This Week in AROS: October 17-24, 2026


AROS is a free, open-source operating system inspired by the Amiga, running on PCs, Raspberry Pi boards, classic Amigas and more. This issue covers Saturday, October 17 to Saturday evening, October 24; from now on it comes out on Saturday evenings. Fresh test builds dated October 23 are available: www.aros.org

CORE AROS

215 changes from 15 contributors went into the main AROS code this week: github.com/aros-development-team/AROS/commits/master

Mesa 26.2.5 (Nick Andrews)
AROS's 3D graphics library was updated to Mesa 26.2.5: github.com/aros-development-team/AROS/commit

MIDI over the network, USB and Bluetooth (Jaime Dias)
A new network MIDI service connects AROS music software to other computers using AppleMIDI and Network MIDI 2.0. USB MIDI devices and Bluetooth LE MIDI instruments now work too: github.com/aros-development-team/AROS/commit

A new bonami.library lets an AROS machine announce its services on the local network: #1591

Bluetooth audio (terminills)
A new Bluetooth A2DP class lets AROS send sound to wireless headphones and speakers through AHI, the AROS audio system: #1727

Hardware security keys (Nick Andrews)
security.library now supports YubiKey one-time passwords and FIDO U2F keys. A new FidoTool lets you test a key: github.com/aros-development-team/AROS/commit

Classic Amiga games (Nicolas Ramz, tonimanot71-bot)
Fixes for D/Generation, Dark Seed, Nigel Mansell's and CD-booting games, plus Kickstart 1.x compatibility in the floppy driver. The m68k ROM was also squeezed to make room for the compositor: #1748

Filesystems (Gareth Davidson and others)
16 SFS and defragmenter fixes, and fixes for CD reading (ISO, Rock Ridge, Joliet and HFS) and the RAM disk. Bryan Ashby fixed an AFS bug that could cross-link files: github.com/aros-development-team/AROS/commit

Networking (Bo Ståle Kopperud, John Knipper)
AROSTCP restarts DHCP when a cable is plugged in and forgets old routes when a link goes down. John Knipper fixed several locking problems: github.com/aros-development-team/AROS/commit

Also new: dosrelative.library by Rob N, Rust programs that can use network sockets, libssh 0.12.2. Most of Andy Rexx's 73 changes were developer documentation.
Elsewhere in the AROS project, terminills added a native RemoteDesktop app based on FreeRDP, and Nick Andrews added SolidCraft, a 3D CAD program written in Rust: github.com/aros-development-team/ports


RASPBERRY PI

Bo Ståle Kopperud made SD cards faster, fixed lost sectors on the Pi 1 to 3, and got NVMe drives working with interrupts on the Pi 500: github.com/aros-development-team/AROS/commit


CLASSIC AMIGA (m68k)

13 changes, mostly the game fixes above and floppy and display fixes.


PC

A multi-core (SMP) scheduling fix by Ashahel and a keyboard and mouse controller fix by terminills.


INDEPENDENT SOFTWARE

OpenZFS for AROS by terminills, an experimental port of the ZFS filesystem with a setup tool. No release yet: github.com/terminills/openzfs-aros

ArtCraft for AROS: coffeecat put together five apps, PhotoCraft, PdfCraft, WordCraft, DeckCraft and GridCraft, building on work Nick Andrews started. Experimental test builds for 64-bit AROS: github.com/tomaszstaniak/aros-photocraft/releases

LightCraft 0.13.0, another Craft app, with image processing done on the CPU, also from coffeecat: github.com/tomaszstaniak/aros-lightcraft/releases

OpenSWOS, Sensible World of Soccer for 64-bit AROS, plus an untested Raspberry Pi build. You need the original game files: github.com/tomaszstaniak/aros-swos/releases
L
impet 0.7.0, a terminal app, scrolls faster. Helix, a modern text editor, has its first preview: github.com/tomaszstaniak/limpet/releases

arospkg 0.6.0, a package manager for the AROS Archives: github.com/tomaszstaniak/arospkg/releases

Directory Opus 5.104, the classic file manager, has AROS builds for 32-bit PC, 64-bit PC and Raspberry Pi: github.com/BlitterStudio/releases

AMIGASYSTEM released AHI-Volume, AHI-Mixer, AHI-Recorder and PlayMP3-GUI for 64-bit AROS, plus libmikmod 3.3.13: www.arosworld.org...

