone else. My hope is that by this point there will be others interested in working on Traveller. I really don't want to be doing web browsers forever! There's too many other things in AROS that need work and I tend to get bored if I do the same thing for too long :)

How did you decide WebKit was the way to go to bring a web browser engine to AROS?
A big part of my programming experience has been web programming, so I know that the web is an incredibly complicated place, and that it takes a serious amount of code to make a browser that can handle even a small amount of it reliably.

The web is also well known for issues with browser compatibility. We're all familiar with the experience of a website that doesn't work in our browser of choice.

Both of these factors mean that when writing a browser for a niche platform like AROS, where you don't have the resources to properly develop and maintain that much code, you really want from an established browser that has a large enough share of the market that they will take care of the complexities of the web so you don't have to.

Once I'd decided that, its was pretty much a case of looking at what kinds of free browser code exists and what I could use. For a long time there's pretty much only been one game in town, and that is of course Gecko, the engine that powers Firefox. Its been a while since I've looked at the code, but I remember it being nearly impossible to penetrate, let alone modify. I haven't paid much attention to it more recently, but I hear that not much as changed. Also, the authors are
more and more focused on Firefox these days, so its difficult to find support for porting work.

WebKit is a newer project (though it has its roots in KJS and KHTML, the components that drive KDE's Konqueror browser), so you could argue that support for it from websites isn't as widespread, but Apple have nearly done everything right with it. They've kept the source open, actively encouraged contributions from anyone and worked hard to keep it small, fast and portable. This has paid off; WebKit of course drives the Safari browser on OS X (and lately Windows), but also has a large part of the mobile market, pushed by Nokia. Then came the iPhone, and we see websites clamouring to make their sites compatible with it. Google has just announced their phone project, Android, which also uses WebKit.

So what we have here is a browser engine that just wants to be ported to everything getting better and better support for the web at large, from both sides. To me it was the obvious choice.

Since WebKit is ported over to AROS now, what is left to do to make it a web browser that we can actually use? More specifically, what is the difference between having a web browser engine and having a web browser?
Well first, WebKit isn't ported yet - I've really only just begun. The Javascript engine works, but the web engine will take a lot more work.

The best way to look at what an browser engine does is to look at your existing browser. There's all the outside stuff - menus, forward/back/home buttons, location bar, tabs, bookmarks, status bar, etc, and then there's the main part of the window where the webpages themselves appear. WebKit (or Gecko or whatever) is responsible for the webpage bit. All the outer stuff that makes the engine into a proper browser is known as "chrome", and its chief concern is with integrating the engine with the rest of the desktop.

This "chrome" is what's needed to turn WebKit into a browser. That's what Traveller really is.

Is this much easier than writing a web browser from scratch?
Absolutely. Although getting WebKit to use AROS libraries and such to do it's display and input is difficult, its childs play compared to the horror of developing all the web stuff.

I've noticed people asking if they can have FireFox on AROS now that WebKit is there. But FireFox doesn't use the WebKit engine, it uses Gecko. The Mac web browser Safari uses WebKit. Do you agree? What are your thoughts on this?
You're correct. Firefox has nothing to do with WebKit, and porting WebKit won't aid a port of Firefox (except perhaps in the case of places where I've had to improve the AROS C library, or update our compilers, etc, which a Firefox port could potentially make use of).

To be honest, I don't see much value in porting Firefox to AROS. It might be worth porting Gecko (though I doubt we're big enough for both of them), but Firefox would suck - it looks nothing like an AROS app.

How do you think this new AROS browser will compare to other web browsers on Amiga and MorphOS. For instance, Sputnik, the KHTML based browser that was ported to MorphOS? IBrowse or AWeb that is available for the Amiga?
I haven't used any of those browsers, only read about them and seen screenshots, so I may be a long way off (and I expect to be politely corrected in that case), but as far as I can tell the Traveller will compare very favourably.

IBrowse and AWeb seem to be too far behind in their support of modern web features to really be relevant. As I've said previously, I don't see the point of web browsers that can't work with the big, Javascript-heavy sites out there. I'm talking about GMail here :)

As for Sputnik, its actually based on S60 WebKit, which is a fork of WebKit done by Nokia for their mobile phones. I suppose Traveller will be most similar to that, but as far as I've seen the S60 branch isn't being kept up to date with the new developments going into WebKit. That may mean that the Traveller is able to get new features faster.

What kind of challenges do you face with this project?
There's two major things that have made and will continue to make this project difficult.

The first is shortcomings and bugs in AROS facilities. For example, porting JavaScriptCore required a system call called posix_memalign(), which allocates memory in a different way than usual. AROS didn't have it, so I had to research both how the call works and how AROS does memory allocation before I could implement it. JavaScriptCore also required some functions that our system math library didn't have. To get them I ended up having to update the math library from its source (FreeBSD). This took a week as so much in it had changed. Now I'm struggling with our network libraries because they're not fully integrated into the core which makes them a little difficult to work with.

These sort of things are usually time consuming to fix, but worth doing because the whole of AROS benefits from them.

The other challenge is the WebCore porting work itself. Its going to take a lot to hook it up to AROS, because of all the work it needs to do. It needs to draw things to the screen, accept input, render fonts and images, etc. I know some parts of this stuff on the AROS side, but others not at all, so I'll have to learn about them. Also, I'm told that there's quite a bit of stuff to implement on the WebCore side that needs to be done to even get minimal functionality - something like 70 files. I haven't even looked into this properly, but I know its not going to be easy, even if AROS provided everything I need and my C++ knowledge was perfect rather than practically nonexistant.

Learning new things is the whole reason that I spend so much of my recreational time on computers, so none of this is a problem. It all just takes time.

I read in your blog about the JavaScriptCore engine inside WebKit. Did you have to do anything special to support JavaScript when porting? Were you able to compile it using gcc or how was that handled?
JavaScriptCore is a Javascript interpreter - it runs Javascript code. It doesn't need Javascript to compile though; its written in plain C++.

The porting process has been interesting. First, I needed a compiler. WebKit has to be compiled with GCC version 4, and of course is written in C++. We had patches for GCC to make it build programs for AROS, but the last version that had C++ support was version 3. We had a version 4 patch, but that was only for C, not C++. So the first thing I did was to take a fresh copy of the latest GCC (4.2.2), and get C++ working.

Once I had a compiler, I modified the WebKit build system to use it, and started it up. Every time the build failed I fixed the problem and tried again. Some of those things required adding small amounts of code to WebKit to help it know what it should do on AROS. Other things required changes to AROS, for example, the math library stuff mentioned above.

Eventually, the build completed and produced the JavaScriptCore test program, testkjs. I moved this and the Javascript test suite into my AROS install, fired it up and started running the tests.

The test program was reporting some unusual problems, so then I had to go back to the code and change small things. The folks in the #webkit IRC channel helped a huge amount here, teaching me how various aspects of the code works.

Thats pretty much the process for porting any applicaton or library, by the way. Teach the build system for the project how to use AROS compilers, hack at the code until it builds, then test and fix the bugs.

This is a very exciting project! I am extremely excited about it! I am glad you decided to work on this project and I wish you the best of luck!
Thanks! I'm pretty excited too! And thanks for the interesting questions, they really helped me make sure I know exactly what I'm trying to do here :)

Cheers,
Rob.
*** Click here for Rob's Blog ***

2007-11-07T21:54:00.000-05:00

Bill Evans Interview

Hello Bill, thanks for taking the time to do this interview.

Could you tell us about yourself and how you became interested in Amiga's?
I'm a Commodore 64 guy from the first day they came out, when the Amiga came out a couple of the guys at school had them and I played around with them while learning C. In 1986, when I was training dolphins at Gulf World, one of the other trainers had an Amiga 1000 and a microphone, I was majoring in Computer Engineering at the time, so we eventually taught the computer to talk to Albert and Ellie (two of the parks Atlantic Bottlenose dolphins) through a hydrophone. When I graduated from college in 1988, the 2000 had just come out, and it was my first purchase when I started work in Huntsville. The third day I had it I attended my first NASAU (North Alabama Society of Amiga Users) meeting and eventually that led to me running NASAU Beach BBS for club for awhile before I moved to Nashville to lead the Amiga guys for VGT who were doing Amiga based video gambling machines. After 2 years in Nashville I came back to Huntsville and helped get Video Toasters into several of the local stations, did some custom software for some of that, and that eventually led to me writing lots of software for the Video Toaster Flyer when it came out.

You have recently accepted the bounty to port AROS to the EFIKA. What kind of experience do you have that allows you to work on a project like this?
With the exception of my two years in Nashville, all of my day job work has been porting OS's or writing custom OS's for embedded hardware and then writing the application So making software run on the Efika is right up my alley.

Could you elaborate more about all of the development work you have completed for the Video Toaster?
I wrote Audio Blackbox, Promix Tools, RenderFX and Flyer Utilites as part of Prowave, in addition I wrote portions of several of Ozware's programs as well as pieces of Decision Maker, Fastfuel, Composite Studio and Millenium. I also headed up the Video Toaster Open Source effort from its start to when I passed the reigns to Bill at DiscreetFX in 2003, I also open sourced all my Flyer code to help the community out.

Recently during my house clean up efforts, I've found a bunch of toaster/flyer developer docs that are going to get put up to help more.

What made you decide to work on porting AROS to EFIKA?
I was looking at doing it when it was first offered, but was busy on some new software for Newteks Tricaster, by the time I finished it, someone beat me to the punch by about 4 hours. So when it bacame available again, I went for it.

What is the status of the port of AROS to EFIKA at this time?
I'm probably about a week ahead of where I thought I would be at this time. I just came home from a week diving in Mexico, but I should be hard at work on the AROS port again starting sometime this week.

A rumor is spreading that you said the port would be nearing completion around November. Is this true? If not, do you have any idea how long it might take you?
Thats actually a true rumor, my Birthday falls on Black Friday this year (day after thanksgiving that is the largest shopping day in the US) and I made a remark that I was planning on spending the bounty money on my birthday (this year, in the Amiga community, its always best to say a year, when giving a release date). Technically I have 6 months for the port, which gives me till mid-Jan, but I took the bounty with the intent to have it available for Xmas, and I still have that as a goal.

A m68k port gets more and more attractive due to Minimig´s appearance. Could you tell us how portable AROS really is? What work is needed to adapt the tree for a new architecture? What are the Milestones?
I think the M68K port or at very least the kickstart replacement is a great thing that should happen soon. Dennis's minimig is a great reason for it to go forward, and Clone-A is another. AROS is actually more portable then I thought it was going to be.

Is there anything else you could add about what work is needed?
I'm working on a how I did it paper, I thought it would help others port to new architectures, I really hate to talk about it now because when I'm about 75% done I'm liable to realize a much quicker way to do this, I'll change my suggestion accordingly.

As you are into development of embedded devices and are familiar with several platforms there, do you think AROS could have a chance in that market?
I think AROS could find a market there. Open source OSs are much more likely to be used for embedded work, the ability to adapt it as your hardware changes is a big advantage.

AROS has rather small footprints and there is already a bounty for an ARM port although the OS is not prepared for RT applications now. What do you think should be done to make AROS more attractive for embedded use?
I think the ports to Efika, Sam, and the USB drive support will make it more available for embedded projects and each project helps make it easier for the next one.

Do you plan to do any development for AROS in the future?
I think AROS on USB stick able to boot up on a Efika would be a cool gadget, that would require us getting USB drives working. In addition, we really need Firewire working on AROS, thats an area I've done a lot of work on other platforms before, so I may look at working on that in the future as well. Then there are other hardware options as well which I may be looking at doing in the future.

How did you develop your programming skills?
I've been programming since High School which is a long time ago. Like most skills, I think the best way to develop it, is practice, practice, practice. So after over 25 years of this, I've had alot of practice.

What programming languages do you know and what is your favorite?
BCPL, C, C++, ADA, Basic, Jovial, LISP, COBOL, Prolog, Fortran, Pascal, PL/I and Forth. Plus 20 or more varieties of assembly languages, many of them for processors that aren't being produced anymore.

Do you think AROS is gaining popularity with long time Amiga fans?
I think so as new features gets added it gets more popular. As we get better support for things like USB, Firewire, DV video, it will become even more popular.

In your opinion, what feature could greatly improve AROS at this point?
Obviously UAE integration is part of the holy grail for the OS. If AROS could run classic amiga software as good as Bernie's Amithlon for instance, alot more people would be using it, and I think AROS will get there, its just going to take awhile.

What applications would you like to see available for AROS?
I'm a video editing guy, so simple video editing software for AROS would be cool. There are several open source candidates for this, but we need Firewire support first and then we can go forward from there.

You mentioned there are several open source video editing software candidates that could be ported to AROS if we had firewire support. Could you please name a few?
Kino, Cinelerra, and Lives from the Linux side (actually more than that, but thats a pretty good list), obviously the Open Video Toaster effort that could be moved to be a DV editor with some work.

To make a push towards a 1.0 release of AROS, what do you think needs to be completed?
The UAE integration, USB support definitely, firewire support would be good but not necessary.

Do you use any other operating system? If so, what type?
I run XP mainly at home, my main systems have to run Lightwave, VT[5] , Speededit, and Mirage. My Palm PDA is around all the time and keeps me on the net most of the time, though I may replace it with a Ipod Touch soon. At work we run XP on the network and Greenhills, WindRiver and LynxOS on our systems at work.

