AROS
The Amiga Research OS
(C) Copyright 1996 AROS - The Amiga Research OS
Some time back in the year 1993, the situation for the Amiga looked somewhat worse than usual (doesn't it always?) and some Amiga fans got together and argued about what should be done to increase the acceptance of our beloved machine. Immediately the main reason for the missing success of the Amiga became clear: it was propagation - or the lack thereof. The Amiga should get a more widespread basis to make it more attractive for everyone to use and to develop for. So plans were made to reach this goal. One of the plans was to fix all bugs of the AmigaOS, another was to make it an OS of the 90s. AOS was born.
But what is a bug? And how should bugs be fixed? What are the features a so-called modern OS must have? And how should they be implemented into the AmigaOS?
Two years later, people were still arguing about this and not even one line of code had been written (or at least no one had ever seen that code). Discussions were still of the pattern "we must have ..." and someone answered "read the old mails" or "this is impossible to do, because ..." which was shortly followed by "you're wrong because ..." and so on.
In the winter of 1995, I (Aaron Digulla) was fed up with it and I posted an RFC (request for comments) to the AOS mailing list in which I asked what the minimal common ground might be. Several options were given and the conclusion was that almost everyone would like to see an OS which is compatible to OS 3.1 (Kickstart 40.68) on which further discussions could be based upon to see what is possible and what is not.
So the work began and AROS was born.
AROS' goal is it to create an OS which
- is as compatible as possible to AmigaOS 3.1
- can be ported to different kinds of CPUs, for example Intel x86, PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc, HPPA and more.
- should be binary compatible on Amiga and source compatible on any other hardware
- can run as a standalone version which boots directly from hard disk, as an emulation which opens a window on an existing OS to develop software and run Amiga and native applications at the same time and as a link library which allows to create native applications with the comfort of the AmigaOS
To reach this goal, we use a number of techniques. First of all, we make heavy use of the Internet. You can participate in our project even if you can write only one single OS function. The most current version of the source is accessible 24 hours per day and patches can be merged into it at any time. A small database with open tasks prevents all developers from doing something twice.
This is the current developer list. Please note that the e-mail addresses of all developers but the coordinator are missing. The reason for this is that we want to protect the developers from junk mail. If you have something to ask or say, contact the coordinator digulla@aros.fh-konstanz.de.
- Aaron Digulla (Coordinator)
- Matthias Fleischer (Exec, DOS, drivers)
- Peter Boeckmann (Sparc, Alpha)
- Iain Templeton (HIDDs, Docs)
- Peter Bortas (WWW site)
- Martin Recktenwald (WWW, layers)
- Lennard voor den Dag (Amiga port, layers)
- Chris Lawrence (Linux/m68k)
- Geert Uytterhoeven (Linux/m68k)
- Kars de Jong (misc)
- Nils Henrik Lorentzen (GadTools, Asl, input.device)
- Stefan Ruppert (Datatypes)
- Harald Frank (Amiga port)
- Martin Steigerwald (Beta tester)
- Sebastian Rittau (Includes, Gadtools, Docs)
- L. A. Guest (CLI tools)
- Johan Alfredsson (Commodities)
- Stefan Berger (Math, DOS, Arp)
- Jesper Skov (Linux/m68k)
- Wez Furlong (Shell)
- Stefan Czinczoll (WWW)
- John J. Karcher (Slim Binaries)
- Adrian Brown (Win95 port)
- Henning Kiel (Games, Misc)
- Przemys³aw Szczygielski (Alpha port)
- Michael Schulz (x86 standalone)
- Adrian Brown (Wintel port)
- Stefan Reinauer
- Christopher D. Judd
- Tommy Johansson
- Paolo Costabel
- Daniel Verite
- Michael Roth
- Nico Heinz
- Bernhard Fastenrath
- Thomas Schwarz
- Yannick Koehler
- Hans Van Ingelgom
- Ross Cohen
- Janos Farkas
- Morten Holm
- Robert Lumley
- Sven Drieling
- James McArthur
- Gregor Goldbach
- Jim Cooper
- Claus Herrmann
- Marco Fanciulli
- Jörg Rebenstorf
- Gabriele Del Prete
- Milos Masopust
- Joseph M. Hinkle
- Armin Obersteiner
- Joakim Ogren
- Erhan Bilgili
- Bernardo Innocenti
- Wojciech Czyz
- Fabio Rotondo
- Paul Firth
- Vitas Povilaitis
- Bill Sidhipong
- Cristiano Contin
- Lars S. Jessen
- Patrice Le Gurun
- Branko Collin
- Paolo Pisati
- Giulio Eulisse
- Karl Staas
- Fabio Alemagna
- Mathieu Chouinard
- Pawel Kolodziejski
- Eirik Nicolai Synnes
- Phill Wooller
- Helmut Steger
- Jonathan Adamczewski
- Richard Tew
- Panagiwths Katsaloulis ( )
- Michael Aldred
- Johan Grip
- Ujvary, Bela Istvan
- Aard Keimpema
This status was generated 23. Apr 1999.
