Again a post "in progress" - so much to write and so little time, so please come back often to see how is it going :)

When i started this article,two weeks were already gone from the appearance of AROS at SCALE;  as i mentioned in the previous blog article, had finally been able to render the animation and upload it in vimeo; lately the Amiga landscape in some way emerged once again in a more mainstream environment due to several events:

first of all, the appearance of AROS in more medias than usual; the march and april issues of the PCLinuxOS magazine host a quite comprehensive review of Icaros Desktop splitted in four parts and written by Darrell 'DJohnston' Johnston; the dissertation starts with explaining how to install AROS using HdToolbox for partitioning your disk - giving also a very detailed insight on how HDToolbox works, pretty needed since the power of the tool and the usual advice from developers and Paolone not to use it unless you know how to - problem is even those Amiga users that used it in the past might have forgot; the article series goes on in installing Icaros, in examining the preference panels, the bundled software, including OWB and janus-UAE and, finally, in doing a general errata corrige and clarification about some mistakes of the last three parts and a fast glimpse at Broadway.

You can give it a look more in particular from those links:

Part 1 - Introduction to AROS, Icaros and installation

Part 2 - A fast overview of Wanderer

Part 3 - More Wanderer and an overlook at the bundled software

Part 4 - Errata Corrige, Janus-UAE and a glimpse of AROS Broadway

[AROS on techradar and PCLinuxOS magazine]

[the work on KS integration II]
[Workbook - a wanderer lite]
[and the work on ABI v1]
The focal point of this article is, though, the ongoing work in the ABI v1 that is actually made mostly by Staf Verhaegen; we already know  that is a very important and time consuming task, that will redefine the binary interface for AROS programs and that will break all actual AROS software, that will need to be recompiled to work again;
on sunday march 20 Staf announced a milestone for its work:

Hello AROS devs,

I am happy; the ABI V1 branch is compiling and running on top of main
trunk of only a few days old.

Before I will branch for ABI V1 I will still merge some changes from the
branch in main trunk that don't have a ABI impact.

When that is finished it is time to branch; hopefully in a week or two.
Do the m68k want to finish something before branching or is it still the
faster the better ?

From this mail a good amount of discussion arise; the main topic were mainly about whether continue development jointly for both the ABI_v0 (the actual old AROS ABI
as you can understand that will be a problem


[Kalamatee works again on new Wanderer]
Guess somebody still remember when in 2009 Nik "Kalamatee" Andrews started to work on the overhaul of Wanderer, with the idea to make it become modular and extensible via a plug-in system; the work was interrupted one year due to serious problems with the AROS graphic subsystem of the time;

Nei cafferkey, beside being actually busy with the wireless bounty, where is actually working on adding the support to the Realtek 8167 chipset for USB wireless sticks (that will also be extended in future for Realtek cards), is also working on improving the VESA driver; some improvements to some graphic.library routines have been made by Deadwood in order to accelerate the rendering of transparent images in themes, that gave performance problems to wanderer, especially on 68k;  in march also performance problems made [look who] review the png datatype behaviour; in this te contribution of Bernd Roesch in finding an excessive amount of calls toward the png.datatype especially on 68k helped to nail the issue;
 
[profiles on AROS Broadway]

[AROS aspire distro]

Nikos Tomasidis is already well known in the AROS environment as main beta tester; however its commitment for AROS recently reached an higher level of involvement in delivering the first netbook-optimized AROS distro: 

[Mschulz and Sonic modularize AROS kernel]

[the SONIC bomb]
Another topic that i want to talk about is the mail that Pavel "Sonic" Fedic sent to the developer mailing last last April first; despite the date, the content was indeed serious; the talk was about the elf binary format structure, and about memory consumption; i seen Michal Schulz doing experimentation with the memory allocator in the last march, i knew about the experiments of Pavel porting AROS on IOS and i knew about the modularization of the kernel and the rework of the graphic subset; however seeing this paragraph from Pavel in my opinion officialise this:

ET_exec is not appropriate for AROS because it's non-relocatable snapshot of address space. Yes, we actually can relocate it, provided that we keep relocs in the output (using -q option), and relocation is even simpler in this case (adding a fixed offset to all absolute addresses), but there is another issue: section alignment.

ELF suggests that different sections (code and data) have different memory access rights. code is read-only and data are not executable. This implies that these sections are aligned to memory page borders.

In order to match different page sizes (4KB, 8KB, 16KB, etc), linker uses "common page size", which is 64KB. This means that there are empty 64KB between code and data in the file. It does not occupy space on disk, because it is encoded in section offsets. It also does not occupy space in memory on UNIX (where address space is virtual, it simply misses that portion), but it would occupy these 64KB if loaded on AROS, where memory has 1:1 mapping.

Yes, we could shorten this size, for example to 4KB, but can we have problems, especially on hosted AROS? Can there be host OSes using larger than 4KB pages? If so, this will mean that we can't correctly work on these OSes.

This issue can be worked around if we split the file up section-by-section, in the same way as it is now. However in this case ET_exec is more difficult to handle than ET_REL, and has no advantages over current loader. It is more difficult because for ET_REL relocations implicit addends are destroyed, and we need to calculate them back.