How many Amiga's have you owned and what models?
I've owned a A1000, several A2000s, an A3000, a CD32 and several A4000s.

Do you currently own any Amiga's?
A couple of 2000s are still around, though I am working at getting rid of them at the moment, I just dont have enough room for all my equipment and really leaving a computer someone else would like to be using sitting in my closet for years (as several of my Amigas have been doing), is waste in my opinion. I'm working on getting me a minimig, I've been talking about licencing Clone A when its done and making a PDA size 1200 that could run games from SD cards.

Could you give me your thoughts about Amiga OS 4 and MorphOS?
I think Ralph is doing what he wants with MorphOS, he wrote an Amiga like OS for the PPC with advanced features. I think he has done a great job and wish him luck in the future. OS 4? I'm on record saying this, so I might as well say it again, I think OS 4 has taken way too long to get us an OS that runs on less then 1000 discontinued boards.

Is there anything at all you would like to add?
Support the developers that are left, send a few bucks to the bounties of your choice on AROS, it really does add up after awhile.

-Bill

2007-10-30T22:03:00.000-04:00

Brusaporto Retrocomputing show report by Paolo Besser.

Brusaporto Retrocomputing is a new event about retrocomputing, set up in the little town of Brusaporto, near Bergamo and Milan. Being it's debut, and not so publicized by the media, this first event has been a discrete success: a hundred to two-hundred visitors went to the show and experienced the many platforms that were on display. Mainly 8 bit computers, some old consoles, and a bunch of rare and powerful systems of the past, like the Acorn Archimedes. There was also a modded Commodore 64 with a faster processor and a CD-ROM drive included into a 1541 drive chassis.

I went there with my AROS machine - the same one I showed at Pianeta Amiga - but with a newer hard disk and an amazing beta of AmiStart running on the screen. I also ran my copy of Amiga Forever under AROS, just to show the old and the new ways on the same system. Once again, people were amazed by AROS. Either they didn't know anything about it, or they tried an aged snapshot in the past. Everyone agreed that AROS is really interesting. Someone said, much more interesting than in the past.

There was also a PPC system running AmigaOS 4 and a SAM motherboard but unluckily they were not on the same machine. I also seen a Draco System (an old Amiga licensed clone for TV studios), some old Amiga workstations and even an A1200 modded at the point it was totally unrecognizable. Then there were whole tables filled with old Commodore computers of the 8 bit era: I noticed some C64 versions I didn't even know existed.
---------------
Thanks Paolo, I appreciate you writing this report for The AROS Show!

2007-10-28T20:18:00.000-04:00

There are several October news items to post from recent events. So here we go!

Congratulations goes out to Michal Schulz! He just received a brand new baby boy! Check out his blog for details.

AROS-Exec.org is looking to update it's web site and forum. They want to move away from Xoops and update the entire look of the site. If you have the know how and would like to volunteer to do this, please contact "NovaBurst" (That's me), at beelboing AT yahoo.com or catch me on the AROS IRC channel. We have already received submissions for this and that is wonderful!

Paolo Besser was scheduled to be at the Brusaporto Retrocomputing event in Italy today. I have not heard from Paolo yet, but I'm sure I will. I will report as soon as I hear something.

Rob Norris has posted an interesting article about "AROS and the GPL" on his blog today. Give it a read!
Earlier in the month Rob completed the SDL graphics and input drivers bounty.

With another large donation from DiscreetFX the UAE integration bounty has raised to over 2000 dollars! There were a couple more donations after DiscreetFX and the amount right now is $2132.00. I just want to say WOW! DiscreetFX has been very generous to AROS and I think it is great they are behind the UAE integration bounty like this.
This bounty is an important one. If you are reading this and would like to see a developer accept and complete this bounty, please donate.

One last item. Someone commented and asked on a previous post of The AROS Show about adding titles to my post. I would like to do this, but this change would cause me to change my current template and would take considerable time that I don't really have right now. I customized the current template I am using to a certain extent and I would have to make other adjustments to a different template. So for right now I don't have time. But I will plan to do this in the future. Thank you for reading and I do appreciate your comments and suggestions, so please don't hesitate to post them.

2007-10-07T00:18:00.000-04:00

64-bit AROS is here, WOW! Yes, you are reading that right, it reads 64-bit AROS! Michal Schulz has been working on the x86-64 Port bounty. Taking AROS into the world of 64-bit. Michal has posted on his blog today that it is now possible to boot AROS in 64-bit. Head over to Michal's blog and read the details. Another AROS milestone has been reached! Pass the food, pass the drink, sit back and enjoy!

2007-10-03T00:40:00.000-04:00

AROS Installer Test

Now that Neil Cafferkey has released the new installer for testing, I thought I would fire up VMware and test it myself. While reading you can follow the screen shots at the bottom that I have provided. My main goal was to get it installed natively. I wasn't trying to do anything fancy. I used the newest version of VMware Server (1.0.4). I've been using the server version ever since VMware made it available for free download. I've installed OpenSUSE Linux and Source Mage GNU/Linux on it in the past and it works very well. I started by downloading the latest nightly build from http://www.aros.org. This is available from the download link on the left side of the main page. On the download page I looked under the "Binaries" section. I downloaded the i386-pc-boot-iso.

I was ready to start my native install of AROS! I started VMware Server and chose to use Local Host. I created a new custom virtual machine with 0.5GB(500MB) hard drive and 256MB of RAM. I named it AROS of course. I then right clicked on AROS on the left and selected Settings. I clicked on my CD-ROM drive and clicked on the "Use ISO image:" on the right. Then I browsed to where I unpacked my AROS ISO from the compressed file I downloaded from http://www.aros.org earlier. I started my virtual machine and it booted the AROS Live CD very quickly.

I double clicked the "AROS Live CD" icon on the left and went to the Tools folder to run the "InstallAROS" file. From reading some other posts about the new Installer, I knew there was a known bug if you didn't quit Wanderer right after you ran the Installer. (You can quit Wanderer by holding down your right mouse button and going up to the Wanderer menu and selecting Quit.) So since I ran the Installer, I quit Wanderer and was left with the Installer window only. I clicked Proceed to continue. On the next screen I chose "Only use free space" which was already checked. I left everything else alone and clicked Proceed. It states that AROS partitions had been created and asked me to reboot and afterwards run the Installer again. So I did.

If you are following this to do it yourself, don't forget to quit Wanderer again after you start the Installer again because of the bug that currently exists. When I rebooted and started the installer again, I forgot to quit Wanderer. When I reached the point where AROS needed to format my hard drive it just sat there and did nothing. This was because of the bug. This is obvious in my screen shots below. You can see the background of Wanderer appearing again while I'm running the Installer. I left it this way, so it would be obvious. If you just remember to quit Wanderer the second time, it won't be a problem. The AROS developers already know about this bug.

When I ran the Installer this time it gave me the same screen, but this time it had "Use existing AROS partitions (on any drive)" selected by default. I clicked Proceed to continue. The next screen asked me to please choose my installation options. I stayed with the defaults and clicked Proceed to continue. The next screen asked me to "please choose where to install AROS. If you are unsure, then use the defaults." I figured the defaults would be good enough, so I clicked Proceed. Next it explains that AROS uses the GRUB bootloader. "The installer will install it to the first drive on your system and configure it to boot AROS". It shows you the GRUB settings. I was ready to Proceed.

The next screen was pleasant and scary all at the same time. It stated "we are ready to begin", but then warned me that this is pre-alpha software and I can no longer undo changes. But that wasn't a big deal, because I had a brand new virtual disk and nothing to lose! So I clicked Proceed to begin the installation.

"Installing AROS..." is at the top of the next screen and it starts installing and copying files. Then I received an "IO Error has occured". (If you look at the screenshots I provided, you will see the full error message.) I clicked the "Yes (always)" button to overwrite and it continued. "Congratulations, you now have AROS installed!" I clicked the Proceed button and the system rebooted. I now notice a hard drive icon that reads AROS in Wanderer. Whoo hoo, it is installed!

So there are some bugs, but compared to how it used to be to try and install AROS natively this was a breeze! It is awesome to finally have a native version running. I have been running the hosted version of AROS for years now. I haven't tried it on a real machine yet, but installing on VMware was a good test I think. The developers will make sure the bugs are worked out, so I'm not worried. I want to remind you to report any bugs you find while testing. You can report them on the AROS-Exec.org forum. I want to thank Neil Cafferkey again for his hard work!

2007-09-30T10:43:00.000-04:00

A new article written by Thom Holwerda at OSNEWS.com has been posted today. The title of the article is Three Men, a Cow, and the Beating of the Dead Horse. I found this to be a very interesting article. He writes about the recent activity in the Amiga community. What is even more interesting is the conclusion of his article. If you are an AROS supporter, you will definitely find the conclusion interesting to say the least.

2007-09-29T00:10:00.000-04:00

There was a new Amiga diskmag just released this week named The Vague. The look of this diskmag grabbed my attention right away. I love the art!

This mag uses Warp3D, a popular 3D driver available for Amiga. Unfortunately this isn't available for AROS. However, Wazp3D, a Warp3D compatible library was placed on Aminet this week and it is under the GNU GPL license. So this could be ported to AROS.

AROS developers have discussed using something more powerful than Warp3D in AROS. I'm all for that! But something like Wazp3D might be handy to help run software that came from AmigaOS or MorphOS and uses Warp3D only.

The Vague is currently available for MorphOS, AOS3, AOS4 and WinUAE. There is also an HTML version. I've tried the WinUAE and HTML versions. I really enjoyed the art and music. The articles were interesting too.

I have chatted with Kas1e, the person responsible for The Vague. Kas1e accepted my offer to write about AROS for The Vague. So there will be AROS content starting in the next issue. The next issue is currently in the works.

------------------------------------------------------------

There was a big announcement today on the Amiga sites that included AROS. The AmiZilla bounty will be split four ways. AmiZilla is about porting Mozilla to AROS, MorphOS and Amiga. The link provided above will explain the details of the bounty change. I applaud DiscreetFX for doing this and helping the community.
DiscreetFX also posted a comment on one of the sites stating it will donate $1000.00 to the AROS UAE Integration bounty. This will make the UAE Integration bounty the largest AROS bounty amount ever. This is wonderful news! Thank you DiscreetFX!

2007-09-24T22:51:00.000-04:00

Pianeta Amiga 2007 Report from Paolo Besser

As promised, here is Paolo Besser's findings at the Pianeta Amiga 2007 show in Italy. I want to thank Paolo for representing AROS at the show.
By the way, to my surprise, Paolo informed me that he included an AROS Show slide in his presentation at the show. This makes Paolo the coolest guy in the world! I really appreciate it Paolo. :)

What are your general thoughts about the show?
The show has been really nice. Not so crowded, as the Amiga name is no longer a catalyst that is able to move the masses, but it is very well presented and realized.
A niche of old Amigans attended the show and followed all the presentations with much interest.

How was AROS received?
I'd say very well received. Every visitor at the show came to my table to see AROS in action, and they literally stumbled in front of it. I got two typical reactions: the "Wow! I can't believe it's true!" and the "I had tried it long ago, but now it's simply another thing!".

Here in Italy we'd say Cinderella transformed into a princess.

There were many interesting things to see at Pianeta Amiga 2007, but in my humble opinion AROS was the guest star.

Can you tell us more about the presentation you gave?
I tried to talk about AROS at 360 degrees, and it was a good choice. Although Pianeta Amiga is a niche-Amiga based show, I thought most people wouldn't know exactly what AROS is, what AROS should do and what to expect from AROS. I was right. So I tried to touch every aspect of the operating system, it's nature and it's purposes, it's pros and it's limits. Hard to do in a 50 minute presentation with a total of 30 slides, but I also tried to keep attention alive until the end of my conference.

What else did you talk about in the presentation?
Everything. I started with a short "What is AROS?" topic, then I showed everything we have gained in previous months, from customizable windows and menu transparency to FAT support and more. I focused on the growing community, talking about AROS-EXEC forums and other AROS websites (Yes, there was also a slide for The AROS Show!), then I showed some "nice applications" running on AROS: Lunapaint, AROS VICE, Murks!IDE and some tools and commodities like SFS defrag and DepthMenu.

I also gave a mention to the incoming new Installer, which created a lot of expectations. Talking with people at the show, I noticed that the lack of a proper installer is what kills the interest in AROS at a very early stage.

But I think that the best thing I explained, is that AROS is not an enemy or a wild competitor for the new Amiga systems. It is, really, a big opportunity and a friendly alternative to enlarge their user base. As AROS may run on every platform and help the Amiga developer community to grow. Everyone can develop his applications on AROS and easily port them to any AmigaOS flavor.

What are some of the questions people asked you about AROS?
I think exclamations were more interesting. I seen visitors literally stumbling in front of my demo AROS machine. They were amazed seeing a cheap old "$100 PC" acting like an Amiga computer. They couldn't believe an AthlonXP 1800+ with 256 megs could run so fast. The other reaction generally was "Wow! I've downloaded an old ISO long (very long)ago, but now AROS is really impressive. Practically a different thing all together!".

