These AROS mpeg videos are made by Paul Gallant and show the AROS operating system running a few demos and Directory Opus. Higher quality versions of the videos are planned soon too.
AROS MPEG Videos Available
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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FYI, the last video, the big one (5+ MB) crashes my WMP 9 when played on 200% size. (And no, we don’t want to hear that your XINE/mplayer plays it fine, we know it.)
I tried a few of them on WMP 9 and they worked ok the rest i tried using another player! perhaps its just that one i didnt try :/.
The visual eyecandy fest on that last video was pretty damn amazing, I almost lost my breath first time I watched it (ofcourse watched it several times), by far the coolest demo video I’ve ever seen… =) These vids remind me of how fast the Amiga UI really was, miss that on me old linux box.
Eugenia, you post many articles about software prodcuts without specifying what they are. I get os news by RSS and I see AROS MPegs available, or KJHKKJH 1.1 released.
Please try to specify, if not in the title, at least in body of the news, what they are. I know, I could click on the link to see what is it, but I don’t want to waste my time.
Does that mean I can install it on my x86 PC?
Thats great!!
Why don’t you click the Aros link and read it yourself.
It is an OS, what else would it be? And it is obviously Amiga-related, judging from the story icon.
As I understand it, indtalling to the HD is a bit difficult just yet and not reccomended. However, it boots and runs like lightning off of a CD. On my AMD 2ghz I had most of the graphic eye-candy demos running at the same time and it was handling it beautifully. So I went to their site and popped the AROS guys a donation. Great work on AROS guys.
I hope to have the better quality videos out soon.
FYI aros boots on x86 PCs. you can download
the ISO image from the site, pop it your PC and
boot right off the CD. Aros also boots fine with
Virtual PC on the Mac:)
Paul Gallant
Paul, can we see those again when AROS is running on the Pegasos!?! Then they should really fly…;-)
Thanks for the effort. 🙂
Sincerely,
Raquel and Bill
Genesi
So it wants to be compatible with AmigaOS 3.1. What kind of nifty things can we do with an AmigaOS 3.1 clone?
I really do feel that AROS represents the best bet of the Amiga’s future, in much the same way that I feel that Linux is Unix’s future.
Mind you I have nothing against Amiga Inc. or Genesi (and no interest in any flamewar between them/their users/their advocates) but I happen to think that open source and Amiga go nicely together. I can’t help but think that the Amiga OS would have advanced far more quickly had the source been available early on. It almost certainly would not have gone through this long, dark period which is, thankfully, nearing an end.
Even though the source was not avaliable, several projects existed in an attempt to extend the AmigaOS. I remember even the scheduler had been replaced at one point, along with all of the user-land utilities in a separate, even earlier project (AmigaDOS Replacement Project was it?). No doubt the scheduler work tooks some reverse engineering, but the ARP work worked out the way it did because the utilities were already quite separate.
The Amiga was my first exposure to the concept of “public domain”, as programmers released their work and source as example code to others. It’s a big part of how I started out programming, which I now do professionally. I doubt I use any specific techniques or ideas from that time (as embedded programming is far more formal) but it was this that peaked my interest. It was one of the few things in life that I got to “look inside” to see exactly how something worked. Made me all happy in a geeky kinda way.
Now that the open source model has shown its true benefits, I can’t think of a better platform to benefit from it. The gift culture that open source grew out of was quite apparent in the early Amiga community, long before I ever heard the term.
The Amiga community is a small, but passionate group of people. Economies of scale aren’t that useful in such a group, it’s unlikely that the community will ever have large software houses developing big projects for it. Open source I believe will offer the “basics” — the web browser and TCP/IP stack, a word processor or two, a bunch of utilites and data processig tools of various sorts. The kernel and OS utilities are part of the “basics” and AROS adds this key element to the open source foundation. Once it is laid, the Amiga can regain some of it’s old glory (and hopefully cut some new ground, as it did in earlier times), and from there on out, I think it will attract at least small scale proprietary work, which will only be good for it.
An open AmigaOS work-a-like also eliminates a bunch of useless feuds that have grown up in the community. AmigaInc. vs. Genesi? PPC vs Intel? It’s not either or — it’s always — “all of the above!” and “whichever way the user wants to do it!” which is much more “Amiga-like” in my opinion anyway.
