08.Aug.2003
AROS (website)
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AROS status report 08/2003
The developments on the operating system AROS go still as planned. In the last weeks had the following update been done:
- Hardware: Michal Schulz is still working on the PPC port, having
received the Pegasos board donated by Genesi, and more recently a Voodoo3
card donated by Randy Vice.
- Hardware: Johan Grip is implementing the OpenPCI specification, and
also reworking our buggy ide.device, which attempts to write too much
data at once instead of splitting the requests in smaller chunks. However
this is going to be more a rewrite than a bug fix. If someone just wants
to do the bug fix, there is an open bounty (currently 40 USD) for the
ide.device bug at TeamAROS.
- Build system: GCC 3.2 is now the minimum requirement to compile AROS,
which now compiles fine with GCC 3.3, thanks to Stefan Reinauer and
others who fixed the various deprecated bits in the tree.
- Build System: Staf Verhaegen continued to improve and simplify the
build system. Lately, he reorganized the kernel build to use only
objects, no more static or shared libraries.
- Build System: Iain Templeton, one of our South hemisphere developers,
did his fair share on the build system too, especially on the configure
scripts (which now require autoconf 2.53, hopefully a generated configure
is kept in CVS for those missing it) and to ensure that AROS compiles and
runs fine hosted on FreeBSD.
- Build System: Also mawk (which comes as default on Debian GNU/Linux)
will generate incorrect headers while building AROS, but GNU awk (gawk)
and FreeBSD awk work fine.
- i386-pc Installation: John Gustafsson and Adam Chodorowski earned the
first TeamAROS bounty for their "Automated Disk Prep and OS Installer".
It will install AROS on the first disk of the first IDE channel. Don't
try this on a disk with valuable data anywhere on it, you've been warned.
Unfortunately it isn't fully usable yet, due to the ide.device bug: some
files get corrupted during installation.
- i386-pc Installation: As part of this work, new Format and Partition
commands were implemented.
- User Interface: We now have a beautiful About dialog, thanks to Pixel
Art's logo and Adam for the code, as well as an in-progress Mesa port by
Nic Andrews. And before you ask, the beautiful Broken.miho wallpaper is
here.
- User Interface: Adam did major improvements to the workbench and icon
libraries (which handle much of the "under the hood" desktop work), and
also to Wanderer itself. The framework for Wanderer commands is in place,
and there is already the Delete tool implemented.
- User Interface: As a bonus, there is now an identification hook in
icon.library to display proper icons depending on the file type and take
appropriate action on double-click, for files without disk icons.
- User Interface: Sebastian Bauer added arbitrary angled gradients to
Zune images.
- User Interface: David Le Corfec, Adam and especially Fabio Alemagna,
who came up with a multitude of ideas and algorithms, brainstormed on
a "perfectly" MUI-compliant implementation of Zune layout algorithm.
Hopefully the new one seems to do the trick.
- User Interface: The Zune string gadget also got a rework and is now
slightly more usable, the prefs program got a few more pages, and many
Zune classes were put in their own loadable modules.
- User Interface: Georg Steger implemented the Cybergraphics'
WritePixelArrayAlpha() and BltTemplateAlpha(), so we can show even more
eye-candy, with alpha blending this time :) Adam used this to implement a
nice grayed-out disabled effect for Zune gadgets, instead of the usual
grid pattern.
- User Interface: Georg is also porting back the intuition.library from
MorphOS, and still does a lot of impressive bug finding and fixing
elsewhere, which for example led to find and report a longstanding bug
in stipple drawing to the XFree86 project. And when you're faced with a
strange memory corruption, try his invaluable trick : call a check
routine in the scheduler ! This allowed to fix bugs in several Prefs
programs.
- User Interface: But maybe the best for the end ... With
BltTemplateAlpha() to blend the anti-aliased glyphs, and the work from
Staf on freetype2, diskfont and bullet libraries, TrueType fonts now
work - and look - great! It also draws upon the work of many others,
including the MorphOS team (and especially Emmanuel Lesueur) and the
FreeType project. The Bitstream Vera font family is now included in AROS.
- User Interface: Use FTManager to install TrueType fonts in a few
mouse clicks, and enjoy the new Font Prefs program.
- Localizations: We got a Spanish keymap contributed by Albert Astals
Cid, several French catalogs by Olivier Adam and Hungarian catalogs,
language and country files by Mark "Bôregér" Balogh.
- Localizations: The applications localization system has been cleaned
up a bit, and as a side effect, much more applications are now localized.
So if your favorite application has been localized but misses a catalog
for your language, don't hesitate to send it to us!
- TCP/IP: Will be available next week. Nah, just kidding ;-) One of the
most requested features. A couple of people are working part-time on
this, so don't hold your breath. This is a huge task, spanning from
low-level drivers to interface libraries and support applications. It's
currently not the priority for most of the developers. Use another
network appliance in the meantime, or come join us :)
- Softwares in contribution: As usual, some new software or updated
versions were imported in contrib: UAE 0.8.22 (a Zune GUI is planned),
the free DeluxePaint clone 4P 0.09, TCC 0.9.19 (you can now directly
create AROS executables!), GNU tools (make 3.80, diffutils 2.8.1, patch
2.5.4, grep 2.5.1, m4 1.4), abcm2ps 3.7.1, sploiner 1.0
- Miscellaneous: After some benchmarking, BOOPSI method calls were
optimized using macros, and are now about 20% faster.
- Miscellaneous: Roughly 2000 CVS commits since the last status update,
with a record of 1063 in July. Check it there. So obviously this status
update is not exhaustive.
(nba) (Translation: wk)
[News message: 08. Aug. 2003, 12:00] [Comments: 0]
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