The questions were always the same. About compatibility with hardware, compatibility with (old) software and, amazingly, about running AROS on PPC-driven platforms. Over all, the most interesting question was: "AROS is really promising. Why is it so unknown?".

What did you think of the new SAM440 board?
It's an interesting platform to run AROS on. Its good someone still tries to break the x86 monopoly in desktop computers, because competition is always a good thing for end users, and I'm really proud ACube is an Italian company. I really hope they succeed in selling it with AmigaOS or any customized smart operating system, as I don't think people will spend more than 500 euros to buy a 667 MHz PPC board, only to run Linux on.

Did you happen to speak with Bitplane Editor Nicola Morocutti at the show? If so, what did you talk about?
Nicola is a smart guy. We talked about the same topics you can talk about with your friends on Saturday evenings with a bottle of beer in hand. Getting serious, we also talked about expanding AROS space on the magazine.

What other interesting things did you see at the show?
The Minimig and the GP2X hand held console. They are great for nostalgic/emulation purposes. I saw the promising SAM440 like everyone else, and exchanged some interesting points of view with Michele Battilana from Cloanto.

What other presentations did they have at the show?
Oh, there were lots of presentations, but I had to be at my AROS booth. So I couldn't listen to them, sorry.

Do you have any other thoughts you would like to add about the show.
It has been a friendly place to go. You might feel the ancient community spirit of the never-ending Amiga days. This year visitors were rather scarce, but this allowed us to talk with everyone without being in a hurry. I'm sure AROS did a good job at Pianeta Amiga 2007, and I hope I gave my little contribution to its credibility among the community. I know this contribution was small, but you always have to start somewhere.

Thank you Paolo!

2007-09-23T22:48:00.000-04:00

I just wanted to post real quick to let you all know that I have been in contact with Paolo Besser who was at the Pianeta Amiga 2007 show this weekend in Italy. He presented AROS at the show. We are currently discussing the show through e-mail and I will post a show report from Paolo's information as soon as possible. Thanks!

2007-09-19T18:36:00.000-04:00

The door swung open and a man stumbled in. He was out of breath and struggled to reach the first desk at AROS Show headquarters. It was one of the reporters! As he fell to the ground he lunged toward the desk and slapped a digital camera on the desktop. The editor standing nearby grabbed the camera quickly and scrambled to the back room!

So here it is. An exclusive screen shot of the new AROS installer.

*** EXCLUSIVE SCREEN SHOT ***

I want to thank Neil Cafferkey for being so quick to send me the screen shot so I could post it here on The AROS Show. He stated it wasn't too exciting because it was still based on the old one. But this screen shot does show some of the new options. Thanks Neil!

2007-09-17T22:16:00.000-04:00

This just in! Mr. Neil Cafferkey has confirmed nearly everything is working with the installer bounty he has been assigned! If you haven't noticed, I'm excited about this one! The Installer Mk2 Phase I bounty is a big one in my book. Here is the list of items for that particular bounty.

1. User able to select HD.

2. Able to co-exist with other partitions.

3. Able to accept other file systems types as they are supported by AROS.

4. Autodetect Windows, and would set up GRUB to multiboot Windows and AROS. It would not do this for Linux or other OSs, but it would not overwrite their partitions of course (unless wiping the disk is requested by the user).

5. Selection of keyboard layout early in the installation.

6. Options to create either one partition, or separate System and Work partitions. Partition sizes can be typed in, or the user can ask to use all available space.

7. No fully manual partitioning needed. However, perhaps HDToolbox could be started from the installer to fill this role if it can be made reasonably reliable.

8. Fixed partition.library. Logical partitions sould be supported by the installer too.

This baby will make it a lot easier to install AROS natively. As I stated back in April, you should start hearing a lot more about people having AROS running native instead of hosted running in Linux.
Neil says he does need more testing to make sure everything is working. He hopes to make a version available for testing within a few days. Go Neil go!

2007-09-15T23:40:00.000-04:00

Michal Schulz has posted about his recent progress on the AROS 64-bit port. He is closing in on AROS running on an AMD64! If you have been wishing and hoping for this port to happen, please give money to the X86-64 Port bounty. Michal has been working hard on this!

The Team AROS web site will be down starting Sunday this week for an OS upgrade. Mailing lists will also be down.

2007-09-11T21:40:00.000-04:00

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!

2007-09-05T21:04:00.000-04:00

Michal Schulz has a new post on his blog explaining some important news about the x86_64 port of AROS. He includes a nice little screen shot. I won't spoil anything here, I think you should read his entire post to understand what is going on.

When Microsoft released their audio device named Zune, it conflicted on Wikipedia with the AROS GUI toolkit named Zune. AROS used the name before that audio player was even a little twinkle in Microsoft's eye. But Wikipedia did help correct the situation. There is a link at the top of the Microsoft Zune Wikipedia page to our Zune now. Our Zune is now listed under Zune (GUI toolkit). This Wikipedia page could use some enhancements. More information needs to be provided, plus some screen shots would be nice since it is a GUI. Hopefully someone with a little time will add some more information to the page. I'm glad they did get the page restored and it is available once again.

2007-09-02T01:04:00.000-04:00

Matthias "Mazze" Rustler has ported the MUIbase database to AROS. MUIbase is a relational programmable database with graphical user interface. You can download it from the AROS Archives. Below are instructions from Mazze.

AROS Installation:
Unpack this archive an create an assign like:
assign muibase: sys:extras/office/muibase
You need a recent version of AROS because some bugs have to been fixed in order to make MUIbase working.

Hint for those who don't read documentation:
Database names and field names must start with a capital letter.

Known Issues:
If you loose focus (i.e. you can't create new sets) press tabulator key.
Changing the order of fields in the structure editor sometimes doesn't work.
The pictures demo database shows only one of the three pictures.

Nice work Mazze!

2007-08-27T21:57:00.000-04:00

You sure do notice around AROS land when Winter is coming. People start working on AROS again, things start happening and that makes it exciting! The #aros irc channel on the freenode network had 10 more people than usual in it today. Activity is increasing already. I wanted to post several news items tonight, so here we go!

A few days ago Hively Tracker 1.4 was released and it includes an AROS version. It is so cool they decided to include an AROS version. For a basic description, check out their "About" page on their web site. You can download the AROS version on their download page. Wondering what sound cards are supported in AROS? Here is a small news item I dug up from AROS-Exec.org.

"Michal Schulz recently commited his AC97 Codec driver to cvs, enabling Native Audio for the first time to the lucky owners of Intel 8x0 and nForce based motherboards.

But.... hot on his heals, Georg Steger ported the AHI LGPL SB Live/Audigy Driver to AROS!!!!"

I have not attempted to get either one of these to work. Maybe someone who knows more about how to setup audio on AROS could comment with more information?

-----------------------------------------------
In other news, Bill "Tigger" Evans has agreed to do an interview with The AROS Show. Bill is the developer now working on the AROS port to EFIKA. It should be a good one, stay tuned!

Last but certainly not least, I received an e-mail today from Menthos of the demo group Nukleus. He wanted to tell me Nukleus has not yet set a specific date for a new edition of Cows and Snakefights. But he is guessing it may be sometime around October. I really enjoyed writing for the last edition. It received a lot of nice comments, especially about the high quality articles. If you haven't read it, download it and do it now!

2007-08-24T16:35:00.000-04:00

Did you ever get the "Feelin" that Feelin would never actually be ported to AROS? Well, in the top secret laboratory of Georg Steger work has been done to correct that way of thinking. Sometime ago he worked on an older port, but left it as is. We zoom to present day AROS land. The eclectic Kalamatee enters the fray! He picks up where Georg left off and now has Feelin running in AROS! Here is the proof.

With some help from Georg, Nick "Kalamatee" Andrews surprised everyone in the #aros irc channel today by showing off that screen shot. It isn't fully working yet. There are some items that still need to be addressed.
Here is a list of items Kalamatee spoke about in the irc channel today.

1. yeah georg fixed some dos stuff in one class which doesnt work now cause we had a fix up in the headers =S
2. and the histogram class had some funcs defined which also doesnt compile now - so theyve been reverted to compile but not work
(iee math funcs)
3. another issue is the default window decorater (use intuitions) doesnt work properly - it doesnt respect the themed borders dimensions so u get some corruption
4. shouldnt be too hard for someone to fix
5. It needs updated to the newer version, but it shouldn't be hard to do now.

Kalamatee did state that it is submitted to the svn. Since Feelin is basically a open-source GUI framework, it gives AROS some nice diversity. It's native GUI is the well known Zune of course. So now that we have it, hopefully it won't take long to get the items fixed to gain a fully functional port. A big THANK YOU goes out to Nick and Georg!

2007-08-15T22:15:00.000-04:00

Space...the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the operating system AROS. Its (insert number here)-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

A new bounty has been posted. The bounty is to port Scalos to AROS. Pixie did a nice job posting about the new bounty on AROS-Exec.org, so I figured I would follow it up the same way. If you read about the history of Scalos on their web site, you will better understand why we are using Star Trek lingo. Basically Scalos was named after a planet from the original Star Trek series. You can read all of the details of the bounty on the Team AROS web site. To show an example, here is a screen shot with Scalos in action.

2007-08-07T15:01:00.000-04:00

As you probably know, the AROS EFIKA bounty has been reassigned to Bill Evans. John H. was not able to continue because of real life getting in the way, which is understandable. Bill Evans posted some information about himself that was interesting.

I am interested in doing the Efika bounty. I've got about 20 years
experience in the embedded field, lately doing BSBs for our new PPC
systems for the Apache and CH53K Helicopters. On the Amiga, I wrote lots of things for the Video Toaster (All of Promix, RenderFX and Flyer Utilities, portions of Copilot Audio and Video as well as Millenium) and headed up the Toaster Open Source effort. I also designed the amiga based Riverboat Queen video gambling machines.

Hopefully The AROS Show can find out more about Bill in the future.

In other news, o1i is back working on GTK in AROS. Awesome! To find out more information be sure to check his blog.

Olivier Adams is still working hard on the Team AROS web site. Not only has he added donors to projects and update the monthly donation information, he is currently implementing even more new features. Be sure to check the Team AROS site frequently and please donate if you can.

2007-06-29T21:32:00.000-04:00

I have been neglecting The AROS Show lately and I apologize. The guys in the #aros IRC channel brought it to my attention, so I promised to get the Show rolling again! First of all, I haven't exactly been lazy. I have just taken a little break, because I am working on my programming skills again. I am devoted to learning Common Lisp. I know the AROS Developers right now are saying "learn C, what are you doing!". I just can't get past my dislike for C yet. I did want to learn something with some power and Common Lisp definitely has that. I have been reading two books online and I have purchased a book, with more to come. The two online are Practical Common Lisp and Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation. The book I bought was ANSI Common Lisp. Plus, I've been using SLIME for Emacs to write my code. Why am I telling you all of this? Because I hope someone ports a Common Lisp implementation to AROS so we can hack on Lisp in AROS of course! CLISP is a very popular implementation and has been available for the Amiga in the past according to Aminet. The veteran Lispers said this would be one of the best options to port to AROS. They also mentioned ECL might be a good option because of it's size and C features. Hopefully someone good at porting will make this a dream come true someday. I could go on, but I better move on to other news.

I have just asked well known AROS Developer Michal Schulz to do a second interview with The AROS Show and he has accepted! His latest project is the AROS port to X86-64. You can read his blog here. You can read the first interview with Michal, here.

Robert Norris has been investigating various things within AROS lately. He has been playing around with some C64 demo stuff lately too. I love that kind of stuff!

Pavel "Sonic" Fedin has been working with CDVDFS for AROS. CDVDFS is a CD/DVD disk filing system for the Amiga family of operating systems.

There is a new version of WinArosLight released by Heinz-Raphael Reinke. This time it comes with installation and uninstallation programs. The setup program will create a shortcut on the desktop. It has never been easier to try AROS. http://amidevcpp.amiga-world.de/WinAros/WinAros062007.exe

The AROS Wallpaper Competition is in it's last two days of voting. You can check out the final selection and vote for the one you like at the official poll.

Stay tuned to The AROS Show for more uninhibitedly enthusiastic AROS news!

2007-06-08T00:25:00.000-04:00

It has been a little quiet lately. For some reason, that usually always happens at some point during the Summer months. But activity has sparked lately with talk of development and stable branches. The developers are discussing this and other ways of making AROS more stable as the project grows.

A new bounty is being started for creation of an AROS Distro. I like this a lot. I think a good one really needs to be created and maintained. Here is the information about the bounty so far.

Objectives:

1. Create a bootable and installable AROS ISO x86 that will include:
A. USB and existing drivers
B. AROStcp and existing drivers
C. Themeable Wanderer with existing themes
2. All packages submitted to the assigned SVN will have reasonable and prudent amount of documentation with each submit.

If you have any suggestions to add to this bounty, you can post in this thread or contact Damocles of Team AROS.

2007-05-21T23:50:00.000-04:00

There were several items added recently to the AROS Archives.
First up is Untarka. It is used to help extract tar archives. Tom "Mithrandir/Tom_Kun" Richard ported it.

Damir "d980" Sijakovic has uploaded a new update to the OS4 Theme for the Theme Manager. Check out the readme for more information.

Paolo Besser has uploaded new versions of his various wallpapers for the wallpaper contest. He has made the essential name change and added more flavors.

