Original Article location: binarydoodles blog

Sorry if i took so long in write the SCALE article and other news last time: looks like i need to learn to be a bit more short, considered that an equal if not higher amount of time is needed to translate the article in english so all you international readers are found reading one month old news.... therefore new passphrase is "write less, write often" :) [and as you can see, in pure open source fashion is another "when it's ready deadline - Happy Easter to everybody :P ]

A little Parenthesis for the recent bad luck of the Aros-exec portal that has been hacked three times in the latest two weeks, the last recorded one on Friday april 10th with a malware-loaded pdf file brought through an iframe; looks like finally the attack was contained and the web site came back to normal, but for those emergency situations the alternative is to go in the other AROS portal usually less frequented (that is bad, is a good one, i also mirror my articles there), called arosworld.org.

Good news: finally I managed to use network from my personal laptop at home! The solution was simple but kinda hidden from the average user eyes, and i stumbled on it casually; i needed to check whether my used network stack (wireless in my laptop) is correctly mapped as Vmnet0, using the program vmnetcfg.exe, located in the same program folder of the VmWare Player; there is no icon on the start menu so find it is matter to look for it. Usually Vmnet0 is mapped on the ethernet card of the computer while the main network I use in my laptop is the wireless one so I had to set Vmnet0 to map the wireless network first. Once done, i finally had no further problems with the network.

Last March 26th has been finally released Icaros Desktop version 1.1 (so far known as VmWaros): i already talked about it last time and can only remind the most important new features:
- recent build of AROS;
- added IconDress script for a fast icon set changing system wide in just a click;
- added Janus-UAE;
- added OWB;
- a new PDF-reader, ArosPDF,based on xpdf by Craid-Kiesau;
- improved stability;
- new Wanderer version with added icon options and status bar;
- updated several applications, including amimemos, simpleeditor and MarranoFTP (still with some bugs though)
- added application-switch and screen-switch keyboard shortcuts windows-style;
- globally improved E-UAE performence and upgraded amibridge scripts;
- added nic for RTL8168, the actually built-in iMica network card;

further informations are available on the distribution site itself; plus The italian IT oriented website Punto Informatico for the second time mentions here the Icaros Desktop release, putting it in the last minute news. I set up Icaros desktop last saturday in my VM and found it very stable. There are still some problems with in example the Zune class Betterstring.mcc that in some applications, such as WookieChat, shows just the last typed character; the reason of this behavior is actually being investigated, also because Paolo Besser said that in its installed system it dont see that behavior, present in the builds that he make.

Steve "ClusterUK" Jones updated Amibridge scripts; since the original cripts by Paolo Besser ised to delete and rewrite the user-startup under E-UAE, the method implemented by Steve allows not to delete the user-srtartup and load simply the chosen application in its own Janus-UAE window, that later can be closed through commodities or closing gadget, so to have a tighter integration between the AROS desktop and the Amiga 68k applications. Despite there might be still some work to be done, including the double pointer problem - Steve says - the target is getting close. The script canbe downloaded from here.

An interesting, and a bit pathetic thread started - or i should say restarted, considered that it represents itself every now and then - some days ago on amigaworld.net and successively even on osnews, about an x86 port of Amiga Os 4.1; a small but noisy minority of users made hear their voice on how the Amiga OS future should go, as happened for Mac OS, through the Intel processor family also considered some key events, such as the purchase of Freescale corp. from Apple and the closing of other manufacturers, that have left a strong uncertainity halo on the PPC platform.
Hyperion some time ago let know their opinion and that they do not have intention to port Amiga OS under x86 - due, as most readers pointed on the thread, to a combination of low ROI, high porting cost, high piracy risk that might make the operation a huge loss - and is also interesting to see how, once reminded this and also stated that at the moment AROS is "the only game in town" on x86 and x86/64 platform, those people literally thrown out something that can only called tantrums in the fact that was not a REAL Amiga-labeled os, that was NOT os4, etc.

I do wonder sometimes if some Amiga user suffer of a peculiar Peter-pan syndrome form or else...

I have to be honest: this kind of aggregating all together around the Amiga "Brand" was something that made sense when I was younger, a way to express an identity and a social role and to stand from the bunch: i used to have a painted "I <3 my AMIGA" sticker on the back of my black Fiat Panda around 1995 to 1999 but then, once started to work and to use different systems made me feel the inadequacy of hanging hard on a single platform: the coup-de-grace came when, in order to do a big gig i had to add some removable storage and so I went to buy a zip drive and a surf-squirrel; i never been able to make it work properly due to the fact that my ViperEC030 RAM area collided with the PCMCIA access and therefore every single time i tried to access the drive, either via shapeshifter or from the Amiga side, the system hanged up pretty badly and had to resort in buying a power mac aside (no, using less ram was not a viable option).

