Submitted by The first “point release” of the AROS distribution VmwAROS has been published, and it’s available on its website. This version introduces a lot of changes and many new features that make it visually different from regular AROS build. Ken Lester’s double state icons, for instance, make VmwAROS look more Amiga-like, and former Amiga users can also continue using their applications thanks to AmiBridge, a poweful scripting system which allows launching AmigaOS programs straight from AROS. A big effort has been made to enhance VmwAROS useability and user-friendlyness.
AROS, especially in its VmwAROS incarnation is fast becoming a usable OS. It self-hosts, has a variety of useful programs (and an even larger variety of games) and to be frank, is just about the prettiest-looking alternate OS out there (Better looking than some well known Linux distros, even)…
Congratulations to the VmwAROS and AROS teams. Now I just need to go try this out.
Edited 2008-12-15 15:57 UTC
First, congrats to the team. For the first time in a very very long time I am considering downloading an AmigaOS image.
The main reason I left my beloved Amiga for BeOS and am now testing Haiku is all the infighting that got in the way of developing an open source version of AmigaOS.
Yes, I know BeOS is also closed source, but at the time of my move AmigaDos was going nowhere because of the different companies and private groups fighting over it and the related IP.
BeOS was a main leg up, and came with all sorts of example code, it took no time to get into it.
What gets me, is the Amiga groups had far more info about the internal structure of the Amiga than the BeOS => OpenBeOS => Haiku groups did for BeOS, and they had a chance for a major head start in time too!
Is it too late for them to see an expansion in users? I know why I will probably move on to Haiku, is there anything special (super useful) about the latest versions of AmigaDos to get me to move back?
Actually, AROS is exactly the same kind of project as Haiku: an open source re-creation of Amiga OS, the same way Haiku recreates BeOS. The only real difference is that since AROS targets x86 and PPC, platforms which “classic” AmigaOS never ran on, binary compatability isn’t an issue with AROS the way it is with Haiku, since there aren’t really any binaries to be compatable with (at least unless you want to introduce a complicated emulation layer)
Vis a vis useful features of AROS compared to Haiku, the main one is probably source-level with AmigaOS 3.x. It’s not 100%, but it is close enough that simple apps will compile on both and more complex thing often need only some code cleanup to rewrite bits of code that only work on M68K CPUs or that use odd compiler-specific constructs from various obscure Amiga C packages.
Edited 2008-12-15 17:58 UTC
And since it is an open source project, it continues moving forward without worries about the squabbling companies.
This looks like a nice release! I am going to download it now…
With apologies for extreme ignorance but will this run on any PPC Mac? I still have my G4 hardware under my desk…
It will run in hosted mode on linux on Mac PPC computers. I run AROS on Xubuntu on my iMac DV+ G3. Even hosted, the OS is VERY responsive. The menus feel so much better than the menus in either linux on the same machine, or OSX on the same machine.
It would be nice to eventually have native support for NewWorld Macs, but don’t count on that any time soon.
Hey. It’s open source, so you could always port it yourself if you’re really desperate
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Edited 2008-12-16 05:14 UTC
Amiga had a chance to shine. Thousands of commercial boxed apps. Games came to the amiga first and then ported to PC. The Video Toaster meant that if you were into desktop video, you ‘had’ to get an Amiga. ah those days.
BeOS didn’t get that chance; it was killed off with the focus shift right before it looked interesting. Haiku now has to build its way up almost from scratch.
There is a small interview with Paolo about the 1.0 release of VmwAROS at:
http://arosshow.blogspot.com/2008/12/vmwaros-10-is-released-by-paol…
Edited 2008-12-16 23:43 UTC
I noticed that if you read the news as non-registred or either not-logged user, then you see the full news, and this one regarding VMWAROS has full indications on recommendations and comments…
If you are Logged In and you scrool the first page of OSNews site, the news regarding Cygwin and VMWAros are posted as one singl line, with no any indications about the contents, and the number of people recommending it and nothing indicating comments…
You must click on it, and only after you had clicked on it then gthe news it will enlarged and you can read read it all, and spot the whole article and the number of comments…
Is that a method to let pass these news as secondary ones and considered as no importance news, and let people focus on other news?
Are minor OSs somtething to stay almost hidden to registered users, and let them focus only on big ones (Windows/MacOS X)???
Hi Raffaele, I wouldn’t be so worried about this. It’s not the first time OS News covers VmwAROS, and maybe Thom thought that it wasn’t necessary to keep the news enlarged by default. And, anyway, this news on OS News brought VmwAROS.org hundreds and hundreds visitors, so I have only to thank him and OS News for it. Regards,