Enjoy!

2007-05-20T19:56:00.000-04:00

I contacted John Hedditch to get an update on the AROS port to EFIKA. He told me the port is currently delayed because he and his wife had a new baby boy! It is keeping them both very busy. He stated he hoped to get back to the port very soon. Congratulations on the new baby John!

The wallpaper contest is getting close to the deadline. The competition team has uploaded all the wallpapers into a gallery, so you can view them all together. There has been the question of the name change affecting the contest. Some of the wallpapers have the old name of Amiga Research Operating System. Plus some have used boing balls in their submissions. Someone has posed the question of extending the contest for 1 month so the needed changes could be made. There is no word from the competition team as of yet. There are a lot of nice submissions I might add.

A new version of Wookie Chat is available and includes support for AROS. You can get the new 2.6 version from the AROS Archives of course.

Christoph Johann Szczecina aka Craid-hjb has provided the funds to get the FUSE Filesystems bounty started. FUSE stands for Filesystem in Userspace. There is some good information about it on Wikipedia. The key point here, is FUSE doesn't need the kernel. Rob Norris posted some information about this awhile back on his blog too. He explains how this could be implemented in AROS.

2007-05-16T22:20:00.000-04:00

The official AROS website, http://www.aros.org has been updated with a new look! Thanks to Tom "Mithrandir" Richard who fought through a lot of suggestions and comments to deliver a very nice site. He took timeout from his other application work to do this. I know the site was difficult to work with because of the way it was coded, but Tom prevailed in the end.

Here is a brief statement from Tom:

The site is now finally operational (After a small 15 hour marathon)

Some small fixes are still awaiting build, but the introduction error
has been removed, and all links should now work properly. :)

I didn't dislike the old site design, but it was in need of an update. It had been years and it was time for a change. So I'm glad Tom decided to take the challenge. He is receiving a lot of nice comments on the news sites too. Thanks for the hard work Tom!

In other news and somewhat related, Paolo Besser has posted a new AROS status update on the new AROS.org web site. You can check it out right on the front page.

2007-05-15T08:21:00.000-04:00

USB support is now in beta! Michal Schulz has worked very hard on delivering USB to AROS. He has posted the latest information in his blog. Two huge support options are mentioned and they have me excited, so I'm sure many others will be. One, is any machine containing USB 1.1 should work. The other is, hotplugging works! More options are coming, but these two are HUGE for AROS! To read more about USB support, head over to Michal's blog. Grab your keyboards and mice and run for the USB ports!
Thank you for the great work Michal!

2007-05-14T22:47:00.000-04:00

Darius Brewka has added LUT support to the Decoration Tool so people with older graphics cards and still use them. A LUT is an abbreviation for a lookup table. The following is the LUT support information by Darius.

I want to say that i´ve added LUT support to decorations, so that now People with a old Graphicshardware can use it.

There are some extensions for the Themefiles, for example the possibility to use separate images for LUT and Truecolor Screens (simply use the same Images but add "_LUT" to the filename for LUT images:

("ArrowLeft/default" -> "ArrowLeft/default_LUT")

that meant two images should be placed to each directory, but it must not, however it´s much faster and looks better when special LUT images are available.

and some other extensions, wait for new Themes by Damir.

I also added support for new Titlebar images in the next Version, so new Decorations should have images

MUI/default
Snapshot/default
Iconify/default
Lock/default
Popup/default

A other update was made to ZUNE, it´s possible now to change to ScrollBars, you have to create a special configfile which is an truncated version of the Decoration Theme file and therefore you can select this Decorations Themefile to change the Scrollbars.

Simply open Zuneprefs, select custom Scrollbars and choose the "Config" file from your actual Theme as Bitmap.

better is to create special Theme files named "prop.config" placing following lines to it

-------------------------

ContainerTop = 0 3
ContainerVertTile = 4 100
ContainerBottom = 193 3

ContainerLeft = 0 3
ContainerHorTile = 4 100
ContainerRight = 193 3

KnobTop = 0 3
KnobTileTop = 10 40
KnobVertGripper = 62 12
KnobTileBottom = 80 40
KnobBottom = 137 3

KnobLeft = 0 3
KnobTileLeft = 10 40
KnobHorGripper = 66 12
KnobTileRight = 80 40
KnobRight = 137 3

-----------------------------------

It´s necessary to place the Arrow buttons and the Knob/Container images to the same Directory where the prop.config file is arround, a full Scrollbar theme consists of following files

ArrowUp/default
ArrowDown/default
ArrowLeft/default
ArrowRight/default
Knob/Horizontal
Knob/Vertical
Container/Horizontal
Container/Vertical
prop.config

2007-05-12T10:19:00.000-04:00

There have been two big interviews lately on The AROS Show and there hasn't been much time to post about the big name change. There was a lot of discussion about this change between all the people involved in the project. I have seen the comments on Amiga.org and AmigaWorld.net about the change. In my opinion, the change is a good thing. One of the largest reasons, is because this gives AROS it's own identity. It breaks free from being wrapped in the chains of another operating system. What great timing too, with AROS getting a load of new features. This is a statement that basically says, we are doing it all on our own, so we deserve our own name.

This change is also needed to insure there will not be a lawsuit against AROS. People may say that is crazy, but in actuality it could happen. So it is much better to avoid that before it is even brought to life.

Now there is no doubt that AROS is based on the AmigaOS and we definitely need to make sure people know that. So when others are interested in AROS, they know what it is based on and where it came from. This terminology is still found on the official AROS web site. I think it is important for it to remain.

So we are only looking at a name change here. AROS still has it's Amiga roots and when people read or talk about it, they will still know that. I know some people will still call it the Amiga Reseach Operating System because that is what it will always be to them and that is fine. There is nothing wrong with that. Long live AROS or the AROS Research Operating System.

2007-05-04T21:09:00.000-04:00

Bill Panagouleas Interview

What is the focus of your company DiscreetFX?
DiscreetFX's focus is on hand crafting unique, stunning visual effects software and films that expand and improve customer video production and creativity. The birth of DiscreetFX began with a CD-ROM (Pyromania from VCE) filled with captured digitized frames of real fire and explosions. The frames were converted to real-time video effects that editors could use in their productions. The original producer of the CD-ROM envisioned using sequenced frames of fire from the CD to give animators using Lightwave 3D or other 3D programs the ability to produce realistic explosions and fire in their animations. The CD sold well in the animation community, even to the visual effects producers of Babylon 5. But my vision went beyond just images in 3D software.

I wanted to remove the complexity and requirement of 3D software, and instead utilize this great collection of captured flames and fire as a drag and drop transition for the Amiga Video Toaster. I wasn't happy with the low resolution frames of the PC & Mac versions (640*480), so I requested the original 2K*2K images and converted them to the native broadcast quality resolution of the Video Toaster Flyer. I had plans for many more theme based effects for the Amiga Video Toaster, but these were put on hold by the demise of Commodore. Then Escom put the availability of Amiga in to limbo. At the time DiscreetFX's software required an Amiga with a Video Toaster to function at its highest intended quality. DiscreetFX was reborn in 2002 with the launch of Video Toaster [2]. Sadly the VT[2] was not for the Amiga, but with new customers and new Video Toasters it allowed me to bring DiscreetFX out of the freezer.

Could you tell us about yourself? How did you get started in this field? How did you become interested in Amiga's?
I first found out about the Amiga when it was mentioned in RUN magazine. My first computer was a Commodore 64. When Run magazine hinted of the Amiga's power, it was still being developed and Commodore did not own it yet. I later bought the first issue of Amiga World and dreamed of owning one, but I couldn't afford it at the time. What drew me to the Amiga was the creative aspect of it. I always had an interest in acting, film production and special effects. The Amiga was the first computer that made this available at a reasonable price.

Rumor has it you worked for Commodore at one time. What did you do for them?
I did work for Commodore in the Philippines where I sold more than five hundred Amiga 500's and over 100 Amiga 2000's.

Do you still use a Video Toaster?
I have many Video Toasters on the Amiga and on Windows XP. The Video Toaster and its offshoots (SpeedEDIT, TriCaster) are great products on Windows and on the Amiga (Video Toaster Flyer). If it was not for the Amiga, DiscreetFX and even NewTek might not exist.

Spontaneous Combustion is obviously a major product for you. Could you give us some history of the product and explain more about it? Is it available for any particular Amiga related operating system?
I finished the Amiga Video Toaster Flyer version of Pyromania as a subcontractor. Later customers requested a sequel for the Video Toaster [2]. By then the technology had advanced to the point that realistic fire, smoke and explosions could be created 100% with computer software. The expensive process of filming real fire was no longer required. Also, I never planned to remain a subcontractor subject to the whims of other companies goals and product lines. With Spontaneous Combustion for the Video Toaster [2], DiscreetFX became its own company with new fresh ideas and products. It's nice that you can turn on your television today and see fire, smoke and explosion effects used on many networks. I am happy that I changed television even a little bit and made it more spontaneous. But the plan was never to be a one hit wonder or to be known as the company that only does fire effects. The goal was to have a large series of theme based video effects to help customers with their video productions.

What other unique visual effect software products has DiscreetFX created?
We have a wide variety of products in development and we are already shipping several theme based digital video effects covering Fire, Sports, Fantasy, Religion, etc. Please see the DiscreetFX product page for specific product information. Before DiscreetFX, you never saw fire, explosions and smoke used as a digital video effect.

What is used to develop these creations?
We use a wide variety of software on our network. We combine tools to get new results on SGI, Amiga, MorphOS and Windows XP. We have also developed custom in-house software that assists us with product development.

Do you plan to make DiscreetFX products available for AROS? If so, what is needed in AROS for you to do this and which products might be available?
I would love to make our products available for AROS. For this to happen, a video editing application would need to be available first. Also we have considered making our effects into Hollywood transitions, but we would need the assistance of the developer to make this happen. Please consider the fact that we would even consider porting to AROS as a compliment, we don't consider porting to many editing systems even when asked. For example we do get asked quite a lot to port our digital video effects to Adobe Premiere. This may be a major mistake on my part but I will never allow it. I have no interest in seeing our products on this editing app ever. If after I tell the customer our products will never appear on Premiere, if they still insist I finally tell them the only way it will ever happen. Adobe would have to buy DiscreetFX and port the effects themselves. This gets a good laugh from the customer but it is the gods honest truth. I run DiscreetFX the way I want to right or wrong. We have survived the might of Autodesk trying to crush us so we must be doing something right.

Your company has donated several times to AROS. The AROS Community really appreciates the interest shown by DiscreetFX. What benefits will AROS eventually provide to DiscreetFX?
I hope that one day AROS will advance to the level that our product line can be ported to it. Today we are a Windows developer under protest.

Have you tried running AROS?
I have run AROS and feel it's advancing nicely.

Have you checked out the paint program Lunapaint, which was originally developed in AROS?
I have not tried this painting application, but will make some time and explore it soon. My schedule is very hectic.

What are your thoughts on the AROS, MorphOS and Amiga communities currently?
Choice is a good thing. In the past Commodore stated there would never be any Amiga clones. So when Commodore died it hurt the Amiga market and left it in turmoil. If Commodore had licensed the Amiga, everyone would be using it today. The Amiga market survived though and today the developers of AROS, Amiga OS 4.0 & MorphOS know they have to do their best or they could lose out to the other Amiga like solutions. Customers get a great benefit from this competition. Today the Amiga market is small, but that does not have to be the case for the future. Microsoft with Windows Vista has failed to deliver a product that customers want. Other factors in the computer and cell phone markets provide an opportunity for Amiga, AROS and MorphOS in the future.

What convinced you to start the DiscreetFX Retro Amiga Game Creation Contest starring "Hottie™"?
Hottie has worked hard and done a great job promoting Spontaneous Combustion. That was the original reason she was conceived. In the future we want to expand the Hottie character into video games, television, feature films and licensing. Mickey Mouse does a great job of it and makes billions for Disney every year. Mickey is a great character but he does not have Hottie's figure.
Read announcement of contest here.

Do you know how many participants have started working on an entry?
I know of at least two teams.

As you know, AROS has it's own sexy mascot, Kitty. How and why was your mascot Hottie™ created?
Hottie was created back in 2002 to represent Spontaneous Combustion. Eric Schwartz did a great job drawing her from the concepts and ideas I gave him for the character. We now have a male version of Hottie too.

What is the current status of your movie Oil Change? Why did you decide to make this movie?
Oil Change is still in production. We have a fantastic new editor for the film and are very pleased with the work he is doing on the high definition footage that has been shot in the last year. He is an old time Amiga owner and fan and he is working hard and doing a great job editing the trailers/film using NewTek's SpeedEDIT.

I am making Oil Change the movie because there is a killer in the food supply (Trans Fat) and many companies choose to cover it up instead of getting rid of it 100%.

Do you still plan to attempt to purchase Amiga Inc?
When DiscreetFX sets a goal it sticks to it. In October 2006 we formed together a group of investor's called DiscreetFX Partners to raise capital. We have been in contact with Amiga Inc. a few times. But keep in mind we can only buy them if they wish to sell and if a price can be agreed upon from both companies. I won't say more as it would be unprofessional to discuss what has been said between the companies so far.