What i described here implies that in future (not so far) AROS will have memory protection. I know how Michal and i will implement it, just it's not ready yet.

there is already a partial protection similar to the one in AOS-4 present in the x86/64 kernel and if i remember good in the efika port[verify - ask mschulz]; i don't know if this is a new rework or is a reprise of the work done in that occasion, though;


Well, is already known that talking about the actual state of Amiga-like OSes having memory protection implies some kind of sandboxing; i am not a kernel developer but the kernel modularisation though should provide the required elasticity for the system to support it, mean older systems probably will use different modules compared to newer ones and also i suppose that this also might make the older modules with no protection coexist in a sandboxed area so that any problems with that will not affect the system as a whole, but since i have no enough knowledge about how is really this is just my own conclusion; interesting to see that probably this post unchained a(nother) thread on AROS-exec here, where once again the topic is discussed, along with proposals and references from other sites;

saturday 2/26:

h 11 am:
After set kinda up properly the machines - sort of; am having problems with the big DELL that shows the movie; my presentation movie is not finished yet and premiere keeps crashing; when it happens AROS soft resets but then the mouse (usb on a ps2 adaptor) does no longer work and have to reboot

h 2:31 pm:
an annoying bug is having place with the nvidia version of the driver and the screen dragging: sometimes the windows ends up in the wrong screen; it happened with mplayer and amifig opened in a different screen and partially dragged;

h 2.44 pm:
interesting that had given  away 20 live cds and am running out of the brochures; for the cds have some more to butn but am running out of sleeves so am using paper sheets folded; the brochures i need a solution, hope somebody might give me a hand printing some of it; animation still incomplete, then there will be the biblical premiere rendering....

h 3:55 pm:
a cup of coffee and back ond track; finishing the animation, i decided to leave out some transitions to be able to finish the animation this evening, render it tonight and show it tomorrow; i tried to install supertuxcart 0.6.2 in the 7800 machine but am afraid there are some problems with the usb-ps2 mouse that start to jump anywhere once the game starts (no, i did not updated SDL);

h 5:00 pm:
less people than this morning now, so i can focus on finish the animation; the two most common questions are: 'what is aros' and 'can i run it in a VM'; people get also pretty surprised when i show that AROS is running on both machines from a small (for today's standards) stick; guess the self-driven and amateurish nature of my intervention is visible compared in example to the printed full color brochures and projector screen of the Haiku stand in the other side; guess they are much better organized than us, i am almost the only AROS supporter around here...

5:30 pm:
half hour to the closing for today of the exhibition; is interesting to see that a good amount of people is either curious of what is AROS or is still aware of the Amiga OS and they are glad it is still around;

5:58 pm:
almost wrapped it up for the day; i almost ran out of brochures and probably need to do some copies or ask someone to print it for me; will tihnk something for tomorrow; sunday; might be even more crowded ;)

Sunday 2/27:

h 10:45
I managed to make some other copies of the brochures, but this time single sided since the copies were expensive and was one of those annoying coin operated copiers; around 10:30 Jorge Mare of the Haiku stand passed by here and we talked about AROS; he was impressed on the speed of poseidon in recognizing the FAT-32 stick and in the new screen dragging on the GMA driver btw
Jorge is Argentino with italian grandparents and guess common roots helped on melt the ice;

- addendum -
It is interesting to see how many people is asking about the "Research" part of the name in AROS; in fact might be kinda ambiguous unless we came out with a better R part of the logo;

12:43pm
My wife joined me on the booth, at least until the two hours of free parking last; i almost ran out of brochures and live CDs again,, and had two invitations to talk; one from a computer science group on UCLA and another from a computer user group in the San Fernando Valley;


h 3:00 pm
Well am preparing myself to start dismantle; have a good amount of stuff to take out (my laptop, my wife netbook,the big fat DELL desktop, two LCD screens, speakers, a super woofer, power strip, the switch,an undisclosed amount of cables.=; the animation is virtually finished but the rendering comes out pretty crappy (blocks, dropped frames,etc) and i decided not to show it today; pity because i worked on it for almost three weeks but need to solve this last step; at least other people can use it for their introductions...

Two booths down there is the OpenShot video editor stand; i talked with one of the two developers and they told me the application is mainlt built in python using bindings to GTK and ffmpeg; i think if somebody starts to make MUI bindings for python like we have already for lua (siamiga/zulu)and ruby (zuby) it might come out something interesting... might we call a binding like that zupy?

h 4:30 pm
Seems they decided to dismantle the bvooths a bit earlier than expected, will lose the connection in few minutes, so better to go for now.

Later this evening:

So here i am at home, writing some afterthoughts: first of all let me tell you: i underestimated the cost and the commitments of having a booth at an open source convention; would love to do it again though if i find somce toto partner with since is very nice to share with others what you enjoy... have at least two persons that asked me to make talks on AROS and one company that i think is checking the feasibility to  use it in some projects; i overall gave away 40 live CDs and 120 brochures and for sure explained about aros to 30/40 people, many of those reminescent of the old Amiga; i personally think is important to show the existence of the project also in order to build some bridges.

