Planet AROS

Integration is on its way...

2010-03-04T00:00:15+00:00

Just a little update about a topic most Amiga fellow are interested in: Oliver's Janus-UAE is progressing very well, and this will help me enhancing AmiBridge. Just a screen of current work in progress... (click on the thumbnail for a larger size)

Icaros flies on PC Professionale

2010-02-20T23:23:06+00:00

We would like to thank PC Professionale for having included Icaros Desktop Live! on the covermounted DVD-ROM of its february issue. It is one of the most ancient and well known magazines in Italy, and we are extremely proud and excited to be there. News about the covermount appeared also on Amiga-related sites in Italy. It's not the first time PC Professionale talks about Icaros (a news about

2010-02-18T12:03:28+00:00

Problem fixed

Thanks to Ball000, who showed me a way, to hide a window (and make in reappear again!), no bad hack is necessary any more to hide the main uae window. ChangeWindowShape is my new friend now :). But I still have no idea, how to make a window opened with WA_Visible=FALSE visible again ;). But it does not matter any more.

clusteruk wanted more memory in amigaOS, the next version will have it:

If you try to give too much memory to amigaOS, you don't get an error message, you just get 0MB of ZIII ram.

2010-02-17T17:31:30+00:00

From hosted to virtual

When I spread a v0.5 to some people, I did get quite disappointing results. Not many of them managed to get it working. It worked perfectly for my AROS hosted on Linux, but only very rare and unstable on their native machines.

Up to now, I did not have a native AROS around, but I did not want to get some real hardware here. QEMU and VirtualBox are not really working stable on this machine, I think they don't like VMWare already running. But I found an old Icaros VE 1.1 image for VMWare, so I will use that for my native tests. Network works, so I wrote a little script, which fetches the binaries from my build machine (another virtual VMWare guest). WGet is really working well on AROS. I was really happy, that wget is available and a little bit surprised, too ;).

And yes, j-uae does not run well on a native host, if it runs at all. Strange..

Back when I started, I had to hide the main UAE window in order to show only the coherent windows. I tried a hack, just resize it to a 1x1 pixel big window and place it in the lower right corner of the screen. If the user switches back from coherent mode, I just resized it to the original values again. Works nice on hosted. Works *not* on native, as it seems.

But UAE does not really run well without its main window. And I did not want to fix that. So I saw, that you can open a window with WA_Hide in AROS. And it is really hidden! The only thing I did not find (not even in the sources) was a way, to show it again (is there one?).

So now I open a hidden window for coherent mode, if the user changes, I open a visible window and close the invisible one. Problem is, I have to protect all accesses to the main window struct with a semaphore. I hope, this does not cost too much of performance, but so far it seems ok.

So at the moment, j-uae runs on my "native" machine, too :). But I just did a quick test, there are for sure still some bugs remaining..

The whole AROS world in a video

2010-02-17T12:42:10+00:00

If one image worths thousand words, a video's value should be greater, much greater. And since words doesn't work particularily well when they have to describe a video, you really should look at this new AROS videoclip from Roman Eberle. There's a mention for Icaros too. Thanks, Roman! If you enjoyed it,don't forget to pay a visit to Roman's website.

New AROS ALIVE movie on Youtube!

2010-02-17T02:04:03+00:00

AROS ALIVE PART III is out! Roman Eberle (aka Romancer) has delivered another installment of this special series of videos regarding AROS!

Link to the video is: YouTube Link

Or watch the video below:

Also check the other parts of AROS ALIVE:
Part II
Part I

Visit the Author's homepage at http://www.roman-eberle.de... And support AROS!

5000 fps

2010-02-14T16:07:35+00:00

While I am still getting accustomed to my new life as IT specialist and system administrator, I'm doing my best to stay in sync with AROS which, luckily, is doing huge steps every day. It is not time yet for a new Icaros update, though, because the two big features being worked on are still... being worked on. In the meanwhile, however, I could give a peek to Gallium hardware acceleration and

2010-02-11T09:19:11+00:00

Weekend

This is totally unrelated to AROS, but it gives you an impression, what I did last weekend :)))) :

2010-02-10T17:20:27+00:00

Just a test ..

and no, it is not working. No, I don't know, if I will finish it ;).

This is just a dummy stub, which lacks all host features. The only thing it can do, is print some debug messages:


bsdsock.c:314  host_sbinit(): NOT YET IMPLEMENTED!
bsdsock.c:274  locksigqueue(): NOT YET IMPLEMENTED!
bsdsock.c:282  unlocksigqueue(): NOT YET IMPLEMENTED!
bsdsock.c:2750  host_gethostname(): NOT YET IMPLEMENTED!
bsdsock.c:2616  host_getservbynameport(): NOT YET IMPLEMENTED!
bsdsock.c:344  host_sbcleanup(): NOT YET IMPLEMENTED!
bsdsock.c:274  locksigqueue(): NOT YET IMPLEMENTED!
bsdsock.c:282  unlocksigqueue(): NOT YET IMPLEMENTED!

2010-02-03T17:28:13+00:00

Wanderer integration part 2

All the missing parts are done now, so if you click on a editor and then double click a text file, the editor opens the text file. If it is a 68k AmigaOS editor or not, does not matter anymore. Of course, both the editor and the text file must be accessible (mounted) in AmigaOS.

To make all that stuff safe, to add configuration parameters and to be able to switch it on and off easily, is more work than to get it working for a first time..

And a GUI was missing, too, of course. As the old GUI was not very intuitive (I never was good at GUI design), I gave it another try. So it looks like that now:

So what is the current bounty status?

1. Must be able to run some classical software which must include: WordWorth 6, Organizer 2, Datastore 2 and Money Matters 4.*
Done.

2. Must provide support for window and screen based apps so they appear to be running on the host system - including access to public screens.
Done.

3. Doubling-clicking a 68k application in Wanderer will cause that application to be run in the emulation.
Done.

4. Each instance of emulation will be a commodity that can be shut down via Exchange.
Done.

5. Port over a Zune based UAE prefs application.
Done.

6. UAE to use AROS clipboard.
Done.

7. separate directory (for 68K files) dictated by the chosen config.
Done.

So all features are implemented. Bug fixing and test time!

Oh, Samantha!

2010-01-31T22:58:04+00:00

Hi there!

Samantha is back! After long period of hibernation in the AROS repository Sam440 port of AROS is maintained again. Big thanks to Markus Weiss, who has restarted it and to ACube who gave me the kick in the butt :)

Since the kernel.resource in AROS did evolved a bit since last time I was writing it form Sam, it has been updated a tiny bit now. Most of the features from Efika's kernel have been back-ported to Sam440 port, including:

Loading and releasing of symbols from every ELF file loaded by AROS, including the kernel itself,
System call for cold reboot (accessible only from kernel.resource and exec.library),
Crash handler displays detailed information, including the byte offset of crash occurrence, relevant symbol name (if such name exists at all) and the executable name. The log includes also the backtrace (with offsets, symbol and module names) which tries to reach as far as possible.

Yes, I do know, it's not much. But it is at least a good start (eerm.... rather a good re-birth?) :).

The Sam440 port has been not only extended, but also fixed a bit. I have found there an ancient bug in the exception handler. It could have lead to random system crashes. The reason was the exception handler itself. There was a risk that an interrupt will occur during reconstruction of the CPU context.

Since the AMCC440EP CPU does not maintain cache coherency (no, it's not a bug, it's a feature fairly well documented in the manuals!), some portions of the code had to be fixed. Now, more AROS code uses CachePreDMA and CachePostDMA pair of functions. Because of that partitions on harddrive are recognised properly now. AROS on Sam440 boots nicely and coexists with OS4.1 on the same harddrive. Nice, isn't it?

Now, the last but not least, after some sleepless nights the OHCI driver of Poseidon is fixed and operates properly on Sam440ep. Wanna proof? Watch the attached screenshot :)

Stay tuned for more news. I promise to write a bit more now ;)

Pointing to the next Icaros

2010-01-22T17:00:26+00:00

Hello to everyone. I've not written anything here for a month now, even if many interesting things happened in the meanwhile. So this "ping" post is just like saying "hey, you've not missed me, I'm still alive". Reasons for this long delay are simple. First of all, holiday: I just stopped everything else to spend some time with my family. Then, a new job: I've been principally a IT journalist for

2010-01-19T17:14:16+00:00

Launch Deluxe Paint from Wanderer!

Even so I did not fix all screen related bugs, I was too bored with screen stuff already. So I decided to go for an "easy" target, the integration into wanderer.

I had to add some code to wanderer.c, which is very j-uae specific. But wanderer.c is not the most beautiful code on earth anyways (no offense), so I don't think it does any harm there. As soon as wanderer detects an m68k amigaos binary, it searches for a special public port "J-UAE Execute" and sends a message to it. If the port is not available, the original wanderer functionality is not changed. Wanderer code is not yet committed, as it is not complete yet (parameters will change) and I don't want some incompatible nightlies causing a debugging nightmare for me.

J-uae starts a thread at startup, which opens that port and waits for messages. As soon as one arrives, it checks, if the path of the clicked icon is inside an in amigaOS mounted volume and if launchd is running. The tread then stores the command in a linked list (GSList, sorry) and sends a signal to the amigaOS launchd, which you should have started in s:startup-sequence of your amigaOS installation for example.

Now the launchd calls a trap to get the next command from the j-uae master thread and the tries to start it with the help of the wbstart.library from aminet. As soon as launchd got his command, j-uae master deletes the command from the list.

As launchd is independent of all other j-uae features, you can use it in a non-integrated j-uae environment, too of course.

Three things are still missing:
- error handling/messages
- buffer overflow checks, if path gets too long
- wb parameters

All solvable, but boring ;). So enough for today :).

Icaros Desktop got sound on iMica and Aspire One A150

2009-12-23T08:56:35+00:00

I'm really, really happy to announce that another very exciting, important piece of the puzzle has been placed: thanks to the efforts of Stephen Jones, who paid for it, and Davy Wentzler, who actually coded it, AROS is getting an AHI driver for Intel's HD Audio. This basically means that many systems using compatible chipsets should get sound too. The driver is still in development, so you won't

2009-12-17T07:51:27+00:00

Christmas time..

But it is not yet time for presents, sorry.

I decided not to release a 0.4, as there was not much feedback, if it worked or not. If you have it working and you found no major bugs, drop a note here, please.

So I went back to my road map and got custom screen support ready. You can now start Deluxe Paint III for example from your amigaOS workbench and it opens on an AROS custom screen. Screen cycling works, too, so if you have many AROS/amigaOS screens mixed, you can use the cycle gadgets just as for native screens (those are native screens).

Downside with custom screens is, that you don't get nice looking AROS menus and window borders, as the program can do too much nonsense with custom screens. So Deluxe Paint looks like Deluxe Paint always looked ;). So no need to show you a screen shot here ;).

And of course every screen gets its own process. Custom screen windows not, as amigaOS windows on custom screens don't have related AROS windows. For custom screens, we don't go down to the window level. So the output of (AROS) tasklist can look like that (some columns stripped):


address         type    state    name    
0xAF86DFE8      CLI     running  tasklist
0xAB676FF0      task    ready    Idle Task
0xAB706548      task    waiting  x11hidd task
0xAB683550      task    waiting  UnixIO.task
0xAB6C1AF0      task    waiting  input.device
0xAB6D1838      task    waiting  Menu Handler 
0xAB6EF298      task    waiting  console.device
0xAB717CA0      process waiting  J-UAE semaphore proxy
0xAB741478      process waiting  CON: Window
0xAF88DEA0      process waiting  CON: Window
0xAB7E0E38      process waiting  xpipe.handler process 
0xAB74C228      CLI     waiting  IPrefs
0xAB7AB6B0      CLI     waiting  ConClip 
0xAB820030      CLI     waiting  C:RexxMast
0xAB826378      CLI     waiting  Decoration
0xAB7D1828      process waiting  pipefs.handler process 
0xAB95CD48      process waiting  Workbench Handler 
0xAB6FB580      process waiting  Lib & Dev Loader Daemon
0xAB71F3C0      process waiting  filesys process for RAM 
0xAF77C810      process waiting  AOS3 Window 0
0xAF762A00      process waiting  AOS3 Custom Screen 100a1c60
0xAB6DCEF8      task    waiting  Screennotify Handler 
0xAF7BA7B0      process waiting  AOS3 Custom Screen 102f2d28
0xAF807730      process waiting  AOS3 Window 0
0xAF7BD458      process waiting  AOS3 Window 104b6ee4
0xAF7BA008      process waiting  AOS3 Window 104b6a8c
0xAF6D1418      process waiting  AOS3 Window 104b4f9c
0xAE43C8B0      process waiting  AOS3 Window 104b45fc
0xAF7AA888      process waiting  AOS3 Window 100a314c
0xAF793D30      process waiting  AOS3 Window 100a241c
0xAF734708      process waiting  AOS3 Window 1000e834
0xAF735520      process waiting  AOS3 Window 1000239c
0xAB953AA8      CLI     waiting  WANDERER:Wanderer
0xAB7187C8      process waiting  UAE thread
0xAB7125F0      CLI     waiting  uae

After a long period of not having spare time for j-uae, things went better the last few weeks, so the activity rose again:

Not that it is sufficient, but much better.

So what's up next? Getting public screen support back working. You can compare that to AROS x86-32 bit and AROS x86-64 bit. 64 Bit has some nice new kernel features. Now I need to merge the new custom screen stuff to the public screen code, too ;).

Diary: Technologies: AROS: Update February 2, 2010 (or: How come Santa has pointed ears and say "meow"?)

2009-12-13T05:05:00+00:00

.highlight {background-color: #888; font-style:italic; padding:16px;} .warning {font-weight:bold; color:#f00;} .description{ font-style:italic;} As usual kilometric post in progress.... stay tuned!