DiscreetFX has graciously stood behind the AmiZilla project. Do you think there is still any hope for the project?
AmiZilla will succeed. It's just taking more time for the programmers to do the port.
AmiZilla Shop

Is there anything at all you would like to add?
If Amiga/MorphOS/AROS users want these operating systems to succeed and become mass market please support hardware/software developers so that they can grow. If you can't support with money then support with programming and or graphic design assistance. Support on whatever system is your favorite (Amiga OS 4.0, AROS, MorphOS) and do something to advance the system. Every bit helps even if it is something small.

Best regards

Bill P
Founder/CEO
DiscreetFX
www.discreetfx.com

2007-05-01T23:08:00.000-04:00

Nick "Kalamatee" Andrews Interview

Hello Nick, thanks for taking the time to do this interview.
MY pleasure =)

Could you tell us about yourself and how you became interested in Amiga's?
When I was younger most of my friends, like myself, got caught up in the Amiga hype (no not that they're going to release another version.. the original hype about how good they where =)) of course this meant I ended up getting a sexy little A500. That was my main Computer for many years until the Amiga1200 came along so logically I had to upgrade. I still have my A1200 even now - though stashed away on a shelf sadly (with mediator PCI bus board, PowerFlyer ATA adaptor etc etc) as well as a second a1200 motherboard for spare's =S. I've also been the owner of a CD32 and A600 but while they were fun - I ended up selling them.

In the late 90s though I found myself using my Amiga less and less, and instead started using/dabbling with Linux. I spent a couple of years learning C via the Linux kernel source (nasty) and one day I recalled a project mentioned in Amiga Format for an open source AmigaOS implementation .... called AROS. That was almost 10 years ago now, and I've had a lot of fun since finding the project - hacking on bits of the system here and there, and generally getting a better understanding of how AmigaOS must've worked internally.

What work have you completed for AROS up to this point?
Well im not sure to be honest, theres a few bits and pieces ive worked on including:

InstallAROS - gave it a bit more of a graphical feel than it originally had (I vaguely remember when it was a tiny window that displayed almost nothing)

Mesa 2.2 - My first real attempt at working on anything on AROS. It took a single night to port the original AmigaOS Mesa code - and ever since to bring it upto date with the latest version ( 6.5).

A few network adaptor drivers (PCNet32 for my VMWare test systems and the VIA Rhine driver)

What AROS specific projects are you working on now?
Right now im working on Wanderer mostly, although I have a theme for AROS in development tentatively named Xstream.

Could you go into more detail on your Wanderer and Zune changes and enhancements?
Hmm I'm not sure what there is to tell. =)
A lot of the most recent changes are to try and get Wanderer working in a more friendly fashion internally - since one of my goals is to make it a bit more modular/pluggable. I also have been working on its general configurability (changing font options, background rendering options, and so on).

What can you tell us about the VIA RhineII NIC Driver you completed recently?
Its a very basic driver for VIA-Rhine based chipsets. I hope to come back to the NIC drivers at some point and make them a bit more configurable but it should suffice for general network activity. All Rhine I and Rhine II cards should work.

You started development on the very first IRC client for AROS named AiRcOS. With your permission a fork of AiRcOS has been created. AROS now has Wookie Chat as well. Do you have any plans to finish and enhance AiRcOS?
Yes, but the problem is finding time since I have a number of projects to work on. Eventually I'd like to rework AiRcOS to become a modular IM application with IRC as only one of its connection options .. something like Trillian for AROS. =)

What has kept you involved with AROS for so long?
I guess my interest in AmigaOS, and of course the friendly/buzzing AROS IRC community is hard to keep away from. I've learnt a considerable amount from people on there - indeed I probably wouldn't have accomplished half of the things if it weren't for people like Fabio Alemagna, Michal Schulz and so on to help when things just don't make sense. =)

Have you thought about what projects you would like to do for AROS in the future?
All the time. =)

I'd really love to get proper hardware 3d support in the relatively near future since realistically it's the only way to get newish games working. I'd also love to get the networking side up to date with more modern systems. There's a lot of things AROS needs still so finding something to do is easy enough. =)

What advice could you give other developers who want to start contributing to AROS?
Dont be shy! The best thing to do is to study the code that exists in the AROS svn repository since it's a great source for information/examples and inspiration. Hang around on the mailing list to find out how things go and if you have problems make sure and ask - theres a lot of really friendly and helpful people involved and most are more than willing to point people in the right direction.

How did you develop your programming skills?
Well, I started when I was 7 years old on Spectrums - its amazing how much enjoyment you can get out of printing your name on screen in different colours. A family friend came round and showed my brother and myself how to write some trivial stuff in Basic, which led us to write our first code - a centipede style game (hasn't everyone wrote one of those!). From there I moved onto the Commodore family of Home computers and was a C64 fan/user for many years. That resulted in me learning ASM mostly from copying page upon page of data from magazines and wondering what the hell it all actually meant. Sadly I never had much time for languages back then so I only really understood ASM particularly well - even once I obtained my first Amiga, though I did try and get my head around Dice C, Storm C (the most promising of them for me at the time) and GG. It wasn't till much later when I started using Linux that I dabbled in C, and a lot of what I have learnt of it comes from the Linux kernel code and AROS's svn repository.

I've also dabbled (through necessity at work) in Javascript, ASP and other web related technologies.

What programming languages do you know and what is your favorite?
Sheesh I'm not sure I can remember hehe..

Lemme see, Z80, 6502 and 68k ASM (though the first 2 are a bit vague nowadays), Comal, Cobal, various Basics, various scripting languages (Javascript and so on), a little bit of Perl and of course C.

After using C for a while now and finally starting to get to grips with it I would have to say its my favourite by far since it allows me to quickly bang out code.

Do you plan to learn other languages? If so, which ones?
Have you ever tried the REBOL programming language?
Finding times the hard bit - though I find it much easier to pick up new languages these days (and most scripting ones work in very similar fashions)

I haven't tried REBOL sadly though I've read a lot about it - again it all boils down to finding the time to do it.

Have you noticed more activity surrounding AROS lately, than in the past?
Yes and No =)

AROS has always had bursts of activity then quiet periods though it does feel like theres a few more interested devs hiding out in the wings lately.

In your opinion, what feature could greatly improve AROS at this point?
That's a tricky one - there's a few things I personally could use that I feel would greatly improve the AROS user experience - A decent standards compliant web browser, reworking the existing data types to support streamed data, A decent media player, Productivity tools (word processing packages and so on) - Let's face it there's tons of Apps we could really benefit from.

What applications would you like to see available for AROS?
Well, a decent media player and browser would be high on the list - as well as a decent general IM application. Those are some of my main uses of PCs in recent years.

To make a push towards a 1.0 release of AROS, what do you think needs to be completed?
Personally I think we need to look at the subsystems we currently lack or are incomplete. A considerable amount of AROS feels feature ready now (imo) so we just need to hit the nail on the head as it were and finish up.

Do you use any other operating system? If so, what type?
For a long time I used Mandrake Linux, however things went to pot when it became Mandriva and I've since migrated to using Fedora Core which I'm very pleased with - as Linux distributions go anyhow.

I also run Windows XP, XP64, Server and Vista on various machines.

How many Amiga's have you owned and what models?
1x A500,
1x A600,
2x A1200
And a CD32

Do you currently own any Amiga's?
I still have my 2 trusty old A1200s.

Could you give me your thoughts about Amiga OS 4 and MorphOS?
MorphOS is an interesting product since its very much alike AROS - indeed a lot of it is based on AROS code. It has a vocal community and developer base that I think would fit nicely with AROS but like most Amiga related things theres the age old "my groups better than yours" sentiment around.

AmigaOS 4 looks interesting but I've not had the chance to use it myself. I got disenchanted with the whole AmigaOS affair long long ago.

Is there anything at all you would like to add?
Thanks for giving me the time to share some of my thoughts. =)
I hope 2007 will be a great year for AROS!

Thanks again for taking the time to do this interview for The AROS Show. Keep up the great work! We hope to have you around for many more years.
Thank you.

Kal, as I like to call him, knows his stuff. There have been many times I have witnessed a new user asking detailed questions in the #aros irc channel and if Kal is available he will answer them with ease. This interview touches on many of the things he has done, but there are so many other little things he has done to help AROS, I can't remember them all. Everything from helping new developers commit their code correctly to implementing a change in AROS that someone asked for on the AROS-Exec.org forum. I just wanted to make sure this was acknowledged and give Kal the credit he deserves.

2007-04-26T23:59:00.000-04:00

The Swedish Demo Group, Nukleus has released a new issue of the disk magazine Cows and Snakefights! In case you missed my earlier mention of this, Nukleus asked me to write about AROS for them and I accepted. The current issue is #7. This disk mag is in Amiga AGA format. So you will either need a classic Amiga of some kind or an emulator like WinUAE to view it. I have Amiga Forever and it worked flawlessly. Besides my AROS article, Cows and Snakefights features over 100 articles about the Amiga, demo scene, etc. It has tons of information, so don't expect to read it all in one night. I was happy I could contribute to it. I want to thank Menthos of Nukleus for keeping me well informed with the creation and release. You can also download it from Pouet.net and read the comments.

2007-04-24T22:44:00.000-04:00

The word for today boys and girls, is scrollbars! Nick "Kalamatee" Andrews has been working on the scrollbars in Wanderer. He is still doing some tweaking, but as you can see, it looks quite impressive already. Don't forget to check Kal's blog. He has been updating from time to time. By the way, Kal will be doing an interview with The AROS Show very soon!

Mithrandir is still working hard on a new web site for AROS.org. It is looking good, I can't wait to see it ready for prime time.

Robert Norris continues to code like a madman on the FAT file system. He does a great job of blogging all about it too. If you are interested in AROS and you don't check Rob's blog frequently, you definitely should start.

Last but not least, you still have one week to enter the AROS Wall-Paper Contest. There are some really nice entries so far. If you are good with the graphics, now is the time to shine!

2007-04-19T21:18:00.000-04:00

WookieChat for AROS! Jahc has made available the first beta release of WookieChat for AROS. With the help of some of our friendly neighborhood AROS Developers, Jahc was able to get his popular Amiga IRC client, WookieChat, running on AROS. The download is available on Jahc's web site. If you plan to try it, please follow the instructions below from Jahc.

WookieChat beta works slightly better if you have a full package installed first, then copy the beta exe + beta catalogs to that directory. If you dont it will be missing a few directories, and there will be no servers predefined.

You can grab the full package from:
http://wookiechat.amigarevolution.com/

I'm aware of the following problems:
1. Window resizes when a tab is closed
2. transparent backgrounds in a few windows, but I suspect thats because I havent specified a background tag in my code. I think you can change the default settings in "MUI Settings.."
3. the bottom part of the tabs seem to be cut off. This is a problem when using Zune under OS3 too. I will investigate when I get some more motivation.

It's great to see WookieChat available to AROS users. I think the AROS community enjoys and welcomes being able to run popular Amiga software on their operating system. RWARR!

2007-04-18T22:24:00.000-04:00

Nic "Kalamatee" Andrews has recently added some changes to Wanderer to allow basic keyboard navigation. He explained this in detail on the AROS development mailing list, so I thought it was important to post it here.
Wanderer is the AROS equivalent to the Amiga Workbench.

so far the following are implemented -:

# TAB - cycles between the location input gadget, the
parent dir gadget and the "icon view" area

# PAGE UP - will scroll the view up
# PAGE DOWN - will scroll the view down
# HOME - will put focus on the first icon in the window
# END - will put focus on the last icon in the window
# CURSOR DOWN - will put focus on the next icon down
# CURSOR RIGHT - will put focus on the next item right
# SPACE - toggle an icons selected state (use LEFT SHIFT
for multi-selection)
# ENTER/RETURN - open the focused/selected icon

Theres a couple of issues needing ironed out as ever -:

# I havent put in code for CURSOR UP or CURSOR LEFT just
yet but it will be done by next weekend.

# Navigating will generally work well with the current right/down keys
however, due to the way i check for the next column atm, on occasional
it will skip a column.
Basically i use the "next" icons x or y coord as a marker - however
earlier icons in that column may have a lower value if they are larger
(will correct it shortly)

# If an icon is selected using the mouse, it doesnt properly clear its
state when you use keyboard navigation ... also to be fixed soon.

# When icons get moved about (drag/drop) it will mess up keyboard
navigation. Ive put in a place holder for a quick sort method based on icon
coords (I will add a single icon option to just have that one correctly
inserted into an existing sorted list) which the drag/drop code calls.

2007-04-13T23:35:00.000-04:00

Damir "d980" Sijakovic Interview

Hello Damir, could you tell us about yourself and how you eventually came to be involved with AROS?
I was bored with Amiga emulation and it was challenging for me to setup a Linux box for AROS hosted. I was a total Linux newbie at that time :)

How did you become involved with the new theme engine, Decorations for AROS?
On one saturday I get an e-mail from Darius about improved WinDecor and basic skin.

I like the new ICE theme, available with the recently released Decorations in AROS. What did you use to create this theme?
Inkscape 'n' Gimp. Sometimes I use PSP instead of Gimp for raster stuff.
More about Decorations and Ice theme

Are you currently creating any other themes for Decorations?
Yes, there are some unfinished themes waiting for a final touch. Also, I was thinkin' to "remake" some of Amiga OS4 & MOS skins. But I'm not sure if people would like that?