My biggest complains are:
1) that haven't been able to get in touch with any other AROS user around; that might have been interesting also to create connections;
2) that the broadcomm gigabit ethernet is not ready yet to be used, else show the big desktop with OWB surely might have made things interesting;
3) that the animation gave me any sorta of problems; crashes in premiere, some videos with the wrong encoding, and that the final rendering was not usable at the end but i am trying to fix things and, once done, will upload it on Vimeo; can anticipate that features an appearance of Kitty, some titiling and some example from my recordings and, due to time constraints, from other AROS videos taken on youtube; I  want to thank the makers of those videos, that i listed in the end titles, and that i also shown on the booth.
4) that this year there was no buffet,just a coffee break saturday.

further addendum

I finally managed to render the animation and i uploaded it in vimeo; there i guess still some erorrs and not all transitions are set, but i guess it is already a start. Would really liked to have this ready and showing at SCALE, but guess will help other AROS evangelists out there.

Introduction to AROS v0.1 from simone bernacchia on Vimeo.

Last week I sent my papers for the 2011 SCALE intervention, and i also tried to apply for a booth; the good news is that very likely i got a booth at SCALE in name of AROS; the less good news is that am alone and have little adequate hardware to show (just my wife netbook and maybe my old laptop): so am calling for any volunteer AROS user that lives in Los Angeles Area/Orange County area or even San Gabriel Valley area if they are available to join me in hosting the booth at SCALE in february 25 to february 27 2011; the SCALE will be held this time at the LAX hilton and complimentary passes will be provided to me and who will do the expo with me.

If you want to help with the diffusion of AROS you can email me at the address provided with the present blog or get in touch via my facebook page, thanks.

Wanna keep it short and to the point this time.

Well, i still try to convince people to try AROS when life/wife/work does not go in the middle, but sometimes things have backfired on me; take in example some of the former Powder developers; some of them now are linux users and even involved in LUGs; the other graphic artist of the project is working on an iPhone Beach Marble Racing game;
OK, i don't expect them to drop everything and love AROS at first sight :P but, at least, give it a look: maybe the "feeling at home" sensation that entangled me might have effect on them too - and if they help in fixing stuff even better ;) - problem is that for them AROS has no sense: no practical sense; to repeat and translate the answer of one of those guys came out from a chat: "AROS is the answer to problems nobody has anymore", and he told me to use better my time since he consider this project useless.

The other ugly side of the fauna are the AROS haters; those people might be linked either to one of the remaining other three factions of the actual Amiga community,and they do not like AROS, they are not even satisfied of the recent progresses happening with the Kickstart Integration Bounties; AROS is not 'pure', is not 'holy coming from Commodore', does not have the Amiga name and - sacrilege! - it is open! Anybody can work on it and taint the code....

well, let me say those things to them: first of all the hobby is mine, i like AROS and like to meddle with it; i think it can evolve nicely and - despite the old school still insists on the 3.1 goal - i hope that once reached something similar to the version 1.0 new API and improvements will happen following the experiments of Michal Schulz on 64 bit and of Pavel 'Sonic' Fedic on the ongoing IOS hosted Port; and also hope that apps like the new Video Editor funded once again from Steve Jones will bring more users to it (and also to the other Amiga flavors of course);

second, lets be honest: right now AROS is the best chance for a modern and updated Amiga-like OS to run in old hardware and, once the bounty will be finished, to be used for homebrew projects that aim in recreating Amiga technology, such as Natami or Minimig, without the need to seek for external licenses. Probably right now AROS is a bit too heavy for original classic hardware - excluded 040/060 with RTG graphic cards - but optimisation is something will likely happen in future: there are still three months before the bounty deadline and, seen the results so far, i expect great improvements.
That is also the reason for Jason McMullan to come out with a further bounty proposal to create a "lite" version of Wanderer to be included in the 68k AROS ROM image; Toni is also working on the DOS packets and in the BCPL interpretation for the old 1.3 apps.

After at least three failed attempts (Evilrich and then Tigger, disappeared almost immediately,Greg 'bheron' Casamento - that had a good amount of bad luck and, very shortly, Gary 'Gaz' Pearman), finally the Kickstart integration bounty started to deliver results and code.

The latest person to get the task is called Jason McMullan; this time he started to submit patches for 68k ROM in the developers mailing list around the begin of october. In october 6, deadwood asked him what he was working on, and he answered:



Jason did not simply applied for the bounty: he worked on a proof of concept  achieving, thanks to the latest UAE developments that finally allowed amiga UNIX buiilds to run, the build of a debian image to be used for compiling AROS on 68k. From this point he begun to submit a big amount of patches for getting the AROS 68k version back on track using GCC 4.5.0.

Its plan is to first be able to compile AROS then, slowly, replace in ROM images original amiga libraries with AROS ones in order to obtain a bootable AROS rom; furthermore Jason thinks to include, together with AROS ELF file format, also Amiga Hunk format in order to obtain the binary compatibility with Amiga software.

Lately Jason is no more alone in working in the bounty, even Toni Wilen, one of the WinUAE team coders, started to work on the bounty helping Jason in setting up the rom, especially taking care of the amiga-only hardware device drivers; he announced its intention to help Jason in this letter in the developer mailing list on October 21st:



Before to go on, is better to remind: Why the Kickstart integration phase 1 and 2 are so important?