There is a total of 1308 functions.
397 (30.35%) are still todo.
160 (12.23%) are currently in work.
751 (57.42%) are completed.
| Job | Count | Todo | In work | Completed |
|---|
| DevCMD | 129 | 70.54% | 27.13% | 2.33% |
| HIDG | 28 | 39.29% | 60.71% | 0.00% |
| alib_commodities | 7 | 0.00% | 100.00% | 0.00% |
| alib_stdio | 7 | 0.00% | 100.00% | 0.00% |
| arp | 70 | 52.86% | 2.86% | 44.29% |
| asl | 6 | 16.67% | 83.33% | 0.00% |
| battclock | 3 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 100.00% |
| commodities | 29 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 100.00% |
| console | 2 | 50.00% | 0.00% | 50.00% |
| datatypes | 15 | 0.00% | 100.00% | 0.00% |
| diskfont | 5 | 60.00% | 40.00% | 0.00% |
| dos | 154 | 11.69% | 7.14% | 81.17% |
| exec | 118 | 0.85% | 6.78% | 92.37% |
| expansion | 21 | 38.10% | 4.76% | 57.14% |
| gadtools | 19 | 0.00% | 47.37% | 52.63% |
| graphics | 165 | 19.39% | 9.70% | 70.91% |
| icon | 12 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 100.00% |
| iffparse | 40 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 100.00% |
| intuition | 124 | 28.23% | 3.23% | 68.55% |
| keymap | 4 | 0.00% | 25.00% | 75.00% |
| layers | 32 | 0.00% | 21.88% | 78.12% |
| locale | 24 | 0.00% | 8.33% | 91.67% |
| lowlevel | 15 | 73.33% | 26.67% | 0.00% |
| mathffp | 12 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 100.00% |
| mathieeedoubbas | 12 | 0.00% | 25.00% | 75.00% |
| mathieeedoubtrans | 17 | 0.00% | 11.76% | 88.24% |
| mathieeesingbas | 12 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 100.00% |
| mathieeesingtrans | 17 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 100.00% |
| mathtrans | 17 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 100.00% |
| misc | 2 | 0.00% | 100.00% | 0.00% |
| timer | 5 | 20.00% | 0.00% | 80.00% |
| utility | 38 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 100.00% |
There is a total of 56 other things.
13 (23.21%) are still todo.
36 (64.29%) are currently in work.
7 (12.50%) are completed.
Graphical progress
Here is a list of programs which have been tried on Amiga-Linux/m68k:
- C:Date, C:Avail, C:Version, C:Assign, C:Info, C:Status and C:SetPatch (It doesn't install any patches though). All of them work, others don't, yet.
- zoo (packer) works, gzip V 1.1.2 (only packing though), LhA and LZX not yet.
- UUxT (uuencoder/-decoder by Asher Feldman)
- TeX: bibtex and bm2font work.
- OMA2.0 assembler works. Linker hasn't been tried yet.
- ira V1.02, a disassembler from Aminet
- From the 3.1 Amiga Developer Update: liblist, portlist, tasklist, fontlist, devlist, modlist, showgfxbase, memmon, taskpri settaskname, lvo, charset, ktest, searchfile, tstat, memlist,
A snapshot of the window of demowin This window is opened with the demowin demo program. It opens a window and renders some graphics in it. You can click on the gadgets and the program will tell you which gadget has been pressed. If you press the gadget with the label "Complement", the sizes for the PropGadgets will change. You can press a key and the program will show you the string which is associated with that key. You can press the left, middle and right mouse button to draw lines in the window. To exit the demo, press the Escape key or click on one of the "Exit" gadgets at the bottom.
A snapshot of readicon This shows the output of readicon. In the big window, you can see debugging and informational output of the program. The small window shows the normal and selected state of an icon and contains a gadget which has the icons' images for its normal and selected images.
Here are more Screenshots and pictures related to AROS.
These are things which are still to do:
- Use SDE - one binary which runs on any AROS hardware
- Ports to PPC, HHPA, Sparc and Alpha
Since the new situation (we must have a license from Amiga Int/Inc), this has to be overworked. Right now, it is not possible to license AROS. Watch this space for further updates.
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If you have comments or suggestions, email me at
digulla@aros.fh-konstanz.de.
23. Apr 1999