I know you have worked with AROS Developer Darius Brewka on Decorations. Have you worked with him on any other projects?
On AmiStart of course.

Do you guys have any other plans to teamup on a project?
We were exchanging some words about Zune. I'm hope that bringing Zune from the 90's to todays "look&feel" standards will be the next project. But it's not up to me.

I noticed you created a wide-screen background for the AROS Wall-Paper competition. Do you plan to design any others before the deadline on May 31st?
Yes, I was thinking to design something vector this time.
Here is the wide-screen background.

I know your working on a new skin for AROSAmp. What is the current status on it?
(AROSAmp was developed by Mithrandir)
Tom got it just a few days ago. There are some small parts left to be added on the skin. By the way, the skin will be a part of AROSAmp.

Do you have any other AROS specific projects you are planning or currently working on?
For now, no.

I know you have designed numerous AROS backgrounds in the past. What is your favorite one?
That would be Cat_i, which seems to be very popular these days. ;)

I am a big fan of the icons you have created for AROS. What is the name of this icon set? Where did the idea for this set come from?
Name is Aeon. I have borowed some ideas from Next, MacOSX, and Vista. Anyway, I have made this set out of fun. Release is coming soon.

Do you plan to work on another icon set for AROS in the future?
Nope. Only improving Aeon.

Have you used the AROS paint application, Lunapaint for anything yet?
(Lunapaint was developed by m0ns00n)
I did play with it a bit. I'm into vector stuff so there isn't much that I could do with LunaPaint.

Do you currently have a web site where we can check out all of your work? If not, are you planning one soon?
I don't have much time for that. Who knows maybe one day.

What other operating systems do you create graphics for besides AROS?
Mostly Amiga stuff, like Feelin logo and themes.

Feelin screen1
Feelin screen2
Feelin screen3
Feelin screen4
Feelin screen5

What are the main tools you use for your work?
Inkscape, Gimp and PaintShopPro for more advanced stuff. I'm also good in Photoshop but I avoid it because it's nightmare slow.

Do you have any advice for beginners interested in creating icons or graphics of any kind?
Hang around art sites like deviantART. You can learn a lot from these guys.

Do you currently own any Amiga's?
No, I sold my A1200 long time ago.

Do you use Amiga OS4 or MorphOS at all?
That would be too expensive for me :)

What features or applications would you like to see added to AROS?
A Zune Calculator would rock. Console, ASL, Editor and some Prefs apps rewritten in Zune would also.
And... I would kill for SVG datatype.

Is there anything at all you would like to add?
Just, have fun with AROS.

Damir has really contributed many things to AROS. I wanted to mention his graphics work on the AROS Archives web site.
Plus, I posted a screen shot of a retro style theme for AROS Damir created a few weeks ago. Damir has now released it!
He was even nice enough to design a little AROS Show button for me which is displayed in the right navigation section.

Thank you very much for everything Damir!
We really appreciate all of your work.

Thank you very much.

2007-04-12T21:14:00.000-04:00

To continue my theme news from last night, Mithrandir has now uploaded even more themes to AROS Archives. I haven't had time to try these yet, but I have seen screen shots and they look really nice. We are lucky to have this many quality themes available already! I can't wait to see more in the future!

2007-04-11T23:55:00.000-04:00

Damir "d980" Sijakovic has uploaded a theme manager and new themes to the AROS Archives. I tested this myself and it works beautifully! After downloading I made copies of the three folders it will replace. They are Prefs, S, and System. Then I copied the three folders and overwrote them. You will find the Theme manager icon inside the Prefs folder. You open it to find a list of themes you can choose from. The three themes in this pack are named retrowhite, retroblue and OS8. Here are my screen shots of retrowhite and OS8, enjoy! The retro themes are retro/future Amiga style. Very cool! The OS8 theme is Mac OS8 style. Damir did a very nice job with it. Once you select the one you want, click the Save & Restart button. Since I was running AROS hosted, I just closed AROS and started it back up from the Linux shell. The theme you picked should now be active. That is all there is to it.
I love eye candy! Hopefully Damir will continue to bring us sweet themes. Stay tuned for an interview with Damir coming to The AROS Show very soon!

2007-04-10T23:32:00.000-04:00

The big news lately is a new web site for the official AROS.org by Mithrandir. The same Mithrandir who developed AROSAmp, has been working extremely hard on a total revamp of the offcial site. I really like the overall content placement he has come up with. I think the new site will be mighty nice. I think it was time to change the current site. Although I don't hate the current site, it is just outdated, plain and simple.

I was really blown away this week by Breakpoint, the largest demoscene party still running. I really liked the Commodore 64 demos and I still can't believe the demoscene on the c64 is going strong! Check out this list of releases at The C-64 Scene Database. I have been downloading demos like crazy! The music has really inspired me to make my own tracks. I am a drummer and I have toyed around before. I did make some music for a never released Amiga Anywhere boxing game, called G-Boxing. The coder is a really good friend, so I have already talked to him about maybe releasing the game on AROS one of these days.
Anyway, the entire time I have been checking this stuff out, I have been thinking how cool it would be to have a demoscene for AROS. We definitely need the SB16 driver working for this. I think AROS would make a great platform for a demoscene. It would make a nice home for a retro/future like demoscene. The other items to consider, would be Assembly language. I don't know why the coding couldn't be written in C. The old scene was usually done with Assembler though. Anyone have any other ideas on this? Maybe NASM Assembler, a 80x86 assembler could be used? I think it was ported. Anyone have any other ideas?
The other item would probably be graphics. I think maybe a Mesa3d port was started? I'm not sure of the status. I know a demo coding contest was talked about at one time. I think we definitely need the right tools before this can happen though. I don't see why it wouldn't sometime in the near future though.
Keep the faith!

2007-04-05T22:18:00.000-04:00

There is a new status update on aros.org, so check it out! There is a lot of cool stuff going on in AROS. There was a time where AROS happenings were a little slow, but those days are gone.

I have some big news that I should have already posted about, but I'm two days behind on this one. Phase 1 of the Installer bounty had been accepted by Neil Cafferkey! As you can see by the bounty description, this one would really improve AROS. I think after this is completed you will hear many talking about their native installations and what kind of machines they are running AROS on!

Jahc is working on porting his popular Amiga IRC client Wookie Chat over to AROS. He is receiving some errors he doesn't quite understand right now. He needs an AROS Developer to help him. He prefers help while in IRC. I think it is cool that he has decided to port Wookie Chat to AROS. We have the native AROS IRC clients AiRcOS and ARIRC on the way, but other options are always welcome. It gives users more choices and it's always great to have developers wanting to port their applications to AROS.

Last but not least, the AROS wallpaper contest is booming right now! There are many new backgrounds in the gallery at aros-exec.org. There is still plenty of time to get into this contest, so fire up the graphics! We want to see more!

2007-04-02T21:31:00.000-04:00

There are a few updates I want to report, plus a few things happening you may not know about.

First, last week I mentioned Robert Norris' code for Frontier: First Encounters. This port is actually pretty far along. Nic "Kalamatee" Andrews has been working on scaling the windows for it. He said he might even add a fullscreen mode. According to Kalamatee it really needs two main things. It has no sound and it cannot load or save a game. We still need someone to give this baby some love. It is even playable right now. Here is a screen shot from Kal. It would be very cool to have this fully working, so contact Robert if you are interested.

The Decorations that have been enabled in the Nightly builds that I reported on a couple days ago are being optimized a bit. Darius has found an issue that is slowing things down a little and he plans to put a fix in very soon. I like that it is implemented and they are able to optimize it and keep it going. Everyone seems to really like it, including me!

Matthias "Mazze" Rustler has contacted Fabien about doing the MAME port for AROS. This would be another nice piece of software to have in AROS. Hopefully Mazze will have it running for us in the near future!

There is a lot of bounty action happening at Team AROS. Kalamatee has donated to start some graphics bounties. Plus, the installer bounty has been split up and I really think it outlines a better plan to greatly improve things for the Installer. We should see improvements quicker too.

I am still putting together some information for my tutorial on customizing the AROS shell prompt. I have also lined up two interviews! One is with the Founder/CEO of the company DiscreetFX. The other is with AROS graphician Damir "d980" Sijakovic. You will not want to miss these two!

2007-03-31T23:01:00.000-04:00

The decorations I posted about last month have finally made their debut in AROS! Darius Brewka has released them and Nic "Kalamatee" Andrews really helped last night by enabling them in the AROS Nightly build. So you can now download the latest Nightly build from http://www.aros.org and check them out yourself! They are enabled by default. The current theme available is called "Ice". The graphics for this was made possible by our very own Damir "d980" Sijakovic. The screenshot I posted this time is from me, showing the Ice theme in action. Be sure to notice the transparency on the menus.
Darius said he plans to write a small tutorial about how to create themes for the Decoration tool. In the near future, I have a feeling we will be seeing a lot of nice themes coming. This Decoration tool is fabulous and it gives AROS some eye candy that helps it shine! I'm all giddy that we get to enjoy it now!

2007-03-30T00:25:00.000-04:00

Fabien, a MorphOS Developer is looking for someone to port his latest MAME port to AROS. At one time AROS had a port of MAME, but it is obsolete now. This new version of MAME would really be nice to have in AROS. Fabien is in the #aros channel on irc.freenode.net a lot. He goes by Fab1 there. Please contact him if you are interested in doing this.

Michal Schulz is still wanting people to test the new USB stack. He has updated his blog recently stating this and giving more detail.

I have been playing with some customization of my AROS shell and prompt lately. I plan to post a little tutorial on this very soon.

2007-03-27T13:45:00.000-04:00

Mithrandir has released a new alpha version of AROSAmp! This new version includes skinning. How sweet is that? If you ask me, it is very sweet! This version is AROSAmp 0.20 Alpha. It can be downloaded at the AROS Archives. You can also visit the AROSAmp home page. Mithrandir would like people to heavily test AROSAmp and let him know of any bugs that are found. He is known as Tom_Kun in the #aros IRC channel. He is also writing a skinning tutorial. This will really help all of those great graphic artists out there to make some cool skins. It is great to see another fine application started and shining in AROS.

2007-03-25T22:42:00.000-04:00

There have been quite a few happenings around AROS land lately. Let's start off by mentioning the new AROS Wallpaper Competition. AROS is in need of a Wanderer background to use for the Nightly builds. So a contest has been started to give graphic artists out there a great way to contribute. The rules are posted on AROS-exec here. Paolone has already entered the contest with a spring, summer, autumn and winter version. You can download them here.

Robert Norris is offering his code for a port of John Jordan's Frontier: First Encounters. A replacement executable for the game Frontier: First Encounters. He posted in the forum on AROS-exec.org explaining more about this port. If you are a fan of the game Elite, this is a piece of that series. They were a lot of fun to play and a port to AROS would fit perfectly! With Robert offering a good start on the port, this is an offer someone should take advantage of.

I am still working on porting the newest version of Python into PyAROS. I am a beginner at porting, so it's taking awhile. I have been receiving help from Mazze and Blacky Stardust. They have been my Jedi Porting Masters, while I'm just a young Porting Padawan. I want to thank those two, they have provided me with very good information and they have been very patient. The current PyAROS is based from the 2.2.1 version of Python. I have recently downloaded that version and ran a diff command to compare that version with PyAROS. I took this patch and applied it to the new version of Python, which is 2.5. When doing this, I directed the output into a file. I looked at the file to see how many rejections it had. There were so many, I didn't even count them. My plan now is to gradually go through the rejections one by one and try to manually make the changes. So, needless to say, it will take awhile. I'll keep working on it.

Our friends at DiscreetFX LLC are sponsoring an Amiga Game Creation Contest. They are offering $1000.00 for a three level demo of a platform game starring Hottie. The winner will get a chance to complete the game and release it on Amiga OS 4.0, MorphOS, AROS, and other gaming systems. Check out the announcement at Amiga.org. I think this is really cool of them to sponsor something like this. I hope it turns out well and I definitely want to see it running in AROS. Good luck guys!

2007-03-22T00:03:00.000-04:00

Pavel "Sonic" Fedin Interview

Hello Pavel, thank you for doing an interview for the AROS Show.
Hello. Nice to talk to you.

Could you tell us a little about yourself and how you became interested in Amiga's and AROS?
I always liked alternative systems. Since 90s I worked on ZX-Spectrum. Then in 1999 I've got my Amiga 1200. A long time passed since that, now I have a Pegasos-2 and also an old PC laptop. I learned about AROS somewhere near 2004. I liked an ability to turn any machine into Amiga-compatible system. Especially this relates to laptops.

How long have you been coding for AROS?
For AROS - not really long.

What work have you completed for AROS up to this point?
My AROS equipment is rather old so first thing I do is making the OS compatible with my equipment. Previously I've implemented PCI configuration mechanism 2 support (this was needed for an old Dell Pentium-1 desktop PC I had before the laptop), several months ago I've fixed a drive detection delay in ata.device - now it works on my laptop without problems.
However, the recent work is a major thing - I've implemented VESA v1 support in the VESA graphics driver.

What AROS specific projects are you working on now?
Currently I am completing my VESA v1 work by adding a support for 256 colour mode (my laptop's screen doesn't allow more). Also I am rewriting AmiCDROM filesystem in order to add Joliet support with complete localization. This is almost done.

