A bit about AROS

Firstly, got to say I haven't thought about this blog that much in ages, but it's funny when things in life end up coming around full circle, and I'm now interested in maintaining it again. Part of me would like to rewrite some of what I wrote before, but I think I'll keep it for nostalgia's sake and carry on where I left off.

So, then AROS, what's it all about?! The acronym AROS originally stood for Amiga Research Operating System, which should give you a clue! It's an open-source operating system designed to be Amiga-like, at its core it's a reimplementation of AmigaOS 3.1, with a number of improvements. The name AROS has now changed to become a recursive acronym, i.e. AROS = AROS Research Operating System, mainly to avoid legal troubles, but I like the new name anyway. : )

If you haven't been following the Amiga scene for a while then you might not know about the other Amiga-like operating systems currently being developed. AROS' two commercial cousins are AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS 2, both run on relatively expensive PowerPC systems and are more polished than AROS at the moment (AROS will get there eventually, plus it's free, no barriers to entry here!). AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS2 share an interesting history but I don't want to bring up the Red vs. Blue war (AROS is black in this coloured OS malarkey, don't know why!), let's just say check them out if you're interested. : ) The newest Amiga-like OS (still in the planning stages) is AnubisOS, basically put the general plan is to create a Amiga-inspired user experience on top of the Linux kernel, it's history is quite interesting too, but much shorter than the others (I'd say seeds were planted in 2008).

Classic AmigaOS (1.x - 3.x) is popular with the emulation crowd and for those who still play around with their real Amiga hardware (special mention to the new Amiga FPGA-based hardware too). A version of UAE is the platform of choice for most here.

The AROS project has been a going concern since 1995 and while progress has been slow and it's a little rough around the edges, it's certainly at a point where it offers a usable system, and the project is still very much active, in fact I'd say it is currently (in 2010) the most active I've seen it since I started showing an interest in it back in 2007.

Here's some more info on the history of AROS:
http://aros.sourceforge.net/introduction/

Here's the main community site:
http://aros-exec.org/

Here's where you can find most AROS-related blog activity:
http://planet-aros.cataclysm.cx/

But why just read about it, try it for yourself! If you have an x86 PC (if you don't know what that means the answer is almost certainly yes!), the easiest way to do that is to use AROS' premier distro, Icaros Desktop, either installed on a virtual machine like VirtualBox or VMware, as a live CD/DVD, or installed natively so that it can run from your computer hard drive just after you switch on your computer. You can find the latest Icaros Desktop (or Icaros for short) news and releases here: http://vmwaros.blogspot.com/

Right, I think that's enough of an introduction to AROS now. In the next blog post I'll talk about setting up an AROS development environment on a Windows machine (if you'd like to use a different way to play around with AROS, ask for help on the aros-exec forum), and we'll create a classic 'Hello World' app. : )