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:

- new official Icaros Desktop themes and theme manager
- Updated SDL, MESA and many other libraries
- Grub2 hack to use netbook resolutions on Intel GMA900 GPUs
- Poseidon now available as kernel module
- Improved 68K apps integration in AmiBridge
. no double pointer anymore using workbench applications
. added more uaegfx resolutions in full integration mode
. Added Amiga games/demos ADF support with sound
- added ZuneARC to manage zip, lha, rar, tgz and other archives
- updated PortablE
- updated development chain with newer include files
- updated wookiechat to latest beta
- added support for audio CDs (PlayCDDA)
- added desktop wallpapers from artist Wilhelm Steiner
- added desktop wallpapers from abraXXious
- added many new games and emulators
- updated DosBox to latest revision
- added BOH demo from Simone Bevilacqua
- updated NoWinED to latest version
- added first Gallium3D demos for GeForce cards
- updated OWB to release 0.9.9
- added SDLBasic 1.0.2
- system files updated to December 2nd, 2009

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.

[ no SCALE this year]
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 ging to publish the mail received here:

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:

I've  completed and committed implementation of correct mouse pointer
handling.
First thing: now applications may change the pointer.
Second thing: now we may get pointer preferences.
A  new  pointer  code is verified to work with SDL driver. Also it is
highly expected to work with VESA mode (since it uses the same generic
software implementation in fakegfx.hidd).
Also it is expected to work with ATI and NVidia drivers.
It will not work with VGA driver, it still will display hardcoded red
arrow. An overhaul of the driver is needed, i'm going to do it.
The  default  pointer  image hardcoded in Intuition really looks like
almost white triangle with a shadow, it's not a bug.
Now some technical details...
The  whole  thing  works using graphics.library ExtSprite engine. Its
behavior is modified according to the following:

1. There  is a support for only one sprite in our display HIDD API. The
same  applies  to  graphics.library. GetExtSprite() always returns -1.
This  means  that  we have only sprite #0 and it's always allocated by
the system. Intuition.library never calls GetExtSprite() or FreeSprite().
MoveSprite() on sprite #0 changes mouse pointer position. ChangeExtSprite()
on  sprite  #0  changes  its look. Any other sprite number is ignored.
Old private pointer handling functions are removed.

2. Colors of the sprite are 17-19 colors of the screen's palette, the
same  as  on  original  Amiga.  For truecolor screens these colors are
grabbed  in  ChangeExtSpriteA()  and  attached  to the internal sprite
bitmap.  This  means  that  setting  palette  has  no effect on actual
pointer  colors  until  next  ChangeExtSpriteA()  (in  intuition  this
happens  at  least  on  every  window  activation).  For  LUT  screens
everything  will  work.  If  the  screen has less than 24 colors, it's
impossible  to  use 17-19 colors. In this case pointer palette entries
are  shifted  down  to be 3 colors before last 4 colors of the screen.
For example these will be colors 9-11 on 16-color VGA screen. Yes, the
pointer may look not as expected if the application specifies a custom
palette for the whole screen, but there's no way to work around this.

3. In theory the same system can support truecolor sprites. Note that
AllocSpriteDataA() constructs sprite data from the bitmap. This means
that  we  could pass any bitmap to it, not only planar 2-plane bitmap.
Even  truecolor  bitmap  with  alpha  channel.  Currently  this is not
supported because of two restrictions:
a)  AllocSpriteData()  always  creates internal sprite bitmap in LUT8
format. In order to support another formats AllocSpriteData() just has
to  be  a little smarter and determine if source bitmap is a truecolor
HIDD bitmap.
b)  Display  drivers always expect pointer shape in LUT8 format. This
is  also  simple  to  overcome,  but there's one little problem - it's
problematic  to  dislay  a  truecolor  sprite  on  a LUT screen. Let's
remember  that  the  user  may  run  in VESA or even VGA mode, and the
user should see at least *SOME* pointer image.

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 scout port is one of those programs that already have a working reactive pointer, and is a good feeling:)

[screen dragging section here]
The second

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.

[better netbooks support and sound drivers]

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:

Terratec Aureon Sky
Terratec Aureon Space 
Terratec Phase 22 
Terratec Phase 28 
M-Audio Revolution 5.1 
M-Audio Revolution 7.1  
ESI Juli@

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

[new software intro]

[The Vague 2]
[zuneARC]
"Yannickescu"

[openTyrian]
[possible worlds]
[Annotate]
A new text editor comes to AROS
[my lua syntax file]
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.

Annotate showing a LUA file using my syntax rules

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

[status of the Janus UAE]
[ReAction wrapper]

[who wants to port Amitwitter]

[the AROS 68k bounty change owner]
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]

Fine tuning amiga emulation

2009-12-12T11:18:18+00:00

One of the most welcomed features of Icaros Desktop 1.2 is the ability to launch Amiga games and demos straight from their ADF files. I noticed that on Amiga forums this has got even more popular than 3D Acceleration, so I'd like to do something to every retro-gamer out there. Unluckily, when the Amiga was a very popular gaming platform, I didn't really like it for the gaming side, but I

Icaros Desktop 1.2 ready for download

2009-12-09T02:07:20+00:00

It's been a long time since our latest "point release" (v1.1), and now I am proud to announce the immediate availability of the new one. Version 1.2 introduces lots of new programs, features and graphic enhancements, leveraging Icaros Desktop to a new level of realiability and user experience and so on (please insert any attractive marketing stuff you like here, I'm just too tired to do so).

2009-12-09T01:14:36+00:00

Icaros Desktop LIVE! is a complete distribution of the AROS desktop operating system. Icaros Desktop LIVE! comes on a bootable live DVD-ROM which runs directly on your hardware (it must be already supported by AROS). It can be installed on the hard drive and can coexist with Microsoft Windows XP, in a dedicated partition. A quick reference guide and some AROS PDF manuals are included. This

2009-12-09T01:13:16+00:00

Icaros Desktop VE (Virtual Environment) is a complete AROS desktop environment running on VirtualBox. Targeted to final users and to developers, Icaros Desktop VE allows testing and using the AROS Research Operating system without really installing it on the hard drive. It can be a reliable way to access this interesting OS for people with powerful, but yet not supported hardware.DOWNLOAD ICAROS

2009-12-09T01:08:14+00:00

Icaros Desktop Light is a CD-ROM size distribution of the AROS desktop operating system, for computers without a DVD drive. Icaros Desktop Light comes on a bootable live CD-ROM which runs directly on your hardware (it must be already supported by AROS). It can be installed on the hard drive and can coexist with Microsoft Windows XP, in a dedicated partition. A quick reference guide and some AROS

Can Icaros play my Amiga games? And why not...

2009-11-28T23:39:50+00:00

It's time for a little preview of the incoming Icaros Desktop v1.1.6, which includes also version 1.6 of the AmiBridge scripts, which currently allow launching AmigaOS Workbench applications straight from the AROS side. The next version, however, will also add support to ADF files, which means that Icaros users will also run classic Amiga games and demos from their AROS computers. AmiBridge 1.6

Mission Icaros Laptop: Accomplished!

2009-11-28T02:26:29+00:00

When I was younger, so much younger than today, I had two wet dreams: a date with Claudia Schiffer, and owming an Amiga notebook. While I am still waiting for Claudia to call me, I just realized the second one, at least from my current point of view. Some times ago I read a message from Yannick on Aros-Exec.org, where I got the description of the Compaq Evo N610c, a old but wonderul laptop

Posting this from my Icaros netbook...

2009-11-21T01:49:09+00:00

In Italy we say "un'immagine vale mille parole", an image worths one thousand words, and I frankly couldn't be happier this time: Hitchhikr has posted on AROS-EXEC a new driver for RTL8169 and similar network adapters, which eventually covers also my netbook's one. So now I can do networking with Icaros on my Acer Aspire One, and that's another important piece of the puzzle, before having a

WANTED! New official desktop theme for version 1.2

2009-11-13T12:36:29+00:00

Icaros 1.1.6 update is on the works (slowly, slowly, but it will come), and I am collecting ideas and files also for the next point release, which will be obviously called 1.2. For that release, I'd love to have a new look. Icons will be the same, but I start feeling the default OS4-like windows borders a bit... abused. Unluckily, I am not a good graphic artist, even if I contributed some

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

2009-11-02T20:22:25+00:00

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!

Yet another GLExcess/Gallium3D video

2009-11-02T02:08:11+00:00

Ok ok, we have talked about this before, and GLExcess running on AROS with hardware 3D acceleration is no more a fresh news. However, I noticed that current videos are not very well done, so I decided to grab the TV output of my Icaros machine (yes, you can connect an AROS machine to a standard TV set if you like, you just need a good video card) with a Pinnacle Dazzle, and this is the result:

Sorry, I couldn't resist...

2009-10-31T23:05:30+00:00

I don't like comparisons between operating systems' boot times. There's something completely odd about them: an operating system should be valued for its stability, its reliability, its user-friendliness, compatibility and price, not for its boot times, which practically don't matter when you use a computer. That's why, when I saw this video, I really couldn't stop myself.This video is from

New OWB is coming, here's the italian catalog

2009-10-28T23:19:52+00:00

After a little pause, Stanislaw Szymczyk has come back and updated his port of the Origin Web Browser (OWB), adding some nice missing features like the upper menu and a quite amount of speed in page rendering. Some bugs, which prevented OWB to correctly hande some sites, have also been fixed. Before the official 0.9.9 release, he has published three RC versions. You can get the latest one here,

2009-10-28T18:09:11+00:00

another release candidate

As there were some problems with the last release candidate, there is another one here.

The following things are different:
- mouse sync in overscan modes should work now (please test!)
- a lot of new and bigger picasso screen modes added
- janusd-draggable for those who want to use j-uae without coherence (this is just a quick work-around)

Mouse sync for non-picasso screens was written from scratch, it took quite some time (much more as you might think). The result is a small and clean code segment, which hopefully works now for all weird overscan settings.

For the bigger screen modes: you need to have an at least so big wanderer screen to use them and assign enough ram to the picasso96 emulation in the memory tab.

I am waiting for your bug reports, either here, by e-mail or on aros-exec.

For all news sites: This is still no news you should put on your site. You may publish it next week, when the 0.4 is uploaded to the official servers. Thanks.

Gallium 3D, try it by yourself!

2009-10-26T18:03:05+00:00

The incredible coder Krzysztof "Deadwood" Smiechowicz has released an "alpha demo" of 3D acceleration under AROS, and you can already use it on Icaros Desktop 1.1.5, you just need a GeForce card supported by the nuveau driver (GeForce 4, FX, 6 and 7 series, except probably some cut-down models). Following the link below, you will get an updated version of AROS MESA-demos and, for your delight, a

Important update about Gallium3D

2009-10-21T13:44:06+00:00

Krzysztof "Deadwood" Smiechowicz's port of Gallium 3D is progressing quite well, at least according to this new video:What he has done so far is simply amazing. This new video shows GLExcess running on a GeForce 5200 with hardware acceleration. I used that demo-benchmark long ago to test video cards for the magazines I work on and, honestly, I didn't believe I could see it on AROS some day. This

2009-10-15T17:55:52+00:00

For the brave

As you all wanted a new version, I compiled a release candidate for a 0.4 j-uae. If you don't find any bigger problems with this version, I'll upload it to the aros archives next week.

I have not tested it very much, it is more or less just a current build of the SVN.

But I've added the GUI buttons to enable and disable all the new features:

You can download the release candidate archive here.

Keep in mind, this is not a 1.0 version. This is not even a 0.4 ;). And read the readme.txt in the archives docs section.

Please report severe bugs by e-mail or here in the comments section.

Well, reports of a great and working version are welcome here, too. Although more unlikely to happen ;).

For all news sites: This is not a news you should put on your site. You may publish it next week, when the 0.4 is uploaded to the official servers. Thanks.

2009-10-09T15:55:09+00:00

Mouse in sync

After quite some fiddling with a lot of parameters, it seems, that the AROS and amigaOS mouse pointers are now in sync both on amigaOS native and Picasso96 screens, both if j-uae is run full screen or in window mode. Of course, janusd needs to be running.

ScanDoubled and Overscan screen modes are not working, could be done of course. If somebody really needs those, well, he might add them himself (or beg me).

I wanted to show you a screen shot, but you could only see one mouse pointer on it ;).

During movement of the mouse, the amigaOS pointer may lack behind, but it is tolerable I think.

I really should release a new version, as j-uae now has clipboard support and mouse sync, it should be useful, even if you do not use the coherence mode..

Do you want one?

AROS to get accelerated 3D?

2009-10-08T01:54:44+00:00

People following the AROS developers mailing list had already noticed some works by Krzysztof "deadwood" Smiechowicz on Gallium3D, but the news is finally official and I can spread it on this site: the heavy task to bring 3D acceleration to AROS has finally started! Gallium3D is an increasingly popular software library which enables hardware and software acceleration on a wide range of video

Theme Prefs - Preview window and more

2009-10-01T05:20:43+00:00

Well If you spend some of your regular web activity in AROS forums you've noticed that I've been busy. It was something I wanted to add for a long time, but never got the time to fully explore it - Lua Programming and adding some needed features to D980's Theme Prefs.

And of course the most requested feature has always been some kind of preview, so that one could actually have an Idea what the window skins will look like before rebooting.

This would not have been possible without Mazze's latest modifications to AmiLUA and the datatype.library. So thank's MAZZE!

It's in alpha/beta stage now, but as soon as all bugs have been ironed out, and I had some of the features I have in mind I'll release it. Can't say much more about theses features, because I don't know if they're actually possible/relevant.

Oh guess what!? I've just realized this is the first piece of actual code I do for AROS!