Were you working on other programming projects before you found AROS?
I've tried to do something for Amiga but this was mainly educational stuff. I wanted to complete two large projects - an audio player and an upgrade for Multiuser filesystem on Amiga. However that stuff was never finished.
I've also made several GeekGadgets ports like Joe text editor and a new version of Midnight Commander. Both of them are availible for AmigaOS and MorphOS.
Near 2003 i went into OpenSource community and there I've discovered that I can do more. Joining an existing project is much better than starting my own one from scratch. I was able to add a functionality into well known large programs. So I've added character sets support into NewsCoaster newsreader and AWeb web browser - the first Amiga web browser which was able to correctly show all russian text.
My current large projects are MOSNet - a TCP/IP stack, and Fireworks - an IEEE1394 stack. Both of them are currently developed on MorphOS however when AROS is running well on my laptop I'll port them to AROS too. MOSNet is a stable working project, Fireworks is in the beginning stage.
One more piece of my work which is going to AROS is trackdisk.device for MorphOS. In fact it's a heavily bugfixed and advanced port from AROS and now i'm going to backport it because I don't know how long I will stand those drive clicks.

Can you explain more about your Extended parallel.device API?
This API actually allows to use the parallel port as a general-purpose I/O port. Every signal can be controlled separately. Parallel port is very popular in electronics world for connecting JTAG adapters, EPROM programmers, various controllers, relays, etc. I am currently developing a driver for MorphOS which uses this API and a PIC programming suite using this driver. In fact the driver is finished, the PIC programmer too, they just need testing before the release. In future I plan to add a support for PCI add-on I/O cards to the driver for those who are afraid to destroy an onboard port during some experiment. Of course this work will be availible for AROS too.

Could you tell us more about the VESA v1 Support you recently released for AROS?
After an attempt to write S3 video driver I realized that I don't have enough time to do it. In addition there was a possibility to change the hardware and actually throw this work away (this is what happened when I moved to a laptop). Also there were some other people with old equipment. That time I already worked on porting BootX - a MacOS X bootloader to a Pegasos platform. The problem was that Pegasos firmware works in text mode and the MacOS X kernel expects graphical one. So I had to learn more about VESA and VGA graphics internals. After learning all this and inventing several tricks to make graphical mode working, I came to an idea that I can implement support for PCI video cards with VESA v1 in AROS and this will be even more useful than a specific driver for a specific chip at the moment.

There hasn't been much talk about the shell environment for AROS. You performed some necessary fixes to the shell commands for a bounty. What are your thoughts about the shell in AROS? Do you think it needs any other improvements?
First it needs bugfixes I beleive. During porting I noticed comments here and there about problems with softlinks. When I'll port my stuff I'll perform builds on AROS natively. And of course I'll fix all bugs I find.

You are the author of MOSNET, a TCP/IP stack for MorphOS. Have you worked with the TCP/IP stack in AROS? Do you plan to do any work in this area for AROS?
MOSNet is based on AROSTCP. Of course I have plans to build MOSNet for AROS. v1.4 waits until AROS works on my machine, it will be released for both platforms. Also it will contain a native inetd (too many requests) and miami.library will have more functions implemented.

Are there any other future projects you plan to develop for AROS?
IEEE1394 stack and complete support for my laptop's hardware. This will involve ess1688 audio card AHI driver and PCMCIA support. However it's far future for now, I'm rather busy.

Are you planning other projects for MorphOS?
Not yet. I'm busy with current ones.

In what way is programming for MorphOS different than programming for AROS?
Very little.

What other non-AROS projects are you currently working on, if any?
I am going to boot up MacOS X PowerPC on the Pegasos natively. Don't have time to give a large progress right now, however. A bootloader, BootX, is done and works. However the kernel hangs after startup and says nothing. I beleive i've messed up something with memory relocation in BootX.

In your opinion, what feature could greatly improve AROS at this point?
A fully functional desktop with integrated file management, like Directory Opus 5. I really miss it. Even at work on PC I've installed Opus v6, anything else seems very limited and disfunctional to me.

What applications would you like to see available for AROS?
A web browser and an office suite compatible with MS Office.

Do you use any other operating system? If so, what type?
Debian Linux Sarge Stable v3.1r00 on both PowerPC and x86. This is what I'm compiling AROS under.

How did you initially develop your programming skills?
Bought a ZX-Spectrum in ~1997.

What programming languages do you know and what is your favorite?
My favorite is C. Also I know PHP, C++ of course, a bit of Perl, m68k assembler, Z80 assembler (from the past). A bit of PPC and x86 asm (can read the code).

Do you plan to learn other languages? If so, which ones?
C#. This is needed at my work.

How many Amiga's have you owned and what models?
I owned an A1200 and it passed a long way until 2004 when it was replaced by Pegasos. I started from a plain A1200 without a hard drive and finished with 1200+BlizzardPPC+64 RAM + IDEFix97 in a self-modified PC bigtower. Then I migrated to a Pegasos-II with G3 CPU. After a year it was upgraded to G4 - this was a support from BBRV, thanks to them.

Do you currently own any Amiga's?
A classic Amiga - no. My space at home doesn't allow me to hold many machines.

Are you interested in Amiga OS4 at all?
Don't know what to tell here, my opinion is split up. At the one hand it's nice to see that someone develops something, and it's just interesting by itself. At the other hand their politics seems very aggressive to me, they tend to "close up" their community and ditch everyone else. This is not a good approach in non-Windows world In my honest opinion, such a things live only until they are as free as possible. And what do we have there? I remember a story with OS4Emul by Ilkka Lehtoranta. Instead of saying "Wow, they need our apps, it's good", they started to implement anti-os4emu protection. The project was closed under these conditions. All of my development is OS4-friendly, all source codes are open and OS4 world is free to adopt any of them. However there's no interest yet.

2007-03-21T18:18:00.000-04:00

A new status update has been posted on AROS.org. The big news today is Michal Schulz releasing the alpha version of the USB stack. We really need people to put this through some testing, so Michal can improve the code where needed. The status update covers this.

There is also mention of Nic Andrews improving AROSTCP and he has commited the VIA Rhine driver. Nic is also asking for people to test this new driver if they have a Rhine network card.

Last, but not least, Pavel Fedin is still working on improved VESA modes. The AROS Show will be posting an interview with Pavel VERY soon, so watch for it!

2007-03-18T22:52:00.000-04:00

Marco van den Heuvel Interview
aka Blacky Stardust

Can you tell us a little about yourself? By the way, is Blacky your real name?
My real name is Marco, but my nick on irc and even before I got on the internet (when I was still programming on the good old c64) is and was blacky. My interest in computers and programming started when I got a c64 for my birthday. I spent alot of years programming intro's and demo's for the c64.

One day a friend of mine got a new computer, I went over to look at it and got blown away by the sound and images I saw. It was an a500, and I was hooked, I had to have one, so I bought me one ;)

The best years of my life and the best memories I have now are from the time playing and programming on the Amiga.

When the time arrived that the software producers moved away from the Amiga and onto the PC I decided to buy a PC, and that's where I am at right now.

Since you focus your work around the VICE project, could you explain more about it?
VICE stands for Versatile Commodore Emulator, it emulates the old 8-bit Commodore computers like the c64, c128, vic20, plus4, pet and cbm2 models. It is free software and available for alot of platforms. The aim of the project is to provide a cycle exact emulation of those computers and their expansions/peripherals.

What made you decide to join the VICE project?
About 3 years ago a program called PSID64 caught my attention. PSID64 is a tool that converts a sid file to a c64 program, to be played on either a real c64 or emulator. I was wondering if I could make tools that could convert sid files to the other 8-bit commodore computers. I came up with a collection of tools called PSIDCBM, consisting of programs that could do the same thing as PSID64 except for the other 8-bit commodore computers (PSID128, PSID20, PSIDPET, PSID16, PSID510, PSID610...etc).

I used VICE to develop the player code and test the conversion results. I found that the stereo sid in the cbm2 emulator in VICE was not done properly. I decided to look into the source code and fix it myself. I sent in the patch to the VICE team and they made it part of the source code.

The idea that I could improve an emulator and add extra features to it was very appealing, so I decided to make support for more hardware expansions and sent in the patches. After I sent in several patches they asked me if I would like to join their maillist. After fixing even more things and adding even more support they asked me if I would like to become part of the core team, and I accepted that invitation.

When did you decide to bring VICE to AROS?
In the beginning of 2006 I learned about the existance of the AmigaOS4 port done by Mathias Roslund. I was curious to see what changes were needed to make VICE run on AmigaOS4, so I downloaded the changed source and was very impressed with the AmigaOS4 code. I also noticed that the directory structure was quite a mess and that just the Makefiles were adapted and configure didn't work anymore. I contacted Mathias and offered to clean up the directory structure and fix the configure to work correctly for AmigaOS4 compiling, and he accepted my help.

After fixing the AmigaOS4 port I wondered if the same source could be compiled for the other Amiga based/derived systems. I started with the AmigaOS3 port, because I would be able to test the resulting binaries on UAE. To my surprise it was quite easy to port VICE to AmigaOS3, and had the port running within a day.

The next port I tried was the MorphOS port. I came across a problem though, because both the AmigaOS4 and AmigaOS3 ports were using P96 as their graphics system, and MorphOS used the CGX graphics system. I went to #morphos on freenode and asked around for some help. Itix came to my rescue and helped me with the CGX support, and I had the MorphOS port up and running a few days after that. Piru from the same irc channel provided alot of improvements and fixes.

The next port I decided to try was the AROS port. the porting went quite good and fast, but the emulator window's graphics didn't show up, it remained gray. I decided to join #aros on freenode and ask around for help. Kalamatee was nice enough to guide me into the right direction and modified some of the graphics code, with his help I got the AROS port up and running.

Besides AROS, what other VICE ports are you involved with?
When I first joined the VICE team I had no particular ports that I maintained. But currently I maintain the msdos, QNX 6.x, solaris (intel/sparc), minix, ppc-BeOS and OS/2 ports by myself. I work together with other people (co-maintain) on the AmigaOS3, AmigaOS4, MorphOS, AROS(intel/ppc) and GP2X ports. Recently I have been updating/fixing the intel-BeOS port. That port does have a maintainer but because of me offering to provide the binaries I have been building/maintaining that port for the last 2 releases. The maintainer of the RISC OS port has decided to quit the project and I have stepped up to maintain that port as well.

I learned alot from all the ports and things I've done, and I'm still learning more. I'm having fun making the new features and it's even more fun to see people enjoy/use what I help make.

How many people are working with the VICE project?
On the VICE website it states that there are 11 core members but we also get patches from outside of the core team, and we get patches from contributors on the mailing list. So the VICE project is really a team effort, and I don't mean just the core team.

What are the future plans for VICE?
There is a TODO list in the VICE documentation, and that is the general goal of VICE. But my motivation or goal for VICE is to make it function as close to the real machines as it can get, and support as many of the existing expansions for the machines as it can. Trying to become (or be) the best commodore emulator out there ;)

You mentioned in the AROS IRC channel there might be a browser that people could use within VICE. Did you find more information about it? What browser is it?
This was more of a joke when I was saying it, because the others were saying that there was no browser for AROS yet and I saw a web browser for the c64 some days before.

The c64 browser I saw is at http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id=30400

The platform that VICE runs on would need pcap support to be able to run this browser, and as far as I know AROS doesn't have this support yet. When pcap becomes available for AROS I will definatly activate the c64/c128 rrnet/tfe support for the AROS port.

Besides coding for VICE, what types of things do you use VICE for?
Playing games naturally ;)

But I also use it to code 6510 assembly and make programs that seem challenging, like for example my pet basic emulator for the c128 using the vdc display.

What are your thoughts on AROS in general?
I am extremely impressed by how far this project has come, and the activity and progress seems to only be speeding up. I admire the people involved in it and I like the way that the Amiga OS will never die this way and will only grow.

Is there a particular application you would like to see available for AROS?
Yes, bash ;)

This so we can do compiling on native AROS and don't have to cross compile everything.

What is your favorite classic computer and why? Commodore 64 or Amiga or something else?
My favorite classic computer would be the Amiga, the memories that I hold dearest are of the days that the Amiga was THE computer to own.

My second favorite would be the c64, it is after all the computer that sparked all I have done programming-wise.

What operating system do you use for developing?
It all depends on the what I am programming for. I like to experiment with all kinds of different operating systems to expand my knowledge and broad understanding of what is possible. So I use amigaos, linux, *bsd, windows, aix, solaris, minix, syllable, beos, zeta, qnx, openserver, unixware, ultrix, os/2, tru64, mint, dos, classic macos, macosx/darwin, openvms, plan9, inferno...etc ;)

The things that can be cross-compiled I do on cygwin, things that can only be natively compiled I use the actual operating system for.

Are you working on any other projects besides VICE?
At the moment, no. The ideas that I still have for VICE will take up most of my spare time for quite some time. But things can always pop up that catch my interest and if I feel the urge to code something I will most certainly do it.

How did you develop your programming skills?
Most of my programming skills are self-taught, when I come across a problem I try to see if I can find information on the internet about it. This usually results in me having a better understanding of the problem and the solution and wind up expanding my programming skills.