The integration bounty are important for a good serie of reasons: first of all, once the AROS 68k port will be completed, it also will include binary compatibility with the HUNK file format, and most of the existing amiga applications written according to the Amiga OS guidelines will work directly on AROS: that means is possible to use AROS in place of the original Amiga OS; unlike the original Amiga OS 3.x, AROS is actively developed and therefore there is the advantage of having new features and patches;

second, AROS is open source and free of charge, and a 68k version b inary compatible with Amiga programs will come out handy for all those alternate and homebrew projects that require Amiga OS compatibility without the need of an official Amiga ROM, names as Natami, UAE/WinUAE.J-UAE, Minimig and the FPGA Toaster-on-a-chip comes to mind;

third but not less important, the existence of an Amiga version of AROS has an emotional factor, binding to the original Amiga Replacement OS project of AAron Digulla - sort of the return home (Amiga Hardware) of the Prodigal Son (AROS) and will add even more legitimacy to the project form those people that so far were against AROS for the fact that does not run on Amiga Hardware; potentially can also add for some more developers that might decide in contribute for improve the compatibility and the performance, just as Tony Wilen did.

Today November second, Jason communicated another significant progress:



And today even better:


and the result is the boot image seen above; it is just AROS exec and the rest is Amiga routines but is a significant step forward!

Jason recommmended Tony Wilen for the assignment of the Phase 2 of the bounty since he has more experience in the Amiga OS hardware internals and is able to code effectively drivers. The outcome of this bounty are keeping mu attention level high nd am really excited to see the progresses!

Notice: since i have been really busy have little time to finish the other article;  now that have some moment available i think is important to mention those two good happenings in AROS land:

- first, saturday June 19 and 20, at the Vintage Computer Festival in Milton Keynes, was held the twentyfifth Amiga anniversary party; amiga users know about it because it also marked the first public appearance of the Amigaone X-1000, a new high-end machine with a dual core processor (even though at the moment Amiga OS can support only one); produced by Trevor Dickinson (an amiga aficionado and also estimator of AROS btw) in cooperation with Hyperion entertainment; a lot has been written about it on the Amiga Forums, in good andin bad, but my main focus is on the participation of ClusterUK development and its iMica stand, where Steve Jones proudly presented its range of AROS powered machines, inclusive of the new GMA950 drivers for intel graphic,written by Michal Schulz,  that grants a nice graphic performance boost. Myself tried the GMA driver on my favorite victim - my wife MSI netbook and my AROS stick some time ago and loved the fact that was running nicely in the external screen actually used by my old laptop; i tried to load a video and the experience was quite smooth and enjoyable; people can easily forget they are using a netbook. Among other initiatives of Steve, we also have the endorsement of the development of the Ganymede IDE - a new developing environment actually in progress made by Proto (dont know its real name sorry) - that should provide a more modern workflow under AROS; the project is commercial but, since Ganymede will be a quite high quality tool coded from scratch, guess developers might not be too bothered in spend some money on it. The interest of people towards the iMica stand, according to steve, was quite high; and was also nice to see younger people get interested in the Amiga technology.
Plus, an interesting twist is that BBC Click, one of the most important computer and technology TV shows in UK, interviewed Steve at the VCF; the interview was held by LJ Rich and will be aired on July 2nd; once a link will be available will be published in aros-exec. Interesting fact is that,according to Steve (since am not in UK and never seen the transmission so far), the show usually focus on consumer electronics and mainstream operating systems; so that appearing in a transmission like that is a sign of interest towards alternate platforms and an important occasion to show the existence to people normally quite oblivious to it.


- the second good news is that the eaudio.device, a wrapper for the Amiga Paula chip audio.device to AHI system calls has been open sourced by its developer, Emmanuele Cesaroni. This device, originally developed for MorphOS, will allow the port of several Amiga software that uses the standard audio.device for their output and operations and, plus, will also allow emumiga to output the audio.device calls. The device has been ported on AROS by Krzysztof "Deadwood" Smiechowicz just two days ago and for test he compiled an Amiga Chiptune player, that is actually working.

*new article in progress: come back often to check upgrades!*

May started today and, despite you see this article right now on line, i can assure you the stubs were here for a while, at least since the begin of april, while i was writing the "kitty on a stick" one; is good being again at work and then dedicate to the advocacy as hobby, people ends enjoying more the time that can spend on it.

April brought the second best good new of 2010: since April 14 AROS nightly builds are also available for SAM-440; this confirms AROS attitude in being a cross-platform Operating system; since Michal Schulz is still working also on the EFIKA port from last year, and when possible (due to its busy schedule with work and family) posts status updates so if you have an EFIKA and still are curious to test/develop on AROS, just hold tight because things looks good :)

[kalamatee fixes recursive self-copy bug, leave out/put away and starts list view]
Lately even Nik "Kalamatee" Andrews had finally time to work again on Wanderer: first he has been able to fix the infamous "self-copy bug" where dragging by mistake a folder on itself resulted in recursive copy of the folder inside itself,and inside itself and so on; plus, this is a fresh update, even the "leave out/put away" functions are finally implemented; it was possible to keep icons on the desktop editing the .backdrop file in the root folder, but now this should be no longer needed (and this also ends my idea of doing a zulu editor for the .backldrop file; well, guess is time to follow paolone's advice and start to build the GRUB config editor...)  - and, in the same aros-exec topic Kalamatee shown the first preview of the long-awaited list view for wanderer windows.