A day in the (vintage) life - report from Pianeta Amiga 2009

2009-09-29T17:31:03+00:00

So, it happened. I went to Pianeta Amiga 2009 and I brought there my Icaros machine and netbook, to show people that yes, AROS works and - you can't believe it! - it may be useful too, since nowadays applications for AmigaOS are often available on AROS too, and Icaros Desktop already provides them. On the table at my left side, there was Steve "ClusterUK" Jones with his iMica system, showing

Diary: Technologies: AROS: Fall colors over the MESA...

2009-09-20T06:29:00+00:00

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Want to begin this article with a sad note: at the end of August my actual company decided to downsize and to change its location, and am among the laid-offs, so right now most of my effort in front of this keyboard goes in finding a new job in order to pay the bills and keep the apartment; hope to be able to dedicate time to my advocacy back soon (that of course means i will be employed): please cross your fingers...

[update in november: still no job, will let you know of anything].

The month of October looks like has been a bit unfortunate for this blog: several times, trying to look at the content, i was greeten from a white page: by the way the black-out (or white-out i might say) affects almost all the ilcannocchiale blogs: it is the second time that I sent notification to the webmasters about this and lately am starting to consider to move this blog in a more affordable platform, maybe even self-hosted.

But let's go back and talk about AROS. Right now the most important news in AROS front are the following ones:

As said last august, Krysztof "Deadwood" Smiechowicz ported version 7.5 of MESA to AROS, for now in software rendering mode only. Latter in the month he also ported GLU,GLUT and added a revised version of SDL that can use MESA. The addition of MESA as library allowed people, especially Matthias "Mazze" Ruster to port some new games on AROS; among the contributions we have now Block Out II, a 3d Tetris clone, Abuse, a well-known platform game, a first attempt to port Open Red Alert (that later has been removed due to a bad bug in the upstream that prevent enemy AI to operate), 3d Pool Billiard (running kinda slow due to the software renderer, kinda playable if you keep the window at stamp size).

September news is that Deadwood decided to accept the Gallium 3d Bounty. Krysztof already started to meddle with Gallium 3d at the time of the MESA port; he started getting decent results, as seen in this movie here on youtube. Following those embrionic attempts, Deadwood compiled a version of GLExcess that includes the nVidia Gallium driver and, compared to the old software-only compilation, the difference is really remarkable.

The latest additions to the already rich porting gallery of Deadwood are the OpenAL/alut/ogg/vorbis libraries. Those libraries, as said from deadwood itself in AROS-exec, are used in several open source games to provide the sound experience; their porting will open the door, together with the perfecitoning of MESA and Gallium, to porting some open source 3d games, such as Warzone 2100, AssaultCube and Cube2; and is known the plan to use the hardware acceleration together with Cairo in order to improve Wanderer responsivity and performance, but as far as i know is all still related to Deadwood progresses.

Talking about 3d and Mesa, last month the e-zine The Vague came out for AROS using the last MESA port of Deadwood; e-zines are well known to amiga users thanks to the demoscene; though i was hardly been a follower, remember an Italian one made called Infamia - at the time even Tadsince1995 used to cooperate with it as coder - and reminding the experience I started The Vague. The AROS version is in the same .lha archive with the Amiga PPC and Morphos version; once double clicked the icon a requester ask to start either in full-screen (for 640x480 resolution) or windowed (as i started it being in qemu at 800x600x24 resolution) ,whether to use sound effects and the music replay rate. Nikos posted a youtube video of The Vague running on AROS here.

The Vague volume 1 on AROS

Its been exciting to see some good demoscene art and nice music on AROS: i liked The Vague and am waiting for further numbers, and possibly even more e-zines and (why not?) some AROS demos too :)

Last August the code of the Poseidon stack finally got released under APL and built together with the nightly builds, making so complete the Poseidon Bounty, the so far most contributed bounty in AROS history. I tried the stack on my old laptop, where a known incompatibility with the USB SIS controller so far occured, with November 12 nightly the USB devices are still not recognized, by the way. Once i find a way to download OWB from the nightly (writing the URL and then use wget to download it seems a good one), will post the dump of PCItool from my old laptop in order to help the debug.

Icaros 1.1.6 is already on the works but, since this blog post is kinda late, let me talk about the version 1.1.5, that I tried both as iso image on qemu and as live CD on the old laptop. So grub worked fine, but when I tried to select my sis900 network card with DHCP form the network control panel and press the "use" button in order to test OWB performance, the system froze hard. Everytime.
In defense of the network control panel, by the way, doing the same with the latest nightly worked pretty fine, apart the missing OWB in the nightly - beside an OWB folder and a OWB icon in extras/networking - for don't know what reason; i understand that OWB cannot be added to the nightly both for weight and license issues but my personal suggestionis to replace the actual useless directory with a script that might download the latest version on RAM, for new installs.

And, talking about OWB, our Stanislaw Szymczyk , after a while where he took a pause from AROS development, released another new version of OWB. The Version 0.9.9 is downloadable, as usual, from the sand-labs web site and this time introduces, beside the usual flattening of several bugs, a loader, called StartOWB, that uses the artwork made by michaels and helps to track the long first loading (caused by the fontConfig cache building); beside that, now the main application menus are finally available with the right mouse button as for every other AROS application, giving it a standard interface. As far as i know, the AREXX port in OWB is still missing, but hope Stanislaw will fix this soon.

The new OWB splash screen,designed by michaels

And then let's talk once more about the hidden hero of AROS, Matthias "mazze" Rustler: most of the software used on AROS has been ported by mazze, starting form several games (, then the unfinished port of Ignition Spreadsheet (that i still hope one day will be finished), LUA and its extensions, zulu and siAmiga - that are providing the base ground for several utilities, panels and give easy way for beginner programmers (like me) to produce something in AROS: the last fatigue of Mazze is the porting of Scout, the famous low-level tool for manage tasks under Amiga OS; undoubtely this might help to get rid of some annoying freeze of some shell windows or commodities, though for the well known lack of protected memory on Amiga OSes is still better to reboot the system as fast as possible.

Going further, any AROS user had to deal with the well known problems with our version of Dopus: despite being invaluable for file management, it has strong issues with advanced operations, such as extracting files, viewing pictures, even personalising buttons; this is due to the fact that this dopus port is pretty old (from 2000, if i remember clearly): now a new bounty has been introduced in Power2people.org, for the port of the latest version of Dopus actually for Amiga OS-4 only; the bounty has been accepted by Neil Cafferkey and hope will improve this invaluable tool.

Last September once again Pianeta Amiga was held in Empoli, despite the fact that this year was held only at Saturday and the flow of people is really at its own minimum. This Year AROS was highly represented from, as usual Paolo Besser and, straight from the United Kingdom, Steven jones that brought its iMica platform. But here is the outcome according to Paolo Besser:

Thanks to Enrico Vitali and other well-known people of the italian Amiga community, the event has been amusing and interesting, but... well, I can't hide the mixture of bitter sweet feelings that left me only half happy. The good news, at least for Icaros Desktop, is that every visitor of the fair had the chance to see it in action, and most of them stopped at my table, asking for more informations or to see some demostration. I've also got many congratulations and many thanks for the effort, asking me for keeping up "the good job", but the bad news about all this, is that Pianeta Amiga this year lacked of visitors. Numbers had been fairly low (I've personally counted about 100 visitors) and the exhibitors themeselves were a tiny group that could comfortably stay in less space than the half area of the Palaesposizioni reserved to the event. "In the good old days you could see a crowd of people making long tails in front of the ticket booth - said Enrico while we were taking something to eat at noon - but today...", unluckily today's Pianeta Amiga loosely reflects the situation of the whole Amiga market. A tiny, fragile community which is hardly trying to keep its platform alive, even if the interest decreases a little more every year, and even if the whole IT market has completely forgotten the Amiga. So we have to thanks ACube, VirtualWorks, AmigaKit.com and everyone else that still persists, and spends money every year to organize a event which has just become a symbol, a tradition for the community, but which is practically perceived like a hobby, a nice meeting day with other people who share the same passion, even by people who professionally operate in the Amiga business.

It is sad for me to hear that despite the good news in the Amiga market (the SAM availability last year, the MorphOS on Mac Mini, icaros, iMica, Ares one, the settlement of the Amiga-Hyperion cause,etc., one of the last Amiga events is gone so unnoticed; despite my hopes, i think it is realistic that next year Pianeta Amiga might not be hold, if this is the trend; of course i expect thngs to change, but who knows....

Frustrations and disillusionment might hit even die-hard supporters. Many of the Aros-exec usual lurkers know Nikos: beside being a strong fan of the platform he is also one of the testers and one of the main bounty contributors ever, but in this thread he say that decided to take a leave from AROS, disappointed from the apparent lack of progresses, especially in the hardware acceleration section. By the way this happened just before Deadwood released its new MESA port and announced the start of the Gallium3d Bounty. The community reaction has been something you will rarely see in other open osurce community: almost everybody sent its own comment to nikos (including myself) expressing support; that convinced him to stay and luckilly for him, the new results on AROS seems to keep him busy...

Another AROS-friendly machine recently surfaced: provided by Pascal "Phoenixkonsole" Papara, the ARES one is an AMD Athlon x2 powered machine provided in a small tower case, bigger in size than Steven's Atom powered iMica; the graphic card is a performing nvidia GeForce 7200 with 256 megabytes DDR2 video RAM; phoenixconsole expects support from Gallium3d in order to enhance 3d capabilities; the machine hosts 1 gigabyte 800mhz DDR2 RAM (can be expanded up to 8 gigs) and can host up to four 5,25" devices; has a DVD/RW drive and a 3,5" floppy drive (foreseeing a catweasel support); it has a SoundBlaster Live as sound card and the network card is a Realtek RTL8139d that has a RTL8139 family chip and, quite interestingly, just today Hitchhikr released an rtl8169.device driver that in theory should support it. Paolone had occasion to test it with its Aspire One netbook and said it works nicely, adding another device to the netbook puzzle (right now still wireless and sound are unsupported on Aspire One).

Phoenixkonsole also plans to put in bundle with Ares One Icaros Desktop and a suite of programs for AROS including: the registered version of FryingPan and the incoming AROS Port of Cinnamon Writer: the latter one fills another software gap under AROS, presenting the first Word Processor available for the platform.

Cinnamon Writer is about to spice AROS

Now, if only Ignition port were finished we surely might had a decent AROS base office suite, together with MuiBase; the actual problem in finishing Ignition is non trivial. According to mazze itself in this thread on AROS-exec, it is depending from the actual order of "struct node":

Problem is that AROS has the elements of "struct Node" wrong on X86. This is supposed to be fixed with ABI V1. Unfortunately, Ignition makes *heavy* use of linked lists.

I could:

-continue porting when V1 ABI is released

-fixing list handling in Ignition which would be a lot of work which wouldn't be any longer necessary when V1 is out

-compiling me a version of AROS with the right order of Node. I could continue porting but I couldn't release the result until V1 is out.

All sucks somehow.

Further in the thread, phoenixconsole ask for how long might still take to Staf Verhaegen to finish the ABI 1.1; Staf's answer does not look too encouraging:

If I don't get help months to years from now. Problem seems to be that for being able to work on ABI V1 you need very good knowledge of AROS internals, Amiga OS internals and low level programming. It seems it is difficult to find people that have these capabilities and want to do it as their hobby activity. Additionally no glory or money can currently be gained by it.!!!

Staf is quite right: actually very few people have the required knowledge to help him in fix the ABI, and the actual AROS documentation, that should help provide that kind of knowledge is still kinda incomplete: lately even the quite famous "Linux lady" Carla Schroeder wrote two articles about the importance of documentation in Linux magazine: they can be found here and here, hoping to give guidelines for the actual coders, and maybe some non-coder to help therm in write it.

Simone "samo" Bevilacqua finally ported BOH to AROS, and it behave nicely even under qemu! BOH is one of the new generation commercial software available on the Amiga platforms (a little but, considered the platform diffusion, important avantguarde of a hopefully bigger production that include even Cinnamon Writer itself) and has been prepared for all the Amiga platforms so far: os 4, morphos and now even AROS. Despite some gitches with the sound due to the SDL libraries (and i expect things to imnprove thanks to the recent Deadwood work), the game runs fine even on qemu.

BOH for AROS

This coming year, God and Cash willing, is my intention to attend once more the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles; will introduce the new features of AROS, the Icaros distribution, the new software and, if possible, even a native AROS box. Will write more about it soon; just mind that if somebody want to help me next february can get in touch with me at the email on the right side of the blog - the Get in Touch with Simone Bernacchia link, that I will repeat here, just remember to replace the sentences between square brackets.

See you at Pianeta Amiga!

2009-09-18T01:41:36+00:00

Icaros Desktop will be at the 13rd edition of Pianeta Amiga, the longest running Amiga event in Europe. See you on Saturday, September 26th 2009 at the "Palaesposizioni" of Empoli, near the wonderful town of Florence, Italy. It will be a good place to meet other AROS and Amiga fans, see with your eyes and touch with your hands the power of new iMica systems and other PCs running Icaros Desktop.

2009-09-16T16:06:12+00:00

Small steps

Spare time is still an issue, but at least there were a few commits by me.

I am trying to get the pointers in sync on non-Picasso96 screens. For P96 screens this is rather trivial, as I know, where the upper left corner of the amigaOS screen in compared to my AROS mouse coordinates.

It all comes down to coordinates conversion from AROS to amigaOS.

WinUAE does this different, it just hides the windows pointer and so the amigaOS mouse is the only one existing.

Somehow I don't like this. I take the AROS mouse coordinates and try to move the amigaOS mouse exactly below the AROS mouse. For P96 this works perfectly.

For OCS/ECS/AGA screens, there is some kind of border around the screen, which (for me) is hard to calculate. But I seem to be getting there.