When programming, a logical mind is a requirement. Example code is also very handy when stuck on a certain problem.

What programming languages do you know and what is your favorite?
I know 6510, 680x0, 80x86 assembly, C, C++, shell-scripting, arexx, basic, pascal, fortran, prolog, cobol, forth, a little bit of java, python and perl. My favorite language would be C, most of what I have coded is done in C, it's portable and flexible.

Do you plan to learn other languages? If so, which ones?
Right now I don't have the urge to learn any new languages.

What do you think of the AROS community since you have been involved in it?
I am impressed, and impressed how it keeps growing. I see people coming into #aros wanting to do something for AROS. I see things going the right way and I am glad that I'm able to see it all evolve. I am glad to be around people who want to keep the Amiga OS alive and feel like I do. I'm also glad that the people on #aros are friendly enough to have the occasional jokes and fun with ;)

How many Commodore computers (including Amiga's) have you owned and what models?
I've had 2 c64's, 3 a500's, 1 cdtv, and an a1200. The a1200 was expanded to have an 68060, 6 harddrives (ide/scsi), 128mb of memory, scanner, printer, sampler, 4 disk drives, tape-streamer, dat-streamer and video digitizer.

Do you currently own any Commodore computers?
Technically I still own a c64, a cdtv and an a1200, but they are still in the netherlands with my brother (I live in the USA now), and I haven't bothered (yet) to have them shipped over here. The main reason for that might be because I'm scared they might get broken or lost on their way over here.

Have you used Amiga OS4 or MorphOS at all?
Nope. For VICE running on those platforms I rely on what people tell me when they test for me.

Is there anything at all you would like to add?
Not really, I hope I didn't get to long-winded at times ;)

Thank you Blacky! We love VICE!
Thank you for the honor of being considered for an interview.

http://www.viceteam.org/

2007-03-16T22:52:00.000-04:00

Amiga Future, one of the most popular Amiga magazines, will start posting the AROS Show interviews on their web site. Amiga Future is a German magazine, but has recently opened an English version of their web site. The AROS Show interviews will be posted there in the future. Of course they will still be posted here first. Andreas Magerl of Amiga Future said they currently do not have any German translators to translate the interviews to the magazine's native language, so they will only be available on the English side. If you are a German speaker who would be interested in translating the interviews from English to German, please let me know. Having AROS content posted on the Amiga Future site is important, because it gives AROS more well deserved exposure. It's a great magazine and I'm glad AROS can be apart of it in some way.

In other news, there has been a new Internet browser bounty description posted by Damocles at AROS-Exec.org. This one is more detailed and addresses some of the concerns of the community. Now all we need is someone to accept it and start working.

Today in IRC Michal Schulz informed us there would be an alpha version of the new USB stack available this weekend. This is a huge piece of the puzzle and it is wonderful to see it progressing.

2007-03-12T23:46:00.000-04:00

Damir "d980" Sijakovic sent me this retro style screen shot. It is one of the themes he is creating for the upcoming Decoration Tool for AROS. Darius Brewka is coding the Decoration Tool. Damir has also created the updated graphics you might have noticed on The AROS Archives. Damir continues to do great things for AROS and I am certainly a big fan of his work!

If you haven't heard, John Hedditch has taken on the EFIKA bounty. This involves porting AROS to the EFIKA board from Genesi. John is actually a physicist. He said, "I'm doing this in the hope of having a quiet Amiga-like machine to use at home ( I had an A1200 for years and missed Workbench and DOPUS5 terribly when I eventually switched over to Linux).". You can check out his personal web site here. The AROS community welcomes John and wishes him the best of luck.

2007-03-10T14:15:00.000-05:00

A new version of VICE has been released today! Version 1.21 is now available for download from the AROS Archives and from the VICE web site. Both PPC and x86 versions are available. Blacky Stardust has worked on the AROS port. He works on almost every port of VICE. Currently he maintains the MSDOS, QNX, Solaris(Intel/Sparc), BEos (Intel/PPC), Zeta, AmigaOS3 / AmigaOS4 / MorphOS / AROS(x86/ppc) / WOS/PUP, Minix, OS/2 and GP2x ports. Blacky states that the main work on VICE for Amiga based systems was done by Mathias (amidog)Roslund. He says Amidog created the version for AmigaOS4. Then Blacky ported Amidog's port to AmigaOS3, MorphOS and AROS, and improved his port and added missing UI elements. He says in a way, Amidog and him both maintain the Amiga ports. Blacky has been responsible for most of the hardware emulation additions too, like (MMC64, Digimax, PET REU, SID Cart for PET/Plus4/VIC20).

Another recent addition to AROS is Matthias "Mazze" Rustler's AROS Archives Download Tool. He took advantage of his port of Wget and wrote an AmiLua script so you can easily download files from the AROS Archives.

2007-03-06T20:01:00.000-05:00

Some major progress updates have happened since I posted the status update. Michal Schulz has posted on his blog that he is back coding on AROS now and has made some progress with USB.
Rob posted on his blog also. He has placed his packet code into the AROS SVN. Developers have been testing it and I've heard nothing but positive things about it on IRC and on the mailing list.
It is good to see the updates. Keep up the good work guys!

2007-03-03T20:28:00.000-05:00

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!

2007-02-27T22:26:00.000-05:00

There are two AROS bounties that I would like to concentrate on in this post. One is something that every member of the Amiga inspired community dreams of and one has the highest dollar amount of AROS bounties. The two bounties are "Port of MOS KHTML engine" and "Port AROS To EFIKA".

There has been some discussion about the bounty for Lynx being canceled. I have to agree with this decision. I would much rather have a better solution for web browsing. Lynx would be just a temporary solution, in my opinion. I think if the effort is going towards something like this, it might as well be a better solution. One of the solutions brought up is Sputnik. (I love the name, by the way) Sputnik is a web browser that is based on KHTML from the KDE project. As mentioned in this interview, it is more specifically based on a browser for S60 devices by Nokia. Sputnik is being developed by Marcin 'Marcik' Kwiatkowski. Right now he is working heavily on the MorphOS port. He has mentioned if the bounty for the AROS port reaches $1000, he would consider doing it. I seriously think if we want a good browser running in AROS we need to take advantage of this offer. If it takes throwing the money from the Lynx bounty into it, then I think it needs to be done. There is still plenty of time to donate to this bounty, because Marcik will be tied up awhile longer with the MorphOS port. If the bounty could be reached without using the Lynx bounty money, then it would be even better, because that means other well deserved bounties would get it. So if you have the money and you want a good browser for AROS, please donate it to the "Port of MOS KHTML engine". You can also see screenshots of Sputnik at the bottom of the interview at http://www.ppa.pl/khtml/index_en.php. The interface definitely needs an artist's touch, but I'm sure Marcik has plans for that once the browser is ready for prime time.

I wanted to mention the "Port AROS To EFIKA" bounty because of a few reasons. First, some good money is being donated to it. Second, I wanted to highlight it so more people would understand what it is. Third, I think it would make a very cool AROS machine. The EFIKA has just recently been manufactured by Genesi. They are known for bringing us the PegasosPPC. The length of the EFIKA is not much longer than a pen. It is tiny, but mighty! Even with only 128MB of RAM, it should run AROS extremely well. Heck, AROS should fly on this baby! They have just now started designing cases for the EFIKA. Check out these pictures here and here. The latter is a full solution and runs $499. It looks like the board itself is running $199 straight from Genesi. This would be an inexpensive solution for a brand new stand alone AROS computer in the future. The AROS bounty is rising on this and is the highest bounty right now. But I think it will take more funds before somebody actually starts working on this one. Only time will tell.

2007-02-23T20:24:00.000-05:00

When I first saw this screen shot I thought it was just a mock-up. I'm sure many people thought the same. But this is not a mock-up, this is the real thing! I repeat, this is NOT a fake!

Darius Brewka has worked hard on this and achieved fantastic results. He tells me this is a special AROS kernel. He said he has discovered some issues that need to be resolved before he can officially release it. He recently told me he still needs to fix some issues, but has been fixing some Zune parts like scrollers to make them more stylish. I don't know about you, but I cannot wait for Darius to complete this so we can all have totally wicked AROS desktops!

M0ns00n has forked AiRcOS to streamline it more for irc. This will leave the current AiRcOS alone to go in whatever direction Kalamatee had envisioned. M0ns00n calls this new fork ARIRC. He has been working with the GUI and has been testing it almost everyday
in the #aros channel on irc.freenode.net. This will be a very nice application when it is a little further along. It has a lot of potential and will really be useful. I plan to use it myself.

2007-02-15T22:53:00.000-05:00

According to Rob's latest blog post, he is making great progress on the DOS packet bounty. Here is a small quote from the post.

"For the uninitiated, this is the debug output from FATFileSystem as it mounts a ten-megabyte image created under Linux with mkfs.vfat and made available to AROS via fdsk.device. It seems to be correctly reading the image, which means my replacement block code is correct, and the handler is happy doing its own thing."

This is really good to see and I know a lot of people will be thrilled to see this. Keep hacking away Rob!

In other news, the latest Status Update has been posted on AROS.org. It is brief and mentions the drag'n'drop issues in AROS.

"Just a little status update to announce that initial drag'n'drop issues in AROS native have been fixed. Wanderer is now almost fully functional and doesn't crash anymore when copying files from a window to another. A progress window, to keep track of operations, has been added too.

All of the new features are already available in latest nightly builds (but not in current snapshot), so we suggest everyone interested in trying AROS to download last night's build."

I heard news that Mithrandir is still coding away at AROSAmp too. He is working on making it fully skinnable. I hear it is looking amazing. More news coming about that as soon as I know more.

2007-02-11T22:10:00.000-05:00

Allanon has released the first alpha release of his SDB Database Engine. A few months ago I posted an update on the Engine after e-mailing Allanon. You can check that out for even more information.
Allanon even included some documentation in this release. Here is the post he submitted in the news on AROS-exec.org.

"The first alpha version of the SDB Engine is finally out. It's available in two packages, the first one is a classic zip archive with the engine and all the needed files within, while the second option is a bootable iso derived from the 07.02.2007 AROS Nightly Build with the engine pre-installed, ready to be tested without touching your hard disk!

The engine is released with 8 tutorials that will help (I hope) to understand how it works; they are configured to work on Ram Disk.
Remember that it's an alpha release so use at your own risk!

You can download SDB from the main site.

Have fun!
...and let me know what do you think!"

2007-02-09T09:21:00.000-05:00

Just a quick post here. If you haven't been checking out Rob's blog, do so. He is working away at dos packet stuff and he is documenting his progress quite well. I have the link over on the right navigation too. Check it out!

2007-02-03T22:41:00.000-05:00

M0ns00n releases Lunapaint v0.3.1! I should have posted about this a few days ago when M0ns00n actually released this, but I got pulled five different directions and did not get a chance. So I apologize.

I am really impressed with the work M0ns00n has put into this application. He should be very proud of his work. This is a very exciting application for AROS and I'm glad M0ns00n is a dedicated AROS programmer. His energy is infectiously inspiring!

M0ns00n plans to make the next release of Lunapaint open source. This will make it easier for others to port it to Amiga OS4 or Morph OS. M0ns00n posted an interesting comment about this on Amiga.org. I've quoted it below.

"Lunapaint will be a nice mix between TVPaint and DPaint on Amiga and something extra - modern features but without the bloat. I'm a graphician myself, so I'm working constantly with improving the GUI so it doesn't get in my way.

The next release I'm making is gonna be open source, so after that, people will be able to sign up to the sourceforge site and join in to port it to OS4 and OS3.9 or MorphOS.

The app is gonna be all free - it is important to have such a tool on the Amiga platform so that we can get more demos and games and art all in all! Amiga was a lot about art, so.

Amiga is now a platform like Unix. On Unix, you have Linux, BSD and Solaris etc. On Amiga, you have MorphOS, AmigaOS and AROS. We can coexist and should share our developments to guarantee a future for this way of thinking. Apps like Lunapaint is gonna give the odds some boost I hope."

You can download the new version at the AROS Archives. You can also check out the Lunapaint homepage here: http://www.sub-ether.org/lunapaint/

Here is the changelog:

* Fixed: Reworked intuition menu a bit
* Fixed: Some logic when using sliders and buttons in the toolbox
* Fixed: Now you can click outside ASL requester w/o crash
* Fixed: Faster painting with some optimalizations
* Fixed: Toolpreview/artifaces from tools don't stay when scrolling
* Fixed: Made floodfill use 24-bit presicion instead of 64 (for pixellers)
* Fixed: Filling over erased areas works
* Fixed: A problem with non antialiased brushes leaking
* Fixed: Speed optimalization in all blending routines (and elsewhere)
* Fixed: Leaks with project saving/loading (no more!)
* Fixed: Checks file header if it's a lunapaint project (no more crash)
* NEW: Saving of first primitive layer objects
* NEW: Start of deluxePaint-like keyboard shortcuts (feel at home!)
* NEW: Render text to brush buffer with freetype 2
* NEW: Z rotation of brushes
* NEW: Layer opacity controls, names
* NEW: Layer drawing shows alpha and layer names / opacity / visibility
* NEW: Canvas drawing is asyncronous when it is benefitting from it

Keep up the great work M0ns00n!