[how the fixed dopus works for me]
So last month Neil Cafferkey bundled the revised dopus code
[directoryopus.cfa]

[further contributions: a new brochure and oldschool pointers]
And, when possible





[Aros Broadway the Regina Rexx problems on AMC development]
Pascal "PhoenixKonsole" Papara is proceeding in the launch of its own ARES one machine; the route that he took to make it more interesting is to fully exploit the power of AROS of being open source and with a commercial-friendly license among its efforts we already know the contribution he made funding the port of Cinnamon Writer [link] to AROS, and now commissioning Fabio "Allanon" Falcucci some custom-made utilities for its own coming soon AROS distribution called Broadway.

From the same words written by PhoenixKonsole on the dedicated website, Broadway is "simple, elegant and f****** fast", and provides a personalised icon theme in black, the "black ice" window skin for the workbench and a probably provvisional but  matching wallpaper; in the software section we have  a nice work made by Allanon; the AMP or AROS Media Cenbter. Built using Hollywood, provides a  unique interface for the functions of audio and video player via AREXX interfacing with mplayer and arosAMP; this application will come out soon also for other Amiga OSes and, quite disappointingly, not yet for AROS due to a bug in AROS rexx implementation that prevent the integration between the media center and mplayer; instead, a so called "lite" version of AMC will be bundled that shows most of the features already working.

[picture of aros broadway and AMC here]



Pavel "Sonic" Fedic is still tinkering on modifying the Graphics.library of AROS; its personal purpose is to support multiple display ports, and in order to make this he made several changes to the graphics.library; those changes are quite strong and, together with the hopefully coming soon ABI v1.1, might force some developers to retouch and recompile some applications.
The work of Pavel has already brought us AROS windows hosted, the interactive pointer, screen dragging (for now on window hosted, hopefully soon everywhere) and an acceleration of the graphics subsystem; it is also idea of Pavel, in order to implement multiple displays, to have the chance of running several drivers at once,maybe even in different monitors; problem is that heis working on PPC hosted on Pegasos and he cannot test properly by itself the changes on native;

[AROS can read catweasel disks]
Among the AROS users we indeed have a good number of die-hard amigans (including myself) that found via AROS a way to revive their Amiga experience; Steve Jones contributed also in bringing drivers for the Catweasel to AROS; for who does not know, the Catweasel is a PCI controller that allows to drive amiga floppy drives making them readable from PCs and moder n devices; Steve posted a video on youtube where he shows how easy has become,also with the help of Amibridge and Janus-UAE, to launch games, applications and documents straight from the old Amiga floppies

[Michal and Cluster GMA driver and the new Silent iMica]
In order still to give the best user experience on its iMica machines, Steve jones commissioned to Michal Schulz a driver for the Intel GMA 945 cards

[ncafferkey repaired fat.handler]

[deadwood working in nouveau]

[ports from yannick: rdesktop and amifig]

[loView]

[how to make AROS a success - topic on a-e]

Even if the last post is not finished yet, i start this because a very important thing happened on AROS: Starting from March 9 nighty, AROS can be finally installed and boot from USB Sticks!

I wrote a basic tutorial on Arosworld.org on how to install using a simple 2GB stick. Despite an initial problem due to the fact that the stick was partitioned in two and one of the partitions was hidden, after I wiped it with a windows program called Hard Disk Wipe Tool, that can be downloaded at this link , i finally as able to install AROS on the stick. Of course I tried the stick in all the computers available at home: my usual old laptop, my new Dell Vostro and, this time, also my wife's netbook, a MSI Wind u100.


The old buggy USB controller of my old ASUS does not allow to boot from USB stick, and is just the next USB fault in a long list (it ever was unable to see any of the sticks and USB devices I tried on AROS since the early Michal Schulz's usb.device tests); my Dell Vostro behaves a bit better, though it will boot forkm the stick if the "USB Legacy Driver" option in the BIOS is on - but that means no external keyboard and mouse: weird huh?

The best of the bunch was the netbook: called affectionately "blacky" from my wife, the wedding gift  MSI Wind u100 started from the stick with no glitches once I selected the stick from the startup menu; most of the hardware is supported: the wired RTL8168 network card and the HDAudio chip works nicely; of course the only missing components from this heavenly are the wireless chip and the external screen output (about the latter one got no clue whether can be selected as main from BIOS, need to check) but was nicely surprised from the performance.

Further tutorials and details can be found in this screen collection made by DizzyOfCRN, that also made a movie of its Samsung netbook booting from stick here, and more in general in this thread on AROS-exec.

Furthermore, paolone started a poll about how should he structure and what software should he put in a stick-friendly version of Icaros; the poll can be accessed from its blog.

I was a bit concerned about the lack of update from the AROS show lately, plus was waiting  for the promised interview to Matthias "Mazze" Rustler and i decided to check the pulse on Paul Beel aka Novaburstfor when the new updates might come out; pity that the answe was not encouraging.

In short, Novaburst said that slowly with the time he lost "the spark" on talking about AROS and that lately he is pursuing different interests; he also added that, at least for now, he will not update The AROS show, this means that (hopefully momentarily) one of most interesting insight voices from what happens behind the community doots got silent; i have a debt with the work of Paul; its periodical writings gave me motivation in checking first then support AROS and start my advocacy and, following, this blog. Hope to read you again soon, Paul.