New on the AROS Archives: Amelinium 1.4.3 (web browser and mail client by Paweł Nowak), YAM 2.11 (email), Rhun's piSensors 0.4 and PiTopBatt 0.4 for the Pi, and new versions of TelegramAmiga, BebboSSH and EdgeSnap by Michele Dipace: arosarchives.os4depot.net/index.php

ami-rust 0.1.0, a Rust SDK for 64-bit PC AROS: github.com/metaneutrons/ami-rust/releases


DISTROS AND PLATFORMS

AROS.games 1.0 is out. Andrzej "retrofaza" Subocz built it on deadwood's 64-bit AROS release. It comes with games, demoscene productions, emulators, and the ArtCraft apps, and it is made for real PCs, ideally with an NVIDIA graphics card up to the GTX 980. It offers an ISO for discs and virtual machines, and an image for USB sticks. Portable, which runs AROS inside a small Linux

Bellatrix, a bare-metal Amiga emulation for the Raspberry Pi 3B, moved to newer AROS code: github.com/JJDSNT/bellatrix


COMMUNITY

There is a new AROS Telegram group, with topics for every AROS flavour: t.me/AROS_official
The AROS Archives moved to a new server on October 22 and were back online the same day. At least one upload waiting in the queue was lost, so if you uploaded something then, check that it arrived.


Have news, a new project or a correction? Post it in the "This Week in AROS" submissions thread: www.arosworld.org...

This Week in AROS: October 24-31, 2026

AROS is a free, open-source operating system inspired by the Amiga, running on PCs, Raspberry Pi boards, classic Amigas and more. This issue covers Saturday evening, October 24 to Saturday evening, October 31. Fresh test builds dated October 31 are available for PCs, Raspberry Pi, classic Amigas, PowerPC and RISC-V: https://aros.sour...e=nightly2


CORE AROS

197 changes from 12 contributors went into the main AROS code this week, and 131 pull requests were merged: https://github.co...its/master

Hardware video decoding (Nick Andrews)
The graphics system can now hand video to hardware decoders and show it on display planes without extra copying. The NVIDIA (nouveau) driver gained hardware decoding for H.264, MPEG-2, HEVC, VP8, VP9 and AV1, plus support for the newest Blackwell cards: https://github.co...99dbe9a209
FFmpeg in the contrib collection now uses this through VA-API: https://github.co...72ffa0e05f

Classic 68k programs on modern AROS (terminills)
m68kemu.library can now run SysInfo, ReAction programs, Directory Opus 5 and Blitz programs on non-Amiga AROS, and the Shell can start 68k commands directly. Michele Dipace sent four fixes. See Notable: https://github.co.../pull/1905

Multi-core RISC-V (Nick Andrews)
RISC-V boards can now use all their CPU cores (SMP), and programs can choose which core a thread runs on: https://github.co...4c0f1a0abc
The new RISC-V test build supports the Milk-V Titan.

IPv6 networking (Jaime Dias)
About 21 changes brought AROSTCP, the AROS network stack, to version 5.15 with much fuller IPv6 support, and the local-network discovery service (mDNS) now works over IPv6 too: https://github.co.../pull/2005

Remote diagnostics (Nick Andrews)
ARDA is a new agent that answers questions about a running AROS machine, such as tasks, memory and network state, over the network. It is read-only unless you switch on its control mode: https://github.co...c94ecca7c2

Interface and fonts (terminills, Andy Rexx)
Pop-up lists for ReAction choosers, colour glyphs in fonts, and a new QR code class for Zune programs: https://github.co.../pull/1914

Also new: one memory pool per program (Bo Ståle Kopperud), a see-through BoingIconBar, soft-link fixes in the SFS filesystem, and the removal of 54,000 lines of unmaintained code.

aros.org published its first news item since July. Nick Andrews writes that the last three months were "the most active in the project's history, with almost 2500 commits": https://aros.sour...e.io/news/


RASPBERRY PI

Bo Ståle Kopperud added hardware video decoding through the Pi's VideoCore chip for the Pi 1 to 4, so FFmpeg can play H.264 video using the GPU. On PPA.pl, Bohun reports smooth 1080p playback: https://github.co.../pull/1932
Screens now use the Pi's hardware display planes, with native HDMI modes on the Pi 4, and 3D graphics got one GL session per screen.


CLASSIC AMIGA (m68k)

audio.device and disk.resource moved to the extension ROM, and CD32 video (FMV) support now loads only when the cartridge is present.


POWERPC AND HOSTED

Gareth Davidson fixed SFS booting on the Sam440 and several problems in AROS running on Windows.