But as life goes, I triggered quite a bug in the Gtk GUI. It uses arrays to store the widget pointers, for example an array, which hold all sound option widgets (One widget for "mono" and so on).

Those arrays were not NULL terminated, so it was hard to say, how many elements were in there. And there were quite some code parts like that:


while(array[i++]) {
  do_sth(array[i]);
}

Which of course terminates not really on the end of the array. So I ended up, NULL terminating all arrays. Still some crashes. So I ended up recounting all possible elements of those arrays and correcting the size of them. Boring work, but now it stopped crashing.

Bad thing is, that I also found a too small array in code written by me ;).

So what is the lesson for today: C arrays are evil. Sometimes.

Diario: Tecnologie: AROS: Il re e' nudo, e sta per essere investito da un Bus...

2009-09-12T22:00:00+00:00

.chiaro {background-color:#888; padding:16px; font-style:italic;} Avviso: In questo momento una situazione MOLTO difficile nella mia vita reale mi costringe a trascurare il blog e la traduzione dell'articolo in inglese- spero di risolvere al piu' presto possibile.

Per la prima volta questo articolo e' uscito prima in inglese poi in italiano, anche a causa del fatto che siccome viene anche postato in Arosworld.net ed e' diverso tempo che non scrivo, ho dato priorita' all'audience internazionale.

Proma di tutto abbiamo dei nuovi port:ing: Fishy_fis ha recentemente portato Dosbox sotto AROS: nonostante alcuni problemi con dei tasti speciali della tastiera, funziona decentemente e permette di usare vecchi giochi e programmi per DOS e, seppur non perfettamente, Windows 3.1. Paolo Besser nel suo blog ha mostrato come fosse in grado di far girare il vecchio Word 2.0 per Windows correttamente in Dosbox.
Mi permetto di precisare come, nonostante abbiamo Dosbox e J-UAE, questa non sia una giustificazione per non portare o scrivere nuovi programmi: naturalmente AROS funziona in hardware molto piu' potente dei vecchi Amiga o delle macchine DOS e programmi che ne sfruttino le potenzialita' non sono solo benvenuti ma anche desiderati; inoltre scrivere applicazioni per AROS permette, con uno sforzo ridotto, di adattarle facilmente per gli altri sistemi Amiga-like e renderle accessibili a una quantita' almeno tripla (approssimativamente) di utenti.

Inoltre da quando un po' di tempo fa, ho provato a creare il mio pannello di controllo network in amilua, sembra che anche altre persone abbiano scoperto la flessibilita' di zulu e alcune piccole utilities scritte in amilua cominciano ad apparire.

Ad esempio Yannick "Yannickescu" Erb ha recentemente scritto WHD Menu, un loader alternativo per giochi sotto WHDload che si interfaccia con Janus-UAE. Non avendo ancora installato e configurato J-UAE non ho esperienze dirette di come funziona l'utility ma le schermate paiono promettere abbastanza bene: la GUI include schermate del gioco (prese o dai dati della newicon o da una apposita directory "screenshots"), la lista dei giochi, un sommario testuale e una interfaccia custom per fare le configurazioni per ogni gioco. Al di la di alcune pecche (un discreto livello di configurazione "a mano" e' necessario sia dal lato AROS che nella macchina virtuale, visti i parametri dell'installazione di WHDload) e delle solite limitazioni di zulu (tra cui quella ben nota di non essere in grado di aggiornare liste - la finestra deve essere ridisegnata), l'applicazione pare comportarsi bene ed e' stata disegnata con una certa cura per i dettagli, mostrando il potenziale di amilua. Spero veramente che Mazze trovi il tempo di includere callback hooks e anche di includere una integrazione con Cairo (esiste un binding per lua ma non e' stato portato sotto AROS) inmodo di avere un kit di sviluppo per principianti e per chi ha bisogno di sviluppare applicazioni rapidamente.

Un paio di settimana fa, lo stack USB Poseidon e' stato posto in "collaudo" ufficialmente, invitando gli utenti a postare i logs di sistema per aggiustare eventuali problemi dell'ultima ora.
Io ho testato l'immagine speciale approntata da Paolo Besser su entrambi i miei portatili: quello vecchio, un ASUS a1300 con p3/900 ,384 mega di ram e venti giga di hard disk, e quello nuovo: un Dell Vostro con processore AMD Sempron, 1,5 giga di ram e 160 giga di Hard disk.

Nel vecchio laptop, purtroppo, i risultati sono stati deludenti: Poseidon non ha riconosciuto il mio USB OHCI hub e, quindi, nessuna delle periferiche che ho provato ad inserire (Platon ha definito lo stack del mio laptop "vecchio e buggato": il solito c..o:P); invece nel mio Dell Vostro 1000 quasi tutte le chiavette sono state riconosciute (al di la di una vecchia chiavetta Staples a 64 megabytes divisa in due partizioni).So che un bug report e' stato gia' inoltrato per il controller SIS USB e ho saputo che Neil Cafferkey, avendo lo stesso controller, ci sta dando un occhiata per vedere se c'e' modo di farlo funzionare.

Come si comporta Poseidon, per i non amighisti? Si comporta un po' come il device managfer di Windows xp ma con piu' parametri: quando si inserisce una periferica per la prima volta, un requester appare e, se non e' stato fatto precedentemente, chiede quale device name usare per la periferica stessa da DOS ed altri parametri: per un utente amighista questo e' cosa normale,visto che Amiga OS non supporta nativamente USB in os 3.x; per un utente windows o amighista di ritorno, come me, puo' sembrare un po' criptico ma ci si fa l'abitudine. In Poseidon la filosofia non e' esattamente "plug-and-play", bensi' "plug-configure-once-and-play", un approccio che per certi amighisti pare essere molto piu' naturale.

Ho comunque da fare dei commenti non proprio positivi alla documentazione: prima di tutto la docuimentazione di Poseidon, in formato AmigaGuide non e' disponibile insieme allo stack ma, per ottenerla, bisogna scaricare la versione Amiga o quella MorphOS e prenderla da li [EDIT: siccome questo articolo e' vecchio e nel frattempo il sorgente di Poseidon e' stato rilasciato in licenza APL non ho idea se ora la documentazione e' compresa o meno]: essendo in formato AmigaGuide, l'utilizzo di Autodoc Reader per leggerla e' pressoche' obbligatorio; secondo, il target della documentazione pare indubbiamente essere un utente amiga smaliziato che conosce discretamente il funzionamento dell'OS e della macchina - cosa che, visto che quando Poseidon venne rilasciato solo gli utenti della linea dura usavano amiga e MOS, aveva senso al momento - ma, siccome il target di AROS e' decisamente piu' vasto, avrebbe un senso riscrivere la documentazione per utenti meno avvezzi a come le cose funzionano nel mono amighista spiegando cosa succede e cosa fare in maniera piu' semplice.

Per illustrare meglio cosa intendo faro' qui un esempio realmente accaduto: un mio amico si era procurato una chiavetta ethernet USB dotata del chipset dm9601 - dichiarata da Platon compatibile nella documentazione di Poseidon. Al di la del fatto che la chiavetta non veniva riconosciuta in maniera corretta siccome l'ultima versione id essa non era riconosciuta dalla versione di test (cosa aggiustata in un secondo momento), non era chiaro come avremmo dovuto configurare il computer per poterci andare online.

Cecando di farsi spazio attraverso la docuimentazione e ottenendo informazioni da platon a spizzichi e bocconi via IRC, e' venuto fuori che il file.device che guida la periferica (e che deve essere puntato allo stack TCP/IP) viene caricato in memoria - nota bene: non in un file .device visibile e puntabile in ram disk, ma in MEMORIA - quindi in breve si dovrebbe indicare il nome del file .device (indicato dentro la guida) o come periferica cui puntare o dentro il file di configurazione interfaces in ENVARC:AROSTCP/db/ oppure, se si usa il pannello di controllo Network, creare un falso file .device - come un file vuoto di testo - chiamarlo con il nome dm9601eth.device (nel nostro caso) e salvarlo dentro DEVS:networks/ per poi farlo puntare dal pannello di controllo.

Come si puo' vedere questo e' un singolare modo tipico di Amiga OS per gestire alcune periferiche e persone che non sono avvezze ai modi amighisti di lavorare possono perdersi facilmente; ancora una volta ribadisco che siccome AROS, volente o nolente punta a diventare una porta di ingresso per nuove leve verso il mondo Amiga, e' mia personale opinione che la guida di Poseidon dovrebbe prima di tutto essere fornita insieme ad AROS e, possibilmente, essere anche riscritta in modo da essere piu' comprensiva verso persone nuove al sistema e al suo modo di lavorare.

Ma, tornando ai miglioramenti ottenuti, tra i requisiti della bounty c'era quello di permettere ad AROS di bootare da una chiavetta usb; il 4 agosto nella mailing list degli sviluppatori Chris Hodges annuncia:

Poseidon e' ora disponibile al boot usando il parametro kernel "enableusb" da GRUB.
Ma, siccome il fat.handler e il filesystem cd non sono disponibili dentro il kernel, fare il boot da una chiavetta in formato FAT o da CD-ROM non e' ancora possibile. Invece il boot da una chiavetta formattata SFS o AFS dovrebbe funzonare ma non l'ho testato.

Michal ha corretto Chris ricordandogli che il filesystem CD e' disponibile dentro il kernel sin dai tempi della sua implementazione base dello stack OHCI, ma al di la' di questo ci si trova in una situazione dove AROS "potrebbe" bootare da chiavetta USB ma la chiavetta non e' riconosciuta da HDToolbox. Fortunatamente pero' l'utility installAROS puo' essere diretta a vedere la chiavetta nello stesso modo in cui lo stack TCP viene diretto a usare la scheda di rete USB, ovvero scrivendo "a mano" il nome della device nel campo di testo "device" se l'opzione "wipe disk" e' selezionata - NOTA: Non ho provato questo siccome non ho schiavette extra su cui sperimentare quindi per favore non provate ad usare questa opzione: non so se si comportera' come previsto o se cancellera' invece il disco principale; fatelo solo se - come al solito - sapete cosa state facendo e avete un back-up dei dati.

A meta' agosto Paolo Besser ha rilasciato la versione 1.1.3 di Icaros Desktop [Nota: siamo gia' alla 1.1.5 ma questo lo diro' nel prossimo articolo]. Come immaginabile, la piu' importante feature aggiunta e' l'inclusione dello stack Poseidon ma vorrei anche aggiungere altri piccoli contributi come la guida rapida di OWB scritta da Nikos, la solita nuova build di files di sistema (dallo snapshot del 31 luglio) e l'inclusione dell'applicazione LiveUpdater nella distribuzione.

A causa di cio' mi sono deciso a rimpiazzare la mia macchina virtuale QEMU con la nuova distribuzione, non senza qualche problemino. Prima di tutto oh scoperto che lanciando il nuovo .bat file da una cartella diversa faceva chiudere QEMU indipendentemente dalla scelta che facevo nel GRUB, quindi ho deciso di muovere il nuovo drive virtuale nella stessa cartella e messo il nome del nuovo drive nel file .bat: questo ha fatto funzionare la macchina virtuale ma, se con schermo pieno scelgo l'opzione "best fit" da GRUB, qemu si chiude di nuovo (se lo faccio con modo finestra ottengo una finestra stesse dimensioni dello schermo); siccome il mio schermo e' 1280x800, uno dei famigerati 16:9, la risoluzione impostata 1024x768 mi e' un poco scomoda se lavoro in finestra e questo mi ha portato ad editare il file boot/grub/grub.cfg per aggiungere due modi 800x600, uno a 16 e uno a 32 bit, e questo mi ha fatto scoprire un nuovo fastidioso bug dell'editor [Nota: al momento in cui scrivo pare che il colpevole sia stato individuato in exec stesso e il bug pare esser risolto, ma faro' sapere di piu' in seguito... ]: cancellare qualcosa in mezzo a una linea di testo ha la spiacevole conseguenza di riempire il resto della linea con il primo carattere a destra del cursore sovrascrivendo il contenuto legittimo; mi sono dovuto arrangiare premendo return davanti ad ogni modifica che andavo a fare per ridurre i danni; spero che questo bug sia risolto presto in quanto il fatto che l'editor principale di AROS non funziona e' piuttosto fastidioso.

Il nuovo bug dell'editor

Un altra cosa che ho voluto provare era se potevo usare poseidon con Icaros in QEMU; per fare questo ho cercato dei tutorial di QEMU in rete ed ho trovato questa pagina wiki della distro Slackware Linux dove viene spiegato come montare periferiche USB in QEMU; non esattamente una passeggiata nel parco ma neanche troppo complicato:

prima di tutto e' necessario entrare nella modalita' linea di comando di QEMU con la combinazione di tasti CTRL+ALT+2; quindi nel prompt inserire il seguente comando:

usb_add host [vendor_ID]:[product_ID]

e tornare di nuovo nello schermo principale con la combinazione di tasti CTRL+ALT+1.
Per ottenere i due codici vendor_id e product_id, siccome windows non ha un comando lsusb come linux, ho trovato un interessante freeware chiamato USBDevView, che mi mostra tutte le periferiche USB connesse al sistema e relativi dati e parametri.

L'utility USBDevView e, nel riquadro rosso, i parametri Vendor_ID e Product_ID richiesti per montare periferiche USB sotto QEMU.

Una volta ottenuti i codici ho provato ad aggiungere la mia chiavetta USB (gia' testata e funzionante con hardware reale) nel modo indicato nella wiki ma non ho ottenuto nessun feedback da dentro QEMU. Non so se questo possa esser colpa di Poseidon, di QEMU oppure non ho montaot la periferica nella maniera giusta ma siccome la mia macchina virtuale parte con il parametro -usb incluso, mi aspettavo di essere gia' in grado di montare periferiche quando volevo. Aspetto suggerimenti in merito.