Talking one moment about Mazze, he recently ported Jabberwocky, a well known Jabber Instant messenger App; in this moment the source was made sync with mainstream so that further versions willbe out even for AROS.

Last month I started some new little works for the AROS community giving my personal contribution in form of works: I created some wallpapers in several formats and uploaded it on the AROS Archives here, and I made a screencast where I show how to install the HDAudio drivers,how to test whether they are working correctly and how to file a bug report; the tutorial was made by me using AROS on Qemu, camstudio, Audacity and put together with premiere; it has been uploaded in Vimeo and can be seen here.

By the way, working at the tutorial was interesting and proposed me several technical problems; the first, obviously, was that since was working in an emulated environment could not propose the situation exactly as it should have shown; the second is that i realized that i need to write a script before to do a tutorial, else i end up having a lot of footage to discard (like 30 minutes for a 10 minute one) andis hard to make the voices match copying and pasting content; the last one was that I missed having a video capture software native on AROS (ok, we also miss audio and video editing software but lets take the problems one at the time) and, upon advice of Fabien Coeurjoly, i wrote to Ilkka "Itix" Lethoranta aobut making the source of its Screen Recording Program for MorphOS available; he gave its availability to provide the code and to help if somebody wants to port it; will let you know more details in the future.

The fact that now AROS is bootable from stick was for me the next critical mass signal, after the release of OWB and the completion of the Poseidon stack, that we can now aim at a largel userspace level; even though its "semi-perpetual pre-alpha stage" (sometimes the lack of smaller features to reach the alpha level frustrates me, i admit it, even though things look to progress fast), there is indeed an area where AROS can increase its user area thanks to its implicit advantages that can be already satisfied IMHO from the actual status (low memory footprint, fast start/shutdown and multitasking): that is the hobbyist area: think at HAM radio people, RC, Robotics, small hardware projects,etc. ; they already used Amigas in the past and have the feeling that the only reason they stopped using it was the death of commodore and the decaying of support; bringing them an Amiga-like OS in a x86 machine might be an ideal target.
Since is my intention to promote AROS for such uses, i started two threads, one in aros-exec and one in arosworld.org, where was trying to do some brainstorming; the thread on aros-exec has been deserted so far, while in the arosworld one got some responses from one of the users; gave me some insight of what might be (for me that am kinda out of the field) useful:


Since another of my ideas was that there are some languages (rexx lua and, paying, hollywood) to provide a rapid application development, i asked whether there was way to interact with them using serial port (yup am still at that level), and that is its answer (longer but condensed):


As you can see, things are starting to look interesting (for me at least): it shows what might be needed for pepole to control devices through AROS: some good things might be bluetooth(not uspported) or MIDI (supported? got no idea, and Hitchhikr port of Bars and Pipes has been left unfinished for now); even HAM radio requires some kind of hardware, as said from a friend of mine  whose father is a HAM radio user and in the past used c64 and Amiga for its hobby; but he said that writing a serial driver should be trivial if somebody knows how to do it (neither me or him knows) -then, still talking aobut HAM radio, there is the lack of software problem; most amiga software found on Aminet is not open source or looks outdated, most linux software that can be ported resorts in GTK or QT (and the port is not trivial), not to mention licensing issues that might arise. Find new userbase and developers might help solve this part too: the most of the software around is ported mainly by three people: Mazze, Fishy_fis and Yannickescu; we also have occasional contributors that then disappears from the scene, like Masta1 that ported the main part of MAME engine but left the job unfinished (screen cannot be resized, missing GUI,etc). Others lack the time to contribute more, likg Craig "cjkiesau" Kiesau, that lately put in Aros Archives both the binary archive and the source code of ArosPDF so that the project can go on; as said in the past it is a port of xpdf on AROS and is GPL licensed.

Oliver "01i" Brunner is going on slow and steady in the Janus-UAE development, now pretty near the conclusion, though this did not satisfied the appetite of some hardcore Amiga Fans, as seen in this thread and also in this thread on Amigaworld.net: in short is the same old story; lots of people complaining about that AROS is not amiga os for brand/hardware/whatsoever else excuse, miss SMP, miss this miss that, does not integrate,etc.
Anyway, looks like another project, less ambitious and so far much less advanced, is trying to solve the problem of using legacy Amiga OS applications on AROS: will not be the final solution (since the idea is to have a local JIT 68k emulation that run the software and use AROS tools (graphics.library, gadtools.library, zune) to display the tool output - therefore is not going to work with those applications that use low-level Blitter and copper graphical output - but will indeed provide a glood level of backward compatibility for those workbench tools and applications.
The project is called Emumiga and has its own blog page, interesting styled in old amiga os3 with amigaguide-style links:) ; no downloads are possible yet but is possible to track down the progressing of the project; i sinteresting to know that the project use its own 68k emulation engine since the licensing of existing engines prevented the use in AROS.
So far it is possible to run some amiga shell commands and work is being done concerning the applications that use window gadgets; a proof of concept is the old Amiga clock; emumiga is now able to show it graphically on a window and use menus, even though at the moment the responsivity is still a bit slow due to the wrapping of AROS and old Amiga os graphical functions; expect things to improve in the future (the code is not even optimised yet).



