[AROS-Announce] Status update

[aros-announce@lists.hepe.com]

Hello,

A long time since the last update but I can proudly reply that I keep the web
site uptodate, now :-)

Here is a short roundup what has happened since the last update:

Parts of AROS are used in the MorphOS product. MorphOS gets some shared
libraries which they need and we get patches to make Amiga software work :-)
Two members of the MorphOS team, namely Nicholai Benalal and Emmanuel Lesueur
have CVS write access and they have started to submit patches. All in all, a
very good deal on both sides :-)

Amithlon (Harald Frank) has also asked if they can use our sources and we gave
them the same deal that MorphOS got. Still, no patches on this side. As I see
it, Harald and Bernie are drowning in work :-) Good luck to them !

Neither H&P nor Amiga have asked to use our source in any of their products.  I
expect them to know what they do. The times when I tried to "enlighten" others
are in the past :-) Good luck to them, also.

On the AROS side, I can say that we have achieved a lot ! At the time of
writing, the AROS CVS repository is 66MB and the contributed sources are 90MB.
Commits are very frequent (in the last few weeks, there was almost no day when
no one committed some of their work), so AROS is more healthy than ever.

And the range of software which we have is also quite impressive: We have
ported the version of DOpus which you can find on Aminet (yeah, that's old). We
have Radium (http://www.notam.uio.no/~kjetism/radium/), a note editor which can
also play the songs you edit with it. We have a CDROM driver, the editor XDME
(which was written by me) was ported last Sunday in about 8h of work (mostly
fixing ghastly code which DICE did compile for reasons unbeknownst to me ;-)
and Python (http://www.python.org/), the first programming language for AROS.
We also have a couple of prefs programs (Font, Locale, ReqTools, Serial) now.

While AROS still lacks a lot of things and a lot of code is, well, doing only a
fraction of what the original AmigaOS can do, it's still impressive to see how
far we did get and that gives me a very good feeling what I look into the
future. AROS Native/x86 is getting more and more stable and when a bug in the
trackdisk.device is fixed (it's *very* slow) and a feature is implemented (it
doesn't support the diskchange signal, yet, so you cannot run the demos on the
contrib floppy disks), you won't only be able to boot into an AmigaOS-like
system on your PC but you will at least be able to edit some prefs, save them
to disk and write some texts with XDME.

Our now home might lack fancy colors and designer chairs but it certainly
begins to feel like Amiga :-)

Have fun !

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Aaron "Optimizer" Digulla, digulla@sowatec.com
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