Insieme al completamento dello stack Poseidon, un altra interessante utility sta per essere rilasciata sotto AROS: SCANdal, scritto da Michal "rzokol" Zukowsky e' una interfaccia grafica per Betascan (un port dei drivers XSANE da linux); questo front-end e' gia' uscito per MorphOS e uscira' presto per Amiga OS 4; la versione AROS ha avuto qualche problema dovuto ai soliti bug Zune ma e' gia' disponibile: unico problema non ci sono drivers per AROS, siccome betascan era stato scritto in parte in SAS C e in parte in assembler 68k; sotto MorphOS supporta solo Umax scanner SCSI e Rzokol sta scrivendo drivers USB per Epson e HP, grazie al port di Poseidon, ma al momento non sono ancora pronti. Speriamo presto.

Un altro programmatore Amiga/AROS, "Steril707" aveva cominciato un po' di tempo fa a fare esperimenti con il port di Cairo fatto da Rob per Traveller e vedere se era in grado di utilizzarlo per progammare delle utilities: il risultato dei suoi sforzi e' al momento quello che lui ha battezzato "Shotofop": un semplice programma per manipolare immagini con pochi essenziali comandi, come ridimensionare, tagliare, ruotare, disegnare con pennello e selezionare parti dell'immagine. questa prima versione e' molto elementare ed usa, per fare esperimenti, la toolbar di Photoshop (naturalmente un set originale di icone dovrebbe sostituirlo al piu' presto); il programma supporta anche layers, pur in numero limitato. Tra i futuri di piani di Steril l'implementazione parziale del formato PSD. Personalmente ho suggerito a Steril alcuni miglioramenti, inclusa l'idea di mettersi in contatto con Rzokol e integrare SCANdal con Shotofop, potrebbe venirci fuori qualcosa di interessante...

Kryzstof "Deadwood" Smiechowicz ha fatto il port della versione 7.5 di MESA sotto forma di MESA.library, portando a termine un lavoro tentato un paio di anni fa da Kalamatee; siccome AROS non ha ancora il supporto hardware per il 3D (supporto delegato alla bounty per Gallium 3D, ancora bassina per essere interessante, quindi donate gente;) ) il rendering e' attualment tutto svolto via software. Recentemente Deadwood ha anche preparato il supporto per GLU e GLUT e un primo supporto per SDL che ha permesso il porting di alcuni giochi, quali Abuse, Block Out 2 e Open Red Alert (che ha ancora qualche problemino). In passato deaswood aveva portato il client di Eternal Lands ed aveva incluso nel port la vecchia versione di MESA di Kalamatee; ora le nuove versioni dovrebbero appoggiarsi alla libreria.

Invece notizie non troppo buone vengono dal fronte della bounty per il Kickstart replacement: sono venuto a sapere via IRC che Greg "Bheron" Casamento si e' rotto una gamba in luglio ed ora, ovviamente, si sta concentrando maggiormente verso la riabilitazione. Da me e dalla comunita' AROS auguri per una pronta guarigione.

Lo scorso luglio Amiga Os 4.1 e' stato recensito su OSNews.com da Thom Holverda. Devo includere il fatto che Thom, giornalista piuttosto noto in OSNews, ha iniziato la sua carriera informatica come utente Mac e BeOS ed e' attualmente un advocate di Haiku-OS; questo significa che la sua esperienza con Amiga e il suo funzionamento interno (come vengono gestite le finestre, come funziona il workbench, le librerie,etc.) e' piuttosto scarsa se non inesistente.

Il risultato e' che questa recensione fornisce un punto di vista "fresco" su Amiga OS e puo' essere comparata all'esperienza di un novizio.

Devo anche aggiungere che alcune delle osservazioni che ha fatto sono secondo me fondate come ad esempio gli schermi spostabili, cosa che mi piacerebbe vedere su AROS, peccato che sia a Kalamatee che a Rob non piacciono...

Quello di cui AmigaOS ha bisogno e' di un set-up con pochi schermi e l'abilita' di spostare finestre da uno schermo all'altro [e io aggiungo files e dati - nda]. Attualmente e' possibile configurare le finestre in modo da apparire in un determinato schermo, e mentre questo e' utile per, ad esempio, vecchi giochi Amiga, non e' semplice da gestire per utenti novizi come me. Questa feature ha un ottimo potenziale, comunque e spero che gli sviluppatori AmigaOS la utilizzeranno di piu' in futuro.

Sono conscio del fatto che i sistemi operativi commerciali Amiga-like sono devisamente piu' avanzati di AROS, che testo quasi ogni giorno (basta pensare a cose come puntatore interattivo, iconificazione di programmi e vista dei files come lista, che mancano tutte ancora sotto AROS), ma molti concetti di base rimangono gli stessi, ad esempio il modo in cui i sistemi AmigaOS gestiscono le finestre - come non vengano portate di fronte al clic del mouse - o il bisogno di aggiornare e fare gli snapshot delle finestre del workbench "a mano" per vedere tutti i files: queste sono alcune delle cose che non sono piaciute a Thom; personalmente sull'argomento delle finestre non portate di fronte col clic del mouse mi sento piu' a mio agio con il metodo amighista (chiaramente), ma sento sinceramente la mancanza dell'aggiornamento automatico e dei file e della posizione (AROS supporta l'aggiornamento automatico dei file ma non con FFS), e non sono il solo:

Il file manager inoltre non si aggiorna da solo: e' necessario aggiornare manualmente la vista di una cartella se ci si e' messo qualcosa di nuovo. Ci sono delle soluzioni di terze parti che risolvono questo problema ma preferirei che qualcosa di cosi' elementare fosse parte dell'instalazione di base.

...

Parlando di finestre, Amiga OS pare avere un problema persistente nel mantenere le dimensioni delle finestre - quasi tutte le applicazioni paiono rifiutarsi di mantenere le dimensioni fissate, e questo comincia ad essere decisamente fastidioso dopo alcuni giorni.

Le conclusioni finali di Thom sono buone ma non entusiasmanti, e non e' la prima volta che qualcuno le riporta in rete dalla pubblicazione della recensione:

AmigaOS e' bello ed e' divertente. Per molti di voi sara' un nuovo mondo di tecnologie diverse da esplorare e con cui giofare. E' anche un mondo ben organizzato ed implementato, con un file-system intuitivo, un file layout elastico (e' possibile muovere tutto dovunque, in teoria), interessanti features come gli schermi spostabili e molte altre cose interessanti. E' anche estremamente configurabile e, se avessi avuto piu' tempo, mi sarebbe piaciuto esplorare piu' in profondita' il sistema per poterlo usare al massimo del potenziale.

Ma purtroppo, codesto divertimento e bellezza costano molto cari, e non sto parlando del costo dell'hardware e del software. Nonostante il belletto posto dagli sviluppatori sul sistema ( in guisa di trasparenze ed altre features estetiche) e' ancora evidente che AmigaOS e' una sorta di reliquia del passato. Il portfolio programmi e' obsoleto e incompleto, manca la memoria protetta e molti pannelli di controllo sono estremamente difficili da capire e da configurare.

AmigaOS 4.1 semplicemente non mi ha fatto entrare. E' come essere invitati da un tuo amico ad una festa dove non conosci nessuno degli invitati. Il tuo amico promette di rimanere al tuo fianco e di farti sentire a tuo agio nel gruppo, ma una volta arrivato, il tuo amico scompare tra la folla e ti lascia in disparte. E il gruppo di persone si conosce l'un l'altro da 30 anni. E si scambiano 30 anni di storie condivise. E non sono realmente interessati in nuove persone: questa e' una rimpatriata, piu' che una festa.

Sento che e' importante ricordare che queste sono le conclusioni di qualcuno che ha iniziato la sua esperienza con l'informatica da un punto diverso dal nostro: questo a dire che molte delle cose e dei modi di approcciarsi alla tecnologia che noi Amighist/mossiani/arosiani di solito diamo per scontato, vengono affrontati con una diversa "forma mentis"; potrei portare un esempio di una persona che impara a guidare una macchina con il cambio automatico e di una invece che impara con il cambio manuale, comparando in questo caso gli amighisti ai guidatori con cambio manuale e Thom al guidatore con cambio automatico.

Come amighista "di ritorno" ed oltretutto non avendo aggiornato il mio sistema dopo la versione 3.1 (il mio 1200 a casa ha il kickstart 3.0 e non ho avuto i soldi ne' il fegato di aggiornarlo), mi sono ritrovato a dover riempire il gap con i sistemi 3.5 e 3.9, che, pu avendo il merito di aver aggiornato la tecnologia delle piattaforme classic, hanno in parte trasformato (in mia opinione) l'elegante e snello os 3.1 in una sorta di blob rappezzato e appesantito. Nonostante cio', il fatto di avere ancora la mentalita' amighista (molto piu' aperta a sperimentazioni e smastricci) mi ha aiutato a comprendere che se fossi stato un novellino e avessi approcciato AROS per la prima volta, o anche morphOS o Amiga os 4.x, probabilmente mi sarebbero apparsi altrettanto criptici che un linux o comunque molto primitivi. E questo ha ispirato il mio commento alla recensione, qui sotto tradotto:

Ammetto che e' difficile per me essere impartiale quando un OS "fratello" e' coinvolto. Thom, come osservatore esterno, ha espresso le sue perplessita' su Amiga OS 4.1; questo mi ha portato ancora una volta a concludere come gli Amiga OS moderni, incluso il mio pupillo AROS, sono fatti principalmente "dagli Amighisti per gli Amighisti", parafrasando il noto detto comunemente usato per descrivere Linux.
Quello che intendo e' che, ad esempio, quando mi sono interessato ad AROS nel 2006 ed ho provato il live CD sul mio computer, la prima cosa che me ne ha fatto infatuare e' stato un feeling simile a quello che provavo usando l'Amiga OS originale, nel bene e nel male: ci sono dei difetti ma sono "quei" difetti che conosciamo e che un amighista affronta ogni giorno.

Come il discorso del Workbench: non e' mai stato il miglior file manager e no i lo sappiamo: il fido Directory Opus o filemaster sono stati i migliori amici dell'amighista sin dal lontano 1988 e ci hanno aiutato a superare codesti difetti; ancora oggi gli utenti Amiga OS ed AROS usano Dopus per maneggiare decentemente i loro files (che sia il commerciale Magellan sotto Amiga Os o il bacatissimo port open source della versione 4 sotto aros).

Molti dei paradigmi e dei canoni di usabilita' del desktop Amiga appaiono obsoleti a utenti che vengono da altri sistemi operativi mentr invece persone come me, che ci sono abituate, si sentono a proprio agio con le finestre che non si portano avanti cliccandoci sopra, cosa che mi permette di concentrarmi sulla finestra in primo piano e di fare altre operazioni nelle finestre dietro di essa come spostare files mentre leggo un blog, ma cose come questa sono ancora una volta soggettive e risentono della percezione personale e di abitudini consolidate.

Sono personalmente contento che, dopo molti anni di inerzia, le cose si sono rimesse in moto nel mondo Amiga; problema e' che ci sono moltissime cose in cui tocca inseguire per tornare al passo con i tempi; al momento gli Amiga OS sono solamente un mercato di nicchia per pochi aficionados per motivi principalmente hobbistici, e pare che per lungo tempo le cose possono restare allo stesso livello, se i problemi piu' grossi non verranno risolti, anche se ho un buon presentimento per il mercato dei netbook...

Per finire, voglio riassumere la mia opinione personale: se non avete mai usato Amiga OS, volete testarlo ma non avete i soldi necessari per una delle schede, la opzione e' di provare AROS, considerato che e' gratis e che gira su molti vecchi PC (e anche in macchine virtuali); se una volta provato AROS e il modo Amiga di lavorare, pensate di essere pronti ad approfondire, allora potete fare il "salto" e comprare una SAM per AMiga OS o una EFIKA , a seconda dei gusti.

Come potete vedere, appoggio in parte l'opinione di Thom: mi piacerebbe, naturalmente, vedere affrontati e risolti i problemi principali di Amiga OS/MOS/AROS, soprattutto per la parte che riguarda l'usabilita'; ho anche alluso al fatto che al momento le schede che supportano AmigaOS 4 o MorphOS possono essere fuori portata per quegli hobbisti con portafogli semivuoti e ho proposto di nuovo AROS come principale punto di partenza (a costo zero e senza impegno, come dicevano nei vecchi annunci pubblicitari) per conoscere il mondo Amighista, nonostante il suo essere incompleto (sempre meno, per fortuna, ma ancora niente puntatore interattivo,acc!). A tal proposito l'ammodernamento di Wanderer e' stato oggetto di questa discussione in Aros-exec; qualcuno qui aveva anche proposto (ancora) di portare Ambient, il window manager di MorphOS rilasciato in licenza open source (GPL) e decisamente piu' potente di wanderer; contro questa proposta ci sono due problemi principali: uno,minore, e' legale: Ambient e' sotto licenza GPL; l'altro, decisamente piu' grosso, e' meramente tecnico: Ambient usa estensivamente classi MUI v4 mentre Zune, l'implementazione open source di MUI usata da AROS, supporta solo le classi della versione 3.8. Steve Jones ha suggerito che potrebbe avere modo di ottenere i sorgenti di Directory Opus magellan e di renderli disponibili alla comunita' (una volta risolti certi problemi di licenza) ma anche se questo fosse possibile, alcune parti di Magellan sono scritte in assembler 68k e questo rende il lavoro di port sotto AROS non banale.