[the new commodore USA wedge - another AROS platform?]
Two weeks ago reading Slashdot I was greeted form this announcement of a supposed heir to the C64: turned out that a company called Commodore USA (that is actually a Florida based company that negotiated the brand name from Commodore Gaming and is actually the rights to the old logo of the twice dead Commodore) is about to sell a wedge shaped all-in-one PC (quite well known to the amiga crowd) as spiritual heir of the old "breadbox"; the machine in itself might be not that interesting - was origially called [name] and runs an Atom Processor together with Intel graphics card and Realtek HDAudio -  in theory all devices already supported by AROS, beside, obviously, wireless and SD card reader (a different beast from USB SD card). An interesting discussion arisen on the Developers mailing list; among the ideas it came out that, if Commodore USA would like to bundle AROS with their computers, it might be a good sign if they decide to support the development of AROS, either participating to the bounties, or contributing in development of missing drivers; plus is unresolved the legal implication of selling AROS in bundle with a system in the states, due to the different copyright laws; even though the most of old copyrights on the technologies are now are expired, is still a good idea being careful.

The article started with Neil Cafferkey work and end with another Neil Cafferkey work: the update and bug fixing of dopus is almost done, with also some help from Mazze and Sonic, especially in poointing some freezing bugs left; it is possible to follow the ongoing work in this aros-exec thread.

Sometimes I would like to be a kid again and believe in Santa (or Baby Jesus, like my generation did) and write a letter with a wish list like " Dear Baby Jesus, give me this year a new job :P" That is what I want for now , since AROS seems to really grow on its own now about software; rarely i seen so much software being ported or developed in that short amount of time. A good tihng is that some of the software ported comes from the other Amiga systems, confirming my idea about the joint market share: an Amiga OS flavor alone does not counts, but targeting all of them makes more economically viable do some port or new software, taking the new commercial game BOH and the new Cinnamon Writer port as an example of this trend.

And even the new release of Icaros Desktop is out; the version 1.2 packs some of the latest improvements and software together, adding some of its own, starting with some brand new ad-hoc themes made by Damir, also author of the original Ice theme and following with a game-related improvement of Amibridge that now wil load directly the .adf files in E-UAE (considered that janus-uae at the moment is still missing sound).

Here is, straight out from the Icaros Web site, the feature list:



So, if at the moment the core system development might have slowed down a bit after the big year improvements, especially Poseidon USB, the support of BIOS settings for screens from GRUB, the release as dynamic library of MESA and the actually in progress work of Gallium3d, is nice to see that the actual state of AROS and Icaros brought developers to use the new tools and libraries and to port more programs, for now mostly games but i can see some interesting tool out there.

Despite my efforts, i am sorry to announce that my talk proposal this year was not accepted from the SCALE organizing committee; who follows the Aros-exec portal might already know it, since i talked about that in the SCALE thread, but for all others am going to publish the mail received here:


And so this year I went to SCALE as a visitor and not a speaker. When you are not a speaker things are different; first of all i found out you pay to enter: either 10 dollars for the expo only, 30 dollars for the talks or the full package for 70[!]dollars (but the talk followers also have occasion to eat lunch in a buffet).

Since was lacking money i decided to get the simple expo ticket and, once I registered in the automatic booth was able to visit the expo; the expo section was in a big lounge at the ground floor, and was quite packed with expositors and visitors; i was able to see again the former holder of the Kickstart 1 replacement Bounty, Greg Casamento, that was promoting OpenStep, and also, a couple of stands below, the Haiku stand, that drew a good amount of attention. I really am sorry that was unable to organise something for AROS due to my lack of money (and being at the time without a job did not helped either) and contacts, because there is interest towards it; just that people does not know its existence; i talked with some members of loca LUGS and this people sounded interested (i even gave a copy of icaros CD to aguy from the San Fernando local LUG), so in short is my impression that if AROS can show more that it does now, our user base and (hopefully) developers base will increase dramatically: have some plan to try to make AROS attractive for hobbyists and tinkerers, will explain more in the future.


After some time of inactivity Pavel "Sonic" Fedin is back to AROS development, and, beside the update and progress of the Winfdows hosted version, he started some more interesting gigs that are going to improve both AROS usability and its "Amiga" feeling: screen beeping, implementing changing pointers and screen dragging.

The first feature was something I used to kick and scream for a while on the early times of my advocacy: Pavel worked on updating some of the intuition compolnents and implementing a sprite machine in AROS graphics.library, and that also brought to review the pointer code. A first glance of the modification was announced on january 15 on the developer mailing list, but a more detailed announcement was made on january 18:


The topic generated intersting discussions and ideas: so far the actual pointer is no more the os-3 arrow but a translucent red triangle; Matthias "mazze" Rustler is working in developing the pointer preference panel that should work like the old Amiga pointer preferences, plus the possibility to import os 3 pointer files and .png cursors; I tried the feature in a new build and seems to work fine.


The screen dragging is still under work by Sonic, that also took advantage of the occasion to try to give a clean-up and remodernation to the graphics.library code and add new functions; this work might also bring even more improvements on AROS graphic internals; in this thread on Aros-exec[link] i asked Pavel to explain better what is going on, since the discussion in the mailing list is pretty technical and fragmented: here is the transcription of its explaination:



My best wishes for the work of Pavel, considered also that lately he achieved good progress in what he is doing.