Erik
Quick question — I had some trouble with yesterday’s ISO trying to boot it — I know that other bootable CD’s work fine on my box, and AROS runs fine on my box under Linux. (the problem I’m having is that the CD isn’t recognized as bootable by the BIOS so it just boots off the HD instead — even though it is set to boot the CD first, and other bootable CD’s work fine…) has anyone else had trouble with this ISO? I’ll wait a week or two then try again with whatever ISO is out then.. til then I suppose I’ll run it under Linux.
Erik
Erik,
Yup, it doesn’t boot off the ISO for me either. I set it to boot off CDROM in my BIOS, and like you said, I’ve had no problems with other bootable CDs.
However, there is a workaround. Download the bootable floppy disk image, make sure the CD is in the drive and once the floppy boots it will eventually look for the CD and boot AROS. According to the AROS web site this should work, so I’m going to go try it now.
FYI, the last video, the big one (5+ MB) crashes my WMP 9 when played on 200% size. (And no, we don’t want to hear that your XINE/mplayer plays it fine, we know it.)
It must be one little hardware or software problem, actually. It played back just fine in WP9 at 200% zoom.
AROS might be an interesting idea, but I don’t think it is “the best bet of the Amiga’s future”.
If people want OS 3.x compatiblity, the ability to run on modern (and not so modern hardware), and access to all of the old Amiga software titles they’re probably just going to run some flavor of UAE. WinUAE works with all Amiga OS versions up to 3.9, offloads graphics and sound to the PCs dedicated video and audio cards via DirectX, runs in any resolution the PC can support thanks to the Picasso library support, and can even drill through the emulation layer and attach to the PCs internet connection.
On top of all of that, it’s free. I’ll never be interested in AROS because I’ve already got all that it offers, and I’ve had it for quite some time now.
Well WMP9 didn’t have a codec to play the 5th one. I tried the 4th one and it played but it was so blury you couldn’t tell anything.
O.K. Everyone,
Please dont start OS wars over the 4th video.
I was toying with the advanced setting of the
mpeg settings when I did that one. If it crashes
your video player I wouldnt be suprised.
I can’t wait to try it out.
I know this is asked every time AROS gets a mention, but how functional is it now?
Also, does it run on newer hardware? USB keyboard and mouse support yet?
Thanks,
Mutiny
yep, that ~5MB one is screwed: it crashed BeOS nplay, and hanged BeOS VLC (after playing about 1/3 of movie).
The 5th video doesn’t crash on WMP6.1 with ffdshow codec, but it gives a black picture and nothing else.
Id be amazed if they really did fly on a low end PPC board versus
a decent spec x86 based board Bill. 🙂
The last video crashes my WM9 too, although it does work in kplayer (based on mplayer). But I’m used to broken movies never working in WM9. I don’t blame MS for that, since I don’t blame Moz/Konq for not supporting many broken pages…
Here it’s awsomley fast (running it under Linux).
Last time I checked the Pegasos was using a G4 800Mhz.
I’d say it worth a good PIII at 1.6
Fast enough for your average Joe user.
Regarding the Videos I couln’t run the 5Meg either.
Everything else works on WMP4
Phil
🙁
When running the “linux hosted” version, can I still run Linux apps (console/gui) ? The “native” iso wouldn’t boot for me so I’m going to try the linux version.
Just in case you didn’t know, Genesi have donated a Pegasos board to the AROS project and we already have AROS booting on it. Though it will be a little while yet before we have it doing anything useful 🙂
Yeah, AROS will fly on a Pegasos, I hope to get a Peg board and put AROS on it full time 🙂
Maybe it’s just me, but I find that the clones (MorphOS, AROS) look a lot nicer than the new AmigaOS GUI we’ve been seeing screenshots of lately. The colours are a lot less gaudy and they don’t seem to be obsessed with sticking ugly textures on every window. Once they mature a little, they might very well warrant a serious look. Oh yeah, and once the widgets are improved too
(and people say that BeOS has small widgets?!?!?)
Anyway, it’s nice to see that there are still some people making GUIs who don’t consider OS X or XP to be _the_ panacea of GUI design.
These videos look almost exactly like AmigaOS 2.0/3.0 with some patches installed and a higher screen resolution. The fact that people still like it shows that AmigaOS 2.0 was pretty good for its time! (around 1990)
http://www.chodorowski.com/aros/screenshots/aafonts+gradientbuttons…
now that looks good!!!!