E, come noto, portare applicazioni sotto AROS per riempire i buchi e' cosa difficile a causa della scarsita' di sviluppatori: nonostante l'arrivo di alcune nuove leve, c'e' ancora troppa poca gente che ha le conoscenze necessarie per lavorare sul kernel e i drivers; inoltre, nonostante gli ultimi progressi di AROS ne abbiano migliorato l'immagine e la reputazione presso la comunita' amiga, AROS non e' ancora riconosciuto come un membro della famiglia da diversi della vecchia guardia, come questo thread in Amigapage.it ci mostra.

Sempre a Luglio,un avvenimento piuttosto interessante nel mondo Linux e' stata la (temporanea) scomparsa del capo manutentore di CentOS (capo manutentore, admin di SVN, detentore e admin del dominio e amministratore delle donazioni alla distro); questo avvenimento e' uno degli esempi piu' eclatanti di quella che gli utenti di Slashdot hanno chiamato la Bus Syndrome, ovvero le probabilita' che un progetto open source ha di sopravvivere se i suoi sviluppatori principali e i suoi manutentori principali venissero a mancare (o, metaforicamente, venissero investiti da un autobus).

Il motivo per cui cito la Bus Syndrome e' relativo alla corrente (dis)organizzazione di AROS; nonostante non sia piu' attivamente coinvolto nel progetto, Aaron Digulla, uno dei fondatori e' ancora uno degli admin del dominio aros.org e a quel che so solo admin del server CVS - ovvero il solo che puo' rilasciare accounts CVS agli sviluppatori, e la sua figura e' ancora di primaria importanza nel progetto. E' cosa nota a coloro iscritti alla mailing list degli sviluppatori che i tempi tra la richiesta ad Aaron e il relativo rilascio di un account CVS possono essere nell'ordine di settimane o piu'. Cosa succederebbe se un giorno Aaron per qualche motivo non potesse rilasciare piu' accounts? E' il suo ruolo e il fatto di essere admin del CVS essenziale per la prosecuzione di AROS? Michal Schulz [che ha recentemente finito la fase 1 del port su EFIKA e che ora sta lavorando al port sotto ARM - nda] e' un altra figura chiave del progatto, e ho gia' espresso le mie preoccupazioni in passato nel caso decidesse di finire la sua collaborazione con AROS, suggerendo e auspicando che possa essere scritta una documentazione estensiva per permettere a nuovi sviluppatori di proseguire il lavoro; il fatto che lo scorso luglio la certificazione CVS fosse scaduta e per un mesetto non fosse possibile fare nuove builds ha rinfocolato le mie perplessita': personalmente il mio consiglio e' che, siccome Aaron non e' piu' sviluppatore attivo di AROS da diverso tempo, sarebbe cosa buona se decidesse di dare l'account admin anche a qualcun altro degli sviluppatori piu' importanti per prudenza e per prevenire le grane che si verrebbero a creare in caso non fosse in piu' in grado di svolgere i suoi compiti di admin.

E, per finire, a meta' di agosto la societa' DiscreetFX di Bill Panagouleas, che ha comprato i sorgenti della originale ToasterCG Suite da Newtek e li ha rilasciati in licenza open source, ha riproposto una bounty per portare la ToasterCG suite sotto i moderni Amiga OS, AROS incluso, astraendola dall'originale hardware Amiga. Siccome molti dei programmi della suite,pur essendo scritti in C contengono parti in assembler 68k (con l'eccezione di DigiPaint, scritto completamente in assembler), il comptio non sembra tra i piu' semplici ma, se portato a termine, sicuramente aiuterebbe a colmare il vuoto presente per software di video processing sui nuovi sistemi Amiga e potrebbe essere anche usato come base per scrivere nuove applicazioni.

Icaros Desktop 1.1.5 available for download

2009-09-11T09:59:53+00:00

A new update for Icaros Desktop is available on the main server. Users of Icaros Desktop 1.1.4 can download and install it straight from AROS using OWB, unpacking it with untgz and installing it with Icaros' LiveUpdater, while others should manually download update discs and bring their version up to 1.1.4 as well. Complete releases of Icaros Desktop Live! and Light will follow in the next hours.

Games... Games! GAMES!!!

2009-09-11T09:53:28+00:00

Krzysztof "Deadwood" previous and recent work on SDL and MESA has made more accessible Multi-platform applications based on these gfx set of libraries.
And the proof of principle working is the latest abundant game port activity going on...

Just look at AROS-Archives and AROS-EXEC!

This all seems quite amazing! I guess an award should go for Matthias Rustler and for his never ending porting activity! MAZZE is working around the clock in getting more games on to the AROS platform...
Latest additions include:

Epiphany - a multi-platform clone of Boulderdash (a.k.a Emerald Mine on the Amiga) made with SDL library.

Abuse - A well known 2D side-scrolling platform game developed by Crack dot Com back in mid ninety's. It features light effects, realistic animation and nasty alien-like creatures to destroy.

CRIMSON - Turn-based tactical war game. It can be played against a human opponent in hot-seat mode in front of the same machine, over a network, or via e-mail, or against the computer.

BlockOut - adaptation of the original BlockOut game edited by California Dreams in 1989 - basically a 3d tetris clone.

And now on the works:

Red Alert - The well known RTS of the C&C series!

I guess AROS might not be such a wasted opportunity for Gaming after all. Maybe we will see dedicated AROS games in the future... Who knows?! ;) For now let's enjoy this current batch.

2009-09-11T08:01:37+00:00

It's official: AROS runs on netbooks (natively!)

2009-09-05T01:57:20+00:00

You shouldn't ever do experiments at night, before going to bed, or you'll risk to rest much, much later than you expected. I was just placing my netbook (an Acer Aspire One) on charge, when I thought: "why don't I try booting Icaros Desktop 1.1.4 using my USB DVD drive?". And so I did. I turned on my computer, pressed F12 at boot to choose the boot device, entered my USB DVD drive and... boot

Live! 1.1.4 available, and update issues

2009-08-31T11:21:02+00:00

Some people complained that automatic update from version 1.1.3 to 1.1.4 doesn't work, as the procedure stops somewhere when de-compressing the downloaded ISO image and mounting this one as virtual CD. I sincerely apologize for the issue, but I can't really figure out its origins: the routine is exactly the same that allowed the first two updates (from 1.1.1 to 1.1.2 and from 1.1.2 to 1.1.3)

Icaros Desktop 1.1.4 update ready for download

2009-08-30T22:59:25+00:00

Icaros Desktop has reached version 1.1.4. This quick update is needed to refresh many system files, since AROS has now got better SDL and MESA support, and various libraries has changed to enhance compatibility with other AmigaOS flavours. This means that system files must be updated to prevent compatibility issues with applications compiled with the latest builds of AROS. But this is not only a

Krzysztof "deadwood" Smiechowicz Interview

2009-08-24T23:02:35+00:00

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'.

Diary - Technologies - AROS: the king is naked and being hit by a bus...

2009-08-19T20:00:00+00:00

For the first time I start to write the article in english instead of italian in order to give higher priority to the latest happenings. Will try to keep it short, considered lately I have been kinda late in delivering my usual articles.

So here we are with new ports: Fishy_fis recently ported Dosbox to AROS: despite some issues with the keyboard it mostly works and now allows to use old DOS applications and games, and even with some level of inaccuracy Windows 3.1. Paolo Besser shown in its blog how he was able to run the old Word 2 for Windows under Dosbox. Of course this does not mean that since we have dosbox and J-UAE we should not do new applications: AROS runs in much more powerful hardware than the old Amigas and DOS PCs and new programs using its capabilities are not only welcome but desired: furthermore (and this is not the first time i say it) writing new apps for AROS, will make it available, after a short work of adaptation, also for other Amiga OS systems, therefore three time (approximatively) the users.

Since some time ago i tried to write my own network application in amilua, seems that other people discovered the flexibility of zulu, and some small utilities start to appear.

Yannick "Yannickescu" Erb built WHD Menu, an alternate WHDload launcher in amilua that interfaces with E-UAE, and it looks pretty good: it includes screenshots (either coming from icons if in a supported format or from a screenshot directory) the list of titles and a custom interface GUI to configure it. Despite some minor tweaks (some tweaking is required by the user both on AROS side and UAE side according to the WHDload setting and path on the UAE machine) and the well-known limitations of actual Zulu (as the inability to dynamically update lists) the application has a professional look and shows the potential of the technology. I really hope that Mazze will be able to include callback hooks and hopefully an integration with the Cairo Library soon, in order to have our own base development language for newbies and rapid applications.

Last week the Poseidon stack had been put on validation and all users invited to contribute with their own bug report. I tested the custom AROS build with Poseidon provided by Paolo Besser in both my laptops, the old one, an ASUS a1300 p3/900 with 384 megabytes of RAM and 20 gig and the new one, a DELL vostro 1000 with AMD sempron 1,5 gig ram and 160 gig hard disk.

The test in the old laptop was kinda disappointing:poseidon did not recognized my USB OHCI hub and therefore none of the devices I plugged into it (platon defined my stack very old and bugged) while in the Dell vostro most of the sticks were recognized (beside an old staples 64 megabytes one pre-partitioned in two sections). I know a bug report has been filled for the SIS USB controller and also hear that Neil Cafferkey, haveing the same controller, was trying to see if there was a way to fix that.

You plug your device and a requester window pops up and, if you haven't made it before,it ask to name the device for DOS use and other parameters: this might souind normal to Amiga OS USB adopters that were used to this way of handle USB devices but for me, that i mostly used USB devices on windows, was a different approach: is not exactly a plug-and-play, can be more defined as a plug-configure-once-and-play, somewhat more expected in some occasions.

Some remarks on documentation: first of all, the Poseidon documentation is not available directly with the stack; it has to be retrieved downloading the Amiga stack from Platon's web site and is in AmigaGuide format, therefore the use of AutoDoc Reader is recommended; second of all, the way it was written assumes that the reader have a medium/advanced knowledge of the Amiga OS internals: in the AmigaOS world and time it was developed this made sense, since the only kind of Amiga user around was the die-hard one that used and abused its machine and can also do some little hardware repairs on it; obviously the AROS version of the documentation might need a rewrite, since AROS brings new users, sometimes completely unaware of the Amiga OS way of doing things and some other time not completely aware, as me and a friend of mine.

Will make a real world example: this friend of mine got an USB ethernet card with the dm9601 chipset, that Platon declares supported on Poseidon documentation. Beside the fact that the card was not recognized properly because that version was not supported at the time (fixed), but we had no clue on how to use the card to get online.

Turns out that the device that has to be pointed to the TCP/IP interface is loaded in memory (and this does not mean RAM disk, just RAM) therefore there is no .device file to point; the device name should be simply declared either in the interfaces file in ENVARC:AROSTCP/db/ or, using the network control panel in prefs, first create a fake device file (like an empty text file), name it dm9601eth.device and save it in DEVS:networks/ to make it point from the TCP/IP interface.

That is a pretty singular Amiga way to handle some devices and is kinda unknown outside Amiga world; once again, considered that AROS aims, willing or not, to be the easiest gateway for newcomers to the Amiga World, it is my personal opinion that the Poseidon guide file should be provided with AROS and also re-written to ensure newcomers might be able to use it and configure it.

Beside this, there are also improvements on the part that requires Poseidon to boot from an USB stick; last August 4th, in the developer Mailing List, Chris hodges stated that:

Poseidon is now available at boot time by using the "enableusb" kernel parameter. However, as fat.handler or the cd filesystem are not available inside the kernel, booting from a fat formatted stick or CD rom are still not supported. Booting from SFS/AFS formatted stick or drive should be working, but I didn't test that.

Therefore we are in a situation where AROS COULD boot form an USB stick, problem is the stick is not seen from HDToolbox. Fortunately installAROS can be instructed to see the device in the same way that I explained before for the network NIC, writing the device name in the "device" text area if the "wipe disk" option is selected - NOTE: I did not try that, since have no spare USB sticks to use, so please do not try to use this option, because i dont know if it might wipe your hard disk instead; this unless - as usual - you know what are doing and have back-ups handy.

Paolo Besser released the 1.1.3 version of the now well know main AROS distro, Icaros Desktop. As most of you probably already guessed, the most important feature is the inclusion of the Poseidon stack, but i would also like to point little contributions like the OWB quick handbook made by Nikos, as usual a new batch of system build files (from July 31st) and the inclusion of the LiveUpdater in the distribution.

[troubles with qemu, best fit and USB - and an annoying editor bug]
And so i decided to switch my old QEMU virtual machine with the old one. At first i found out that launching the new .bat file from a different position made QEMU exit with every selection I made form GRUB so i moved the new virtual disk and replaced the name in the batch file, and then it worked. Still, if i use QEMU and select a "Best Fit" option in GRUB, QEMU will close; since my screen is a 16:9 and the 1024x768 option is not feasible as window, i resorted to edit the file boot/grub/grub.cfg to add 800x600 modes, and found an annoying bug: deleting something in the middle of a string causes the first character in front of the cursor to overwrite all that is from him and the end of the line; had toe resort to press enter in front of all parts that i needed to modify to reduce the damage; hope this will be fixed on the coming builds because the fact that the main AROS editor is broken is kinda annoying.

The new annoying editor bug

Another thing that I wanted to check was whether Icaros in QEMU can handle USB devices thanks to Poseidon, so i looked in the net for a tutorial and found this wiki from the Slackware project where explains how to mount USB devices on it, well not exactly user-friendly but not even too complicated: first it is needed to switch in the monitor mode using CTRL+ALT+2, write the following command line:

usb_add host [vendor_ID]:[product_ID]

and switch again with CTRL+ALT+1.

In order to retrieve the vendor_id and product_id codes, since windows xp has no lsusb comand, I found this interesting freeware called USBDevView, that will show all usb devices installed in your system and all related data.