Last January a discussion in Aros-exec brought the first draft of a more complete Wireless stack for AROS: the wireless technology is already supported with the prism2 chipset but, as stated in the discussion, its implementation is kinda obsolete, not supporting security protocols as WEP and being tied to the single chipset; the main goal of the bounty is to provide a reliable stack not tied to any chipset in particular, so that separate device drivers can be written to interface with it and its future extensions and improvements; by the way the requirements include at least one driver to be written, and the focus of the submitter (Colani1200) fallen on the netbook's widely supported Atheron chipset.

The bounty is gone online on power2people on January 18 and is, also thanks to the initiaitve of the aros-exec user Terminills that decided to match every other donation until the bounty reached the $2000 quote, actually the highest active, despite being still far from the $4170 record quote achieved from the Poseidon bounty last year.

The wireless bounty also match efforts in developing drivers for netbooks and other Atom boards as the commercial iMica and Ares one, since most of the hardware is usually similar; it is not a surprise then that new AHI sound drivers were actually developed from a Davy Wentzler, programmer of the Audio Evolution audio recording software on the Amiga platform and now on Windows and OS-X (hoping for support on AROS one day), paid from an initiative of Steve Jones. The provided sound drivers were mainly prepared for the iMica boards,that use the Atom support chips but, according to Steve jones words,most of the HD Audio boards should work; from the news in AROS-exec, those are the supported sound cards:


Davy accepts paypal donations at the mail link provided oin the aros-exec news article.

Yannick "Yannickescu" Erb is another guy that, like Fishy_fis, started do porting of programs and games for AROS; we talked about its efforts int he past when he released the WHDMenu tool; he did not stop, though. Let's a couple of its remarkable works:

The first utility is ZuneArc: it is a graphical front-end for archivers such as zip, lha, tar and others and was a long-awaited in AROS world, since so far the almost only way to handle archives (beside some lucky guy that was able to go around dopus limitations) was to use the shell command line.


The program is written in C and its GUI reminds me a bit the first versions of winzip as user interface. The use is pretty easy: clicking "open" a requester will appear: just select your archive to unpack and confirm: the content of the archive is displayed in the list below the buttons. At this point is possible to add/remove files from the archive or to extract either the selected files/directories in the list or the full archive content. Thanks to a text config file, ZuneARC can be extended and customised to handle more archive formats (having, of course, packer and unpacker programs ported on AROS).

Another program ported by Yannickescu on AROS is a VNC Client that will allow to pilot a remote computer from AROS. Yannickescu worked also on porting the server part but for now he is stuck with some unsupported functions.


The port of Yannickescu has a starting GUI written in amilua/zulu and the performance are quite good, considered that I tested form my qemu machine, therefore in native might be even better, even though i haven't tried yet.

Yannickescu is also working on a Windows Remote Server client that is actually under beta testing by several AROS developers including Paolo Besser.

The home page of Yannick "Yannickescu" Erb, form where is possible download all those software and much more, is here.

A new text editor comes to AROS and bring a much wanted feature with him: syntax highlighting.
Annotate is a lightweight text editor, previously released by the original author, Doug Bakewell, under GPL, has been ported to Amiga OS4 and lately to AROS by Daniel Westerberg.

Annotate is distributed in an unique lha file containing the executables for all Amiga systems; unique requirement is to copy the AnnotateSyntax.xml file in ENVARC: in order to make the changes persistent.
Annotate has also a macro system and a full AREXX port so that whoever (not me, pity) has the skills can program it for macros and to test files.

By the way, having finally a syntax highlighing editor on AROS (beside Vim, that i have been unable to run in the last version), inspired me to enhance the experience.
So I gave a look at the file AnnotateSyntax.xml and found that every new language has its own XML base tag plus a group of subtags that can make the language syntax react appropriately; starting form this I made a first draft for a LUA syntax highlighting taking as reference the Notepad++ LUA syntax file.


It reacts quite nicely to the base LUA syntax but haven't found a proper way to make it react to the zulu syntax yet; i based my implementation of the zulu syntax from an HTML guide for MUI

Interesting news even on the Kickstart replacement Bounty phase 1: the bounty changed hands and now the new holder is Gary "Gaz" Pearman, a programmer and web developer with a background on linux and Amiga programming in C and E; he set up a blog where is possible to track down (once again) the development; the fact that the blog has already some articles, not only one, is a good sign that Gary is involved in the project. So what did he do so far?
At first he tried to follow the same route of Greg "bheron" Casamento, trying to get Aranym to work (Aranym is an Atari ST-oriented 68k virtual machine that can be used as a generic 68k machine) in a 68k port of Debian but, after several misadventures including an incorrect disk image, he seen that aranym on 68k was pretty slow and without network support so he decided to work on real hardware and try to compile the kernel first; since seems there are no supported GCC symbols on the compiler he is using, but seems he found a solution taking some needed assembly implementated functions from the mac port of GCC. This bounty has been around for a long time so it is obvious that people is eager to see results; so far things are proceeding in the right way...

[AROS alive]
Roman Berle made come out the third part of its promotional video on AROS, called AROS alive. It took several time for Roman to come out with this one but we can see, from the way he used tripod for camera placements, the attention to detail put in the captures and the sound mixing, that he improved its skills and the end product looks really well done and professional. I personally would have liked to bring AROS alive last year as community promotion example at SCaLE, but my set up at the time was uinable to show it with sound.