INDEPENDENT SOFTWARE

- Kaffeine by Michele Dipace runs unmodified 68k Amiga programs on 64-bit ARM AROS (see Notable): https://github.co...1/kaffeine

- coffeecat released Limpet 0.8.0 (terminal), arospkg 0.7 (package manager that can now update itself), Fastfetch 2.70.0 and OpenSWOS release candidates, plus a VectorCraft test build with GL rendering: https://github.co...t/releases

- serk118uk released meteTorrent 0.5 (a torrent client), meteAccountant 0.2 (bookkeeping) and arFiles 2.1, a Finder-style file browser: https://www.arosw...post_15364

- AMIGASYSTEM released Directory Opus 5 Magellan 5.1.0.4 for 64-bit AROS with the reported bugs fixed: https://www.arosw...post_15449

- AMIGASYSTEM also released FFmpegRecorder, a 64-bit screen recorder that saves the whole screen or part of it as MP4 video, in six languages. It is on the AROS Archives as MP4-ScreenRecorder 1.3: https://arosarchi...os-v11.zip

- deadwood released EmuV0 1.14 for 64-bit AROS, which runs older 32-bit programs: https://www.arosw...post_15353

- New on the AROS Archives: VCStat 0.7 by Rhun (Pi temperature, voltage and power monitor), Amelinium 1.5.4 (web browser and mail), PolarPaint 1.485, and new versions of TelegramAmiga, BebboSSH and EdgeSnap by Michele Dipace: https://arosarchi...ion=recent

- aros-tools 0.6.11 by Fabian Schmieder: https://github.co...aros-tools


DISTROS & PLATFORMS

- SanpOS is a new AROS-based distro for 64-bit PCs, shown on AROSWorld by a computer science student. It has its own bar, menu and file manager. The developer also says Blender 2.49b has been ported: https://www.arosw...post_15375

- AROS Vision, the 68k AROS distro, has an updated Full Edition dated October 31, with a-graph, AmiPixelShop, new C64 and Atari formats in its multimedia player, and C64 datatypes: https://aros-visi...nload.html

- piAROS: Bohun says the Pi 3, 4, 400, 5, 500 and 500+ are fully supported: https://www.arosw...post_15488

- PomAROS opened new projects for package management and for Rust on AROS: https://github.co...pkg-fusion


COMMUNITY

- coffeecat's ArtCraft apps, first made for AROS, have been ported to AmigaOS 4 by Enrique Martos: https://www.ppa.p...craft.html

- At AmiWest, terminills ran AROS on all cores of a new laptop; retrofaza reports: https://www.arosw...post_15327


NOTABLE

Classic Amiga programs on modern AROS, from two directions. In the main code, terminills' m68kemu.library now runs SysInfo, ReAction programs (which use AROS's own native ReAction implementation (started by Kalamatee, built out by terminills), Directory Opus 5, and Blitz programs. Separately, Michele Dipace introduced Kaffeine, which grew out of m68kemu. Instead of emulating Amiga hardware, it passes a program's system calls to native AROS. In his tests, the original 68k Personal Paint draws and saves pictures, Directory Opus, Redit, and TurboText work, and a new 68k-to-ARM64 JIT runs about five times faster than the interpreter. He compares the goal to Trance on MorphOS and Petunia on AmigaOS 4. Games that access the hardware directly are not covered: https://www.arosw...post_15484


SPOTLIGHT: ARiaOS4

ARiaOS4 is Andrea "afxgroup" Palmatè's open-source, AmigaOS 4-compatible operating system, a fork of AROS. Announced on October 25 as AROS4, it was renamed the next day. It runs on the AmigaOne X5000, Sam460 and A1222 and the Raspberry Pi 2, with a new Workbench, an open ReAction and ARexx based on Regina: https://www.amiga...33-EN.html
Around October 30, he showed two work-in-progress screenshots on Ko-fi: a desktop preview with a new preferences app, inline settings for Workbench windows and a new dock, AriaDock, and a closer look at AriaDock, which he says is "still a work in progress": https://ko-fi.com...up/gallery



Have news, a new project, or a correction? Post it in the "This Week in AROS" submissions thread: https://www.arosworld.org/infusions/forum/viewthread.php?thread_id=2155

© 2026 Argo (Chris Fraser), This Week in AROS. All rights reserved. Sharing a link is welcome; please don't repost the text or images without permission and credit.

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Just a clarification on the 68k emulation. The reaction programs are using an aros native reaction implementation that kalamatee started and I’ve been building out.