Then, several years later, my rediscover of AROS in a moment in which was looking for alternatives to my fast-decaying "alternative"xp install on my old laptop, made me reconsider the option of an Amiga OS-like system and of its philosophy: it was much more user friendly than linux and a well known environment for me; a deeper immersion in the AROS community made me realise its big potential as Open source system and as ideal prosecutor of the Amiga OS philosophy: fast, lightweight, modular, user-centered and can run fast even in less recent and cheap hardware. The big plus the fact of being open source: mantained and updated by the community itself, it guarantees an indefinite long life to the system and allows the flow of new ideas and philosophies, beside the possibility to be used in commercial systems that would like to use it (as in example Natami) without the need to pay licence fees or to stipulate binfing OEM contracts; in short as i already said, an ideal solution for the diffusion of the Amiga philosophy and methodology. What i see instead is still several old school Amiga supporters stuck in their principles like "intel outside" and "Amiga is a full Hardware and Software complete solution, and is the ORIGINAL one", and whines about wanting anything that has the "Amiga" brand: reminds me closely the monologue of Eddie Murphy in the "Eddie Murphy raw" movie when he talks about its experience when he was a kid and was asking the mom for a McDonald burger (watch it and laugh here) and, having instead received a home-made burger (better than the McDonald one for sure) he start crying because other kids that have the McDonald burger fools him; luckilly growing up the sense of what is important changes and so when Eddie is grown up he craves for the mom's house-made burger (the moment of the admission here at 3:30): in my own head i see AROS as the mom's burger and Amiga OS as the McDonald's burger; vantages are visible: your mom can make your burger the way you like instead of McDonald's that being a big industrial franchising has its own easy-to-make-fool-proof-recipes-and-cooking-methods (see the book McDonald's behind the arches to know more about their procedures), but both things have their reason to exist even in relation to the number of people they need to serve: right now Amiga OS and MorphOS have a number of users too small to become mainstream and afford the jump to the x86 platform making sure they will see a decent Return of Income from a non-indifferent effort.
So, if you look for AmigaOS on the x86, AROS is here already and, as already said, being open source, can be expanded from anybody who has the skills to do it; the proposal of AROS now, in this very moment, thanks to the self-compilation, to OWB, to the (partially) working USB stack that allows to use external medias that started to glance in the eye of several hobbyists ,returning amiga users and, hopefully, even on the eye of more business-oriented people such as Steve Jones, who give AROS installed in bundle with its iMica; as i said this is finally the right time to introduce AROS at a higher number of people, for now mainly hobbyists and geeks, then, once solved the lack of software problem, even for less tech-savvy people.

And in the sense of improving AROS a good new is coming from the developer's mailing list: Jens Langner and Pavel "Sonic" Fedin are cooperating in order to compile Betterstring.mcc in the cross-compiler without passing through MetaMake (the AROS building system); therefore now the Betterstring class for AROS will be added directly from mainstream and removed from the source tree; in future Jens plans to make other classes, such as NList and TextEditor, compile from the cross-compiler and therefore to be released together with AmigaOS and MorphOs updates; Jens also plans to port YAM - the most known open source mail program for Amiga OSes - for AROS.

Nik "Kalamatee" Andrews is actually working in further improvements of Wanderer: some pictures appeared on AmigaNews.it and a Demonstration Video made by Kalamatee itself on Youtube shows the Wanderer windows holding a win-style directory tree at the left and the already known status bar on the bottom: the interesting fact is that those features will be in future handled as external modules and therefore enabled or disabled at will; that show the intention of Kalamatee to make Wanderer a more modular system easy to customise and upgrade, even with third party modules that will surely appear.

And, finally, another comeback of Stanislaw Sszymczyk, that released the 0.9.3 version of OWB: several bug fixed, optimised for better speed, the .htaccess login problem has been finally addressed and now OWB show a modal requester asking for username and password.
The latest OWB requires the latest codesets.library that can be taken from a nightly build .iso made after March 30. The new version, available for x86 and x86/64 can be downloaded from the sand-labs AROS OWB website.

Posted by saimon69 on April 19 2009 04:25:55 · 0 Comments · 802 Reads ·