27.May.2003
AROS (Website)
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AROS: Status Report May 2003
Another whole month has gone by, which means that it's definitely time for another status update. Doh, why do have all the status updates to begin like that? :) I'd like to thank all the people who showed interest in AROS in the last months, and there have been a lot! Anyway, let's not wait longer, here are the juicy bits, in this relatively uneventful month...
Hardware
Johan Grip received the Pegasos board at the end of April, installed Debian GNU/Linux on it, and started working on the hosted AROS port. However he was no longer able to continue for personal reasons, so he sent the board to Michal Schulz, another talented hardware hacker.
In the meantime, Michal, who already had a PPC PReP board, worked on the native PPC port. He merged his sources in the AROS CVS tree, creating the new 'arch/ppc' directory. To this day, he went as far as implementing task handling and scheduling. Congratulations Michal! Sources as well as a PReP boot image can be found at http://home.tu-clausthal.de/~misc/AROS.ppc.tar.bz2
Michal is also reworking exec.library to make it hardware/platform-independent, by moving dependent stuff in resources like kernel.resource, OpenFirmware.resource...
Build system
No fundamental changes to this sometimes hated system, but lots and lots of little bug fixes and improvements by almost every active AROS Team member in tools, config files, makefiles... So much activity caused quite a few broken nightly builds, but it seems now stabilized.
Also the newer gcc 3.3 that got installed on the build machine led to some problems, but nothing that couldn't be handled.
We now use bzip2 instead of gzip, and a custom, simpler package format than tar to create the AROS floppy and squeeze every possible byte. In the quest to more space, some less useful programs were removed from floppy. Thanks to Adam Chodorowski for the cleanup and optimizations!
i386-pc Installation
The installer for the i386 native port, install-i386-pc, is currently broken, but a graphical bootsector installer is in work, as well as a bootmenu editor, courtesy of Sebastian Heutling, who also still works on the HDToolBox partition editor.
User Interface
Adam Chodorowski began to work on the Zune custom class PreferencesWindow.mcc which implements the AROS standard prefs window buttons and look.
Paul Smith continued his huge work on the next iteration of Wanderer and the underlying desktop.library. It draws icons, and different views are possible (large icons, small icons, details).
Fabio Alemagna added horizontal and vertical color gradients to Zune images. Take a look at the obligatory screenshot!
By default, the Boot Shell is now closed after Wanderer is started. To open a new shell, use the Wanderer/Shell menu item, or use Amiga-W shortcut (Amiga key is the right Win key on pc105 keyboards)
Localizations
Thanks to Olivier Adam for his French translation of dos.library catalog, and to Paulo Silva for the Portuguese keyboard description (which Georg Steger implemented).
Miscellaneous
Some miscellaneous things that have happened:
- Staf Verhaegen continued to work on diskfont.library.
- Stefan Berger worked hard on ports of gtlayout.library and term 4.7, which can be found in contrib.
- Adam Chodorowski imported AHI 5.8 in AROS CVS, following Martin Blom's release of the AROS port.
- Georg Steger worked on the unix hosted kernel to allow nesting supervisor, so that signals occuring during a signal handler execution are not ignored. It should improve the stability of the serial device.
- and of course, lots of fixes here and there by many developers: for a rough idea, already more than 350 CVS commits this month (although we won't beat the record of 890 last month, according to the AROS-CVS mailing list archive).
Documentation
AROS documentation, in source and HTML-rendered form, is now available on the download page.
Web
Randy Vice set up an AROS support site, TeamAROS, at http://thenostromo.com/teamaros/.
Be sure to check their bounty program if you want to sponsor AROS development.
(nba) (Translation: gf)
[News message: 27. May. 2003, 16:37] [Comments: 0]
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