The USBDevView utility and, circled in red, the Vendor_ID and Product_ID codes required to mount USB devices in QEMU

Once i obtained the codes i tried to add my device in the way that was explained in the wiki, and had no feedback from inside QEMU. Now i dont know whether is poseidon fault, QEMU fault or maybe should have done something more than mounting the USB device, but my QEMU starts already with the -usb option and so i expected to be able to mount devices at will. Am accepting suggestions.

And, together with the very close completion of the Poseidon Stack, another interesting utility is about to be released for AROS: coded by Michal "rzokol" Zukowsky, SCANdal is a graphical fontend for Betascan (that is an Amiga OS port of the XSANE drivers from linux); is already gone out for MorphOS and will be out soon also for Amiga OS 4; thje actual development in the AROS side is actually stopped due to another Zune bug in displaying more than one radio button at once, hope Michal will be helped and find a workaround for it.

"Steril707" some time ago started to experiment using Rob's cairo port and see if it was able to take out something interesting from it: the result is what he called "Shotofop": a simple but effective graphic application that allow to do basic operantions such resize, crop, rotate paint and select parts of the paint. The first verison is quite primitive and it uses the Adobe Photoshop toolbar (but of course new and more original button will be used next); it also supoprts a limited number of layers. Steril plans ot implement partly the PSD file format too. I suggested him to get in touch with the author of SCANdal and find a way to make the two applications talk,it might be interesting.

Krzysztof "Deadwood" Smiechowicz ported latest MESA version 7.5 to AROS in shape of mesa.library; since AROS still have no hardware 3D support (delegated to the Gallium 3D bounty, and is still low - please donate!), all the rendering is actually done via software. So far GLU and GLUT are compiling but missing functionalities and incluided as dynamic libs, and SDL implementation is not done yet. In the past Deadwood ported the Eternal Lands Client embedding an old MESA version, now with the release of MESA as a library that will no more needed.

Not so good news from the Kickstart Replacement Bounty phase 1: i went to know through IRC that Greg "bheron" Casamento last month broke its leg and now is obviously focusing more on recovering its health; me and the AROS community wish him to get well soon.

Last month Amiga OS 4.1 has been reviewed from Thom Holverda of OSNews.com. An important preamble is that Thom started its informatic experience on BE-OS and Mac and is an active Haiku-OS supporter, therefore is mostly unaware of the "Amiga Way" of dong things, like our winndow system works, how libraries works, etc.

So the result is something that you can compare to a newbie introduction to the world of Amiga, and give what they call a fresh look on the actual platform state.

I might also say that he had some spot-on observations on things that I would like to see in example on AROS,IF one day will be decided to use draggable screens in Amiga OS style (Kalamatee and Rob actually dislike them btw):

What AmigaOS needs is a few default screens set-up, and the ability to drag and drop windows [and icons or files too when the screen contains a single app on my opinion - nda] from one screen to the other. Currently you have to manually configure windows to appear on certain screens, and while this is useful for running, say, old Amiga games, it's not very user friendly for new users like me. The feature has a lot of potential though, so I hope the AmigaOS developers can capitalise on it more in the future.

I am well aware that the commercial Amiga-like OSes are more advanced than AROS where i meddle almost daily (see iconification, interactive pointer and show as list),but some basic things remained the same, such as the way Amiga OS handle its windows, not clicked by front, or the need to update the workbench manually to show drives and files, and those are among the things Thom did not liked; while personally on the window handling topic I feel at home better on Amiga OS style (obviously), i sincerely miss the automatic update and snapshot in the windows icons and positions (AROS support automatic update, but not for FFS so far), and am not alone:

the file manager also doesn't auto-update its contents; you need to manually update a folder if you downloaded something new into it. There are 3rd party utilities that fix this problem, but I'd prefer it something as basic as this is part of the default installation.

...

Speaking of windows, the AmigaOS seems to have a more persistent problem with retaining window sizes - almost every application refused to remember window sizes, which really starts to get on your nerves after a few days.

The final conclusion Thom draws are good but not exactly the most positive around, and is not the first time those are reported on an Amiga board or blog:

The AmigaOS is cool. It's fun. For most of you, it will be a whole new world of technology to explore and play around with. It's also a well-implemented world, with a logical file system, flexible file layout (you can move everything to everywhere, seemingly), cool features like the draggable screens, and lots of other stuff. It's also remarkably configurable, and given more time, I would've loved to explore more of the innards of the system, to really be able to use the system to its fullest potential.

However, said fun and coolness comes at a massive price, and this time, I'm not talking about the price of the soft and hardware. Despite the lipstick the developers put on the system (in the form of transparency and other fanciness) it's still very clear that the AmigaOS is a relic, a thing from the past. The application portfolio is outdated, lacking, and incapable, there's no protected memory, and many configuration panels are overwhelmingly difficult to understand and use.

AmigaOS 4.1 just didn't let me in. It's like being invited by a friend to a party where you don't know any of the people there. Your friend promises to remain by your side and ease you into the group, but once you arrive, your friend wanders off into the crowd, leaving you by the sidelines. And the group of people have known each other for 30 years. And they're catching up to 30 years of shared history. And they really aren't interested in newcomers - this is a reunion, not a party.

Remember: those are the conclusion of somebody that used to get to know the world of computing starting form a different side of the fence; this means that many things and approaches that we Amiga/MOS/AROS users take usually for granted are approached with a different mind orientation, might take the example of somebody that started driving motor vehicles using automatic gear and instead somebody that started using directly stick-shift, with of course Amigans among the stick-shift users.

Being a returning Amiga User, and having myself not been actively involved in Amiga progresses after 3.1 (my 1200 system is a 3.0 and had no chance nor the money to update the software), i myself had to re-learn many of the glitches introduced with os 3.5 and 3.9, that made a nice fast and efficient system such as the original Amiga OS 3 in a much less efficient and patched kinda blob. But despite that i still have the Amiga mindset and that helped me a lot in the past; i went to realize that without my original Amiga Background a modern OS-4, MOS or even AROS might have looked, if not as dark as a linux, probably much more primitive.

That inspired my main answer in the board:

Well,is hard for me to be objective when a fellow OS is involved; Thom as an outsider of the Amiga world expressed its concerns about AOS 4.1; so far, i got to realise that the Amiga OSes, including my endorsed AROS are made "by amigans for amigans" in paraphrase to the usual saying for linux.
What I mean is that, when i got interested in AROS in 2006 and tried the live CD, the first thing that made me fell in love with it was the feeling similar to the one of using an Amiga OS, in good and in bad: there were undoubtely flaws, but were *our* flaws, stuff we Amiga users had to live with everyday.

Like the workbench: as file manager has always been not the best option: Directory opus or filemaster has been Amiga user best friends since 1989 to help overcome those flaws,and still Amiga and AROS users deal with it either with the commercial old Magellan or the open source dopus 4 revisited, in example.

And now some of the Amiga desktop paradigmas and usability might look outdated to people coming from other systems, while people like me , used that all the time, actually feel comfortable with the windows that does not stack on click, allowing to focus on the main task and handling stuff in the back; but again is all matter of perception and habits.

I am glad that after many years of inertia things started to move in the amiga world again, but the problem is there is a lot to catch up and so far good old Amiga OSes are now a niche market for aficionados and a hobby; and looks like it might stay like this for long time, and not aspire to be more until many of the flaws are catched up, though i have good feelings about the netbook market...

At the end my personal opinion is: if you never used an Amiga OS or like and want to have a taste of it but have no money to spend, the first answer is try AROS, considered it is free and runs in most x86 hardware (and in virtual machines too); then, once you got used to it, if you like it, you can go the next level and buy a SAM for AOS or EFIKA for MOS too, according to tastes.

So, as you can see i endorse in part Thom opinion: of course I would like to see addressed the main problems of Amiga OS/MOS/AROS, epsecially for the usability part; i also pointed on the factr that right now a real Amiga OS or MOS are hard to reach for any hobbyist with little money to spend and proposed once more AROS as main low-cost and low commitment gateway to the Amiga world, despite its actual incompleteness, that thank god is slowly being addressed (but still no interactive mouse pointer, damn!); furthermore the upgrade of Wanderer is the topic of this discussion in Aros-exec, where somebody also proposed (once again) to port Ambient from MorphOS,considered that is open source (GPL licensed) and much more powerful than the actual Wanderer; against this there are two main problems: one is legal but minor - Ambient is licensed under GPL - and the other one is merely technical but bigger - Ambient uses extensively MUI 4 classes and Zune so far supports only barely MUI 3.8. Steve Jones gave the hint that he might have a way to obtain the Directory Opus Magellan source code (once some licensing problems are solved), but even that is a non trivial port, considered parts of it are written in assembler.

And, of course, porting applications and filling the gaps in AROS is pretty matter of lack of developers: despite new blood lately came in, still very few people have the knowledge required to handle the core system coding, and despite the actual progress, still AROS is not yet fully recognized as one of the Amiga-like extended family members, like is shown in a thread in Amigapage.it, here, translated through Google.

An interesting happening of the latest days in the Linux world, about the disappearance (now solved) of the main mantainer of CentOS (and also SVN admin, domain admin and holder of all the monetary donations of the distro) gives insight to what i heard slashdot users call the Bus Syndrome or,in short, how many chances of survival have a project if one of the key mantainers or key developers is gone suddenly missing (or, as a figure speech, hit by a bus).

Now, in AROS there is little organisation as known, but still the figure of Aaron Digulla, founder of the project, one of the admin of the aros.org domain and of the CVS server - therefore the one who can administer CVS accounts - has a primary importance; is well known to the Developer's mailing list subscribers that might take an undetermined amount of time between the request for a CVS account to Aaron and receiving the account datas. But What if for some reason Aaron will come to miss? I wonder: is its position and the fact to be the CVS admin essential for the prosecution of AROS? Michal Schulz [that finished recently phase 1 of EFIKA port and now is working on the ARM port BTW] is another key developer and i already expressed here my concerns for when he will decide to give up AROS development, wishing for all actual core developers to try to documentate as much as possible; now also considered, because of some server upgrade problem, the CVS certificate expired and it has been impossible to build nightly for a couple of weeks, it is my opinion and advice that since Aaron in the last couple of years dropped active development in AROS and is actively busy in other projects, might be a good thing if he decides to give Admin privileges to some of the core developers as a backup move, to prevent any incoming trouble that might happen to ther project in case he might be unable to attend it admin duties anymore.

To finish, another interesting bounty has been rekindled last yesterday: since last year Bill Panagouleas' DiscreetFX acquired the sources for the Video Toaster suite, they also started a bounty for hardware-abstrtact and porting the programs including the ToasterCG suite on the modern Amiga-like OSes, including AROS. Since many of the programs,despite being made in C include parts written in assembly code (with exception of digipaint, being entirely written in assembly) that might be not a trivial work, but if done can surely help the actual lack of good video processing software on modern Amiga systems and also be used as base for new video applications.

2009-08-18T17:49:09+00:00

Progress? What progress?

At the moment, I have nearly no time to code for j-uae. 1h/week does not bring you much further, sorry. I have a lot of "day-job work" to do and the remaining time gets my family and friends.

What is the current bounty status?

1. Must be able to run some classical software which must include: WordWorth 6, Organizer 2, Datastore 2 and Money Matters 4.

WordWorth works on a public screen. Other programs not tested/available, but I see no reason, why the should fail.

2. Must provide support for window and screen based apps so they appear to be running on the host system - including access to public screens.

Public Screens are fine. You can have aros windows on amigaOS public screens and vice versa (still needs some debugging, but will work).

3. Doubling-clicking a 68k application in Wanderer will cause that application to be run in the emulation.

Missing (not started)

4. Each instance of emulation will be a commodity that can be shut down via Exchange.

As you wish. But I don't see the point in here, one instance is enough. But it is a commodity, you can start more than once.

5. Port over a Zune based UAE prefs application.

Done.

6. UAE to use AROS clipboard.

Done.

7. separate directory (for 68K files) dictated by the chosen config.

Not really sure, what this means. UAE handles it this way already.

So what is still missing?

- custom screen support

Should be trivial, as j-uae already can run in full screen mode. But e-uae was never designed to switch between windowed/fullscreen mode on the fly. Opening a custom screen works already, but the closing/switching part is missing completely. I am working on that at the moment, whenever I find some time.

- wanderer start

I will keep that simple and just launch the program without any parameters etc. Should be quite easy. Fancy features like parameters etc can be added later, otherwise this bounty will never be done.

What next?

Vacation. One week. Then we see any further ;).

Latest AROS News!

2009-08-12T21:55:25+00:00

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.

Icaros website hit 250,000 visitors

2009-08-01T14:55:40+00:00

According to our counter, Icaros Desktop website has been visited more than 250,000 times! Thanks for your warm and growing interest in our AROS distribution.

Personal entry - Amiga and my heart beat...

2009-07-27T06:30:22+00:00

I've always refrain myself from posting here personal business unless it's strictly related with AROS. Well the next lines aren't directly attached to AROS, but bear with me, as a shrink is to costly and I just feel the necessity to "put it out of my chest"... So to speak!

I'm swamped with work (not money unfortunately), and I feel unhapy for most of my time. I can hardly sleep, I feel lonely and degraded in several ways.

I've being blaming a few things for my current condition, but yesterday I've come to the conclusion that I was happy being an Amiga nerd, and knowing the inside out of the OS, the hardware, and that provided me a emotional cushion. It sound ridiculous, but all my bad choices through out my life only help to hinder this situation.
The last time I felt really alive was at the Amiga Mira Party in 2000, from that day on, I felt like dieing each time a little (yeah sounds like a song, but reality sucks more...) with clear exceptions from some ultra-positive moments such as my child birth and so on...

I did not bury my "friends" - I still have all the A1200 and A4000 in pieces laying around my grandmother's house. I distinctly lack the will to sell them (reminds me my A500 - I did repent myself from selling it)... And I can't even think in putting them in the garbage!
This sounds ridiculous, and of course it's no the main reason of my unhappiness, but it reflects my unwillingness on letting go of the past, and addressing the future.

So keeping in touch with AROS is a reason to keep me temporarily sane. Because AROS is a future... It does not simply rely on nostalgia, but on gathering the OS finest points and update them to today's standards.

And each triumph of AROS does bring me a smile...

Do I have reasons to smile? Well it certainly seems so - Poseidon is nearly there, O1i work is promising, Rob is definitely back, Paolone work on IcAROS is getting wider user audience, more and more people regard AROS as an Amiga option...

As for me I'll won't be doing no AROS work for now, as I lack the time... But I'll be around.
And hopefully I'll be happier by then.

Poseidon officially enters testing phase: new ISO

2009-07-25T11:53:13+00:00

Thanks to all the people that tested Poseidon in the latest days, Chris Hodges fixed many issues encountered during the AROS port and now our USB stack should be enough stable for most configurations. Anyway, today Poseidon entered its official test week and, if everything is fine, it will be released under the terms of the AROS Public License. On our mirror there is a NEW ISO from July 25th,

2009-07-21T12:00:25+00:00

emulation heaven

Nothing happened to my code for quite some time, sorry. No spare time -> no code.

So this blog entry is the best I can do for you ;).

Did you ever wonder, how my development machine looks like? I'll give you an impression.

The only native operating system is Windows XP. It runs two things:
- an X Server (Xming) and
- VMWare

In VMWare I run Debian (and sometimes IcAros). Debian opens quite some xterms on the X Server (rootless).

In those xterms, tirc is running as my irc client and I can start AROS from there. So AROS is running on Xming, too.

Now inside AROS, I can run j-uae (rootless of course).

It's a pity, AROS can not run rootless, otherwise I would really loose the overview, which window runs where ;).

And this is where it ends (this is just one X11 window):

This is m68k-ffplay (new version from aminet) running rootless inside j-uae, which is running on x86-aros running linux hosted running in VMware on Windows XP.

Any further questions?

Btw, the video runs quite smooth, fascinating.

The only remaining question is, which DS9 episode is being played ;)?

Best of both worlds? ;-)

2009-07-17T17:37:01+00:00

After so long talking about new Icaros updates, new features, new USB stak, new everything, let me talk about something really old. Since from Icaros Desktop 1.1.2 we've got also DosBox (which is not fully working, however, due to some issues with international keyboards makeing it crash hard pressing special characters keys), I just asked myself if it was usable for something better than gaming.

Diary:Technologies:Amiga / AROS: Hacko ergo sum

2009-07-16T22:00:00+00:00

This time will not talk about lua programming, also because since many of the project that i tried to work in either got covered by somebody else, (like the network control panel or the amistart calendar). Am also still thinking on how to build some tutorial to explain the base concepts on how to generate a zulu interface.

Andrea "Afxgroup" Palmete' accepted the OS4 Depot Gnash os 4 port bounty: considered that Gnash is a project under GPL license, it might be possible, once the bounty has been satisfied, to port it in other amiga-like systems with adequate modifications (being a os4 project it uses reaction for its - thank God quite basic - GUI); so far results are pretty good: youtube movies are working properly and flash applications up to version 7 are quite supported too; a summer of code task should bring to the mainstream project the actionscript 3 classes support. Personally i still hope that somebody might build one day an open source builder for flash contents: in the past there were attemts such as f4l but now the projects looks abandoned and the project that should have replaced it, called UIRA, was actually suspended for political/legal issues; the original developers made a call for new people that would have liked to bring it on....

In the meanwhile Stanislaw Sszymczyk continued to update OWB that, so far, reached version 0.9.7 [edit: 0.9.8 is already out]: it fixes some errors that brought 0.9.6 version (like inability to submit forms in some pages such as the aros-exec forum one) and features also a basic bookmark manager. Beside that, the cookie handling has been updated in the mainstream version and implemented (fixed a bit more too) in the AROS version.

I am also glad to announce that now the AJAX editor of my blog platform is working too unde OWB, beside the minor annoyance to need to refresh the page once i saved the content.

OWB 0.9.7 on my blog edit platform - the bookmark window is in the bottom right.

Paolo Besser is working too in try to improve its Icaros Desktop distro: recently, beside the new Icaros Desktop 1.1.2 release, he published a new Automatic Upgrade tool that will detects upgrades either from an .iso file, a CD-ROM or from internet, downloading a nightly.iso and using it to upgrade the system I tried it yesterday but it makes my QEMU environment close, guess because the disk ran out of space (my system partition is small) while downloading the nightly .iso from the net.

And Chris "platon42" Hodges is working on fixing the port of Poseidon on AROS: one of the main problems that Chris is having now is that he is lacking a real x86 hardware where to test on: its actual method of testing is to develop on VmWare, upload its latest binaries on the nightly buillds and have users with real hardware report about any problems it might arise. So far some peripherals are recognized and some can also be mounted, but in other cases we still have either system freezes and hangups or the new inserte dperipheral might not be recognized properly by the stack. Once that is done, seems there still are some problems with the fat.handler, where in example the OS command copy does not work properly from FFS/SFS to FAT yet...

Matthias "Mazze" Ruster is busy, together with the YAM developing team in porting finally the well-known Amiga mail client on AROS; the port is virtually finished, beside a necessary bug hunting for some specific system-related flaws.

Last June 6 I had the occasion and the privilege to participate at a monthly reunion of the Southern California Commodore/Amiga Network (SCCAN) in the town of Castaic, north of the Los Angeles County and San Fernardo Valley, almost at the limit of the huge LA urban area. In the garage of one of those almost-cloned suburb houses i was greeted from Joew May, one of the members and the house owner. On ce the garage door slide up i faced its "laboratory": on the various crowded shelf i seen a c64, a sx-64 (c64 executive), several amiga 500, 1200 and a 3000 with or without external hard disk, beside three or four a2000 with toaster piled in a corner. After a while other members of the group arrived, included Robert Bernardo, the founder and brought further hardware and software; i therefore seen UAE on a eee-pc 700, i was able to see a custom version of the c-one board which also supported Minimig in its FPGA programming, the sx-64 mentioned above and other relics from the 64 era, including a plastic musical keyboard overlay similar to the one distributed by SIEL in italy.

An overall view of the SCCAN : from the left, standing Jerold - a guest movie operator; then Robert Bernardo sitting with white shirt and glasses, then standing Tim, the c-one user and, sitting on the right Matt with its eee-pc running UAE. Just next to Robert look st the pile of a2000 equiped with Video Toasters:)

It was a pity that, since my wife and my mother in law were with me, i wasunabvle to stay more than a couple of hours but it was nice to see some other people with a common ground to share; beside those little reunions, the SCCAN and the Fresno Commodore Club also organize in Las Vegas the Commodore Vegas Expo (or CommVEx) on the last week-end of July; as usual for budget reasons i cannot partecipate: this was a good edition with excellent guest (among those,Dave Haynie, RJ Mical and miss Jeri "C-One" Ellisworth !!!) but at least it is my intention to go to Castaic again next end of August/begin of September.

In order to show AROS to the SCCAN members, I thought it was about time to introduce it in a much better way than it happened at SCALE, where I introduced VmWAROS on virtual machine, full screen but no sound and the network still to be fixed; that of course was unprofessional and, am afraid, even unconvincing.

The stimulus to do that also came from the IRC channel, where an user asked how Icarosperformed on Virtualbox; nic answered that he has been unable so far to make Icaros run on virtualbox properly and remembered - and me too - that last year Michal Schulz made some fixes for AROS to run properly on it; other reason has been due to my subscription in the FSUGItalia board, where I introduced AROS and one of the users complained about the fact that VmWare was not an "open" virtual machine and was looking for alternatives such as Virtualbox.

So, at the end I downloaded and installed Virtualbox on my own machine and proceedted to look for make Icaros work on it.
According to an old multiplatform tutorial I should have first joined together all .vmdk files with the
vmware vdiskmanager, usually buindled with VmWare server but not with the player (thanks again to Kalamatee that provided me the file via IRC saving me from an approximate hundred megabytes download) and then I should have used qemu and convert the virtual file in a middle format that, using a Virtualbox tool, should then become readable from this one; and therefore I proceeded in all the iter to the Virtualbox converter... that was not there! Hoiw come?

A further search in google clarified that latest versions of Virtualbox can read VmWare virtual drives (nice to know having spent half an hour converting the files...) and so, once deleted the converted files I do the attempt to configure Virtualbox in run Icaros. The first boot attempt ends with the red pointer on the black screen and nothing else; considered that, whan I made my tests, the ata.device still were having big problems with AMD boards (and my Dell laptop has an AMD Sempron), i decided to follow instructions on Icaros site for unsupported SATA drives and so I changed in GRUB the ATA=32bit string in ATA=nopci (ATA=nodma works too btw) and doing so i finally boot on Wanderer.

Icaros on Virtualbox: it works, despite some problems...

First of all I need to make clear that, unlike VmWare and qemu that adapt a screen refresh rate to the host machine speed and virtualisation capabilities, Virtualbox will run at full video speed (else known as 1-1 screen refresh) and will run excellent if your hardware support virtualisation else,like in my single core laptop, expect to wait up to three seconds for opening a wanderer window and show its icons.

Second, might be a mistake in my configuration but the Virtualbox network bridge tends to make exclusive use of the network, therefore forget to browse from AROS and windows at the same time; ti make sure the bridge does not give me any problem, i disabled it when i dont use VB, and will keep it like that until i dont understand what to do about it, or somebody will suggest me a workaround.

Third and last, the sound "kinda" work if i set a compatible sound card (AC-97 with a supported chipser) in the virtual machine, but the sound test make a kind of attempt of a sound (sound like BEEreberebereberebeepp-p-p, instead of a two seconds Beep) and then it freezes badly the virtual machine.

So for now Virtualbox is still there, sitting in my disc; probably i will do some more experiments in the future; about me i decided to switch to plan B and try the QEMU option.

Hopeful to have a better result (also because to what an IRC member told me) i decided to install the VE version of Icaros, that also includes KQemu, and follow the instructions given by Paolone in its web site for installing a QEMU environment on a netbook here, with some interpretation, of course. And the final result was really good: double clicking on the executing .bat file shortcut, Icaros start at full screen (i have another.bat file for work in a window), the sound seems to work properly, tried with milkytracker (this .mpeg file make freeze and quit qemu environment btw) and the network works fine thianks to DHCP.

Icaros on qemu: finally something to show for evangelisation :)

Despite that i still gave problems in transferring files: considered the (damn!) net sandboxing system of qemu, making a subnet with IP addresses like 10.2.xx that is not visible from outside, this mieans that in order to transfer files i have to FTP from inside qemu towards my machine; and that is complicated from the fact that my machine does not have a static address, being used mainly through wireless. I tried a simple FTP address on it but so far it did not work, art least i was unable to see it from inside qemu. When i have some time will install the XAMPP package (doing web sites i need it even for work) and will set filezilla server.

But those were not all the experimentations that I made so far: when the Network control panel came out had the pretty insane idea to make a personal "emergency live-CD" with all I needed to go on line, like OWB, a IRC client, YAFS and the FTP using as base a nightly; this because my old laptop has a malfunctioning DVD drive that can read only CD-ROMs. Therefore, I found a copy of Magic ISO maker and started to experiment burning images. For my perosnal disappointment i have been unable to make any progress: either the CD booted showing a mangled scren or they did not boot at all (but they were showing if i boot from another original nightly). So, seems that so far the only way to make a bootable CD is to build AROS using the toolkit from source; knowing that the GRUB boot file for AROS is called eltorito (yuo, same as the mexican food restaurant chain) i tried to make point the bootable option to it, still without success so far. Any advice for me?

Going on with my activities, lately had occasion to work again on the translation of the Amiga Programming Guide by Gianfranco "ShInKurO" Gignina; he prepared a SVN repository on Google Code for allow other people to partecipate. Since am already susing SVN at basic level from my office in linux shell, i thought that was a piece of cake to handle. But, as usual, murphy decided to pay me a visit. To contribute I decided to download TortoiseSVN, a SVN client for windows that provide a graphical user interface integration. I already prepared the translation of the new parts of chapter 5 but, despite I did inserted the google code repository and the generated password in the settings (as https too) i have been unable to commit in the repository.My caontribution has been uploaded by ShInkUrO itself, which I sent it via email; i really hope to fix this soon.

And, to finish for this time, let me provide an interesting link that I found on the net: the "how to survive poisonous people" talk made by the SVN developer's team and hosted on Google video: it talks about problems that might arise when some community members are, to say it soft, "less cooperative"; thank God this happens less in AROS environment, but is still a good source of advice.

Diary: My first tests with Poseidon

2009-07-16T17:13:21+00:00

Icaros is a funny thing for an old computer geek like me. When I was younger, I spent (too) much of my spare time trying to get things working like I wanted, and then I transformed this old passion in a job. The lucky thing about this, is that now I have easy access to hardware, and I can even test Icaros on different configurations, looking how it works with different devices. Yesterday I

Poseidon test #1 for Icaros Desktop 1.1.2

2009-07-15T18:37:45+00:00

Since AROS people is really interested in trying Poseidon, I'd like to make all the bravest Icaros users happy with a "unofficial" test update to Icaros Desktop with Poseidon enabled. Please notice that this is not a mainstream update to our distribution, it won't change your version number and it is meant only to test the new amazing AROS USB stack. The meaning of this little update is only to

A lizard on the mirror

2009-07-15T14:54:55+00:00

We have to gratefully say "thank you" to Aros-Exec's user Hybrid512 and his company Lézard-Visuel.com, for providing us a fast and reliable mirror site for Icaros files. If you run a company too, and you're interested in some IT services, please have a look to their nice website (you need to speak French, though).