The AROS Research Operating System is a lightweight, efficient and flexible desktop operating system.

The AROS Research Operating System is a lightweight, efficient and flexible desktop operating system, designed to help you make the most of your computer.

It's an independent, portable and free project, aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS at the API level (like Wine, unlike UAE), while improving on it in many areas. The source code is available under an open source license, which allows anyone to freely improve upon it.


Distributions are preconfigured and tested versions of AROS. 

They contain a number of useful user applications that don't come with the main AROS.org binaries and will be of great interest to users. 

They may not have the latest core system, but their stability and user friendliness is much greater than those of the nightly builds. If you are a user interested in checking what AROS has to offer, use the distributions to get the most complete AROS experience.

AROS 68k and other new platforms.

An important new chapter has been opened in AROS's history with the development of a stand-alone AROS port for the original Amiga computers. This should also be of great interest to people using WinUAE to run old Amiga applications. Such is the level of compatibility, the AROS ROM image can even boot original Workbench disks as old as V1.3. This development will hopefully also lead to improved integration of original Amiga software into AROS on x86 platforms and elsewhere.


AROS's platform support has continued to diversify in other directions too. A Linux-hosted ARM port has emerged, and new hosted ports for Mac OS X support three different CPU architectures. And AROS may soon become even more portable with the recent development of new iOS and Android ports.


Graphics.

On the PC-compatible/x86 front, a lot has been happening too, particularly in the area of graphics. The Intel GMA graphics driver has been extended to support a wider variety of chipsets, and also now works with laptop LCD displays as well as external monitors. The Nouveau and Gallium based driver for nVidia graphics cards has been improved too: as well as increasing its speed and hardware support, it has also become the first driver with hardware-accelerated alpha-blending operations.


A notable graphics feature from our Amiga heritage has also been introduced to AROS: most native graphics drivers now support screen dragging and scrolling. These include our drivers for nVidia and Intel GMA chipsets, as well as the generic VESA driver.


Apart from the graphics drivers, AROS also received some additional graphics libraries: egl.library and openvg.library. The first provides portable GL initialisation and window management interfaces, while the second is a vector graphics library accelerated using Gallium. Our port of the SDL library has become more polished too, with improvements to features such as SDL-to-GL integration, leading to a more enjoyable gaming experience.

Wireless networking.


Two significant milestones in network support for laptops have been reached. Firstly, a modern and secure wireless networking stack has been added to AROS. The first driver to use this infrastructure supports many popular cards with Atheros chipsets. Secondly, support has been added for a wide variety of mobile broadband USB devices.
Other improvements


Debugging support and error reporting have been improved. Misuse and mismanagement of memory and other resources by applications is now more easily detected, and error reports now include stack traces showing where the error occurred.


A lot of fine tuning and ease-of-use improvements have been made to various components. The FAT filesystem handler has received a number of important bug fixes. Native graphics drivers are now typically activated automatically for detected graphics cards, and the AC97 and HDAudio sound drivers usually need no manual configuration before use. And at last, AROS is no longer stuck with one unchangeable mouse pointer: the standard pointer to use can be chosen in a new pointer preferences program, and applications can change the pointer to suit different situations. The AROS shell has become more sophisticated, and now has a scrollable output history, as well as support for more modes and some bug fixes. AROS's handling of GUI themes has also become significantly faster. Finally, another piece of the backwards-compatibility jigsaw has been filled following the transformation of Regina into a much more complete ARexx clone.

Wider developments.

AROS now has a third distribution available in addition to the regularly updated Icaros Desktop and AROS Broadway. The new AspireOS distribution is aimed mainly at the Acer Aspire One 110 and 150 netbooks, but may also be interesting to users of other PCs looking for a lightweight distribution.


Many applications and games have been added to AROS's software selection in recent months. Some application highlights include AmiFig, Portrekkr and Open Universe. 3D games such as Cube, AssaultCube and Super Tux Kart (with a popular kitty car!) put AROS's 3D graphics enhancements to good use, while many 2D games such as Giana's Return and Mega Mario have also arrived. We have added a number of emulators too to allow even more retro gaming fun to be had.


Screenshots.

AROS building on AROS. The complete GNU tool chain has been ported to AROS.     Large version...

Icaros Desktop distribution uses Ken Lester's icons delivering more Amiga look and feel.     Large version...

Migration to GRUB2 enables graphical boot console, but most importantly usage of SFS as a default file system for AROS.     Large version...

Well known AROS distribution, VmwAROS, changed its name to Icaros Desktop to underline its primary goal of beeing Live CD, native distribution.     Large version...

Network preferences enable user friendly configuration of AROS TCP stack.     Large version...

AROS MPlayer (based on MorphOS version) brings rich multimedia experience to AROS, supporting numerous audio and video formats as well as DVDs and network streaming.     Large version...

Orygin Web Browser port brings AROS user experience to the next level. It supports the latest standards in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.     Large version...

2007-11-30

As the 2007 Fall AROS has got new look with customized themes and new wallpapers, new Installer and huge work on translations. More screens to come ...

Shown here is the winners works of our Wallpapers Contest, integrated into nightly builds.     Large version...

Simplemail mail program being ported to AROS by micken_micken.     Large version...

The window of a new AROS installer from Neil Cafferkey.     Large version...

WmvAROS - AROS-native evironment preinstalled on VMWare HD image, showing some AROS networking programs - WookieChat IRC client and AROS-Exec download tool, by gobgobgob.     Large version.

Here`s some works from 2006. AROS showing our cool painting program by Hogne "M0ns00n" Titlestad, Lunapaint v0.2.3 in progress. Also AROS programs was successfully localized to russian. Also work in progress by Kalamatee: Conceptual GUI For W.I.P AROSTCP Config Tool and MesaGL continued example. And forthcoming GUI FTP client by Suppah (aka voidstar).

Here is our cool painting program by Hogne "M0ns00n" Titlestad, Lunapaint v0.2.3 (http://www.sub-ether.org/lunapaint) in progress. Now Datatype loading complete... and more changes to come.     Large version...

This screen shows forthcoming GUI FTP client by voidstar aka suppah, taken from the last build.     Large version...

Here is work in progress by Kalamatee: Conceptual GUI For W.I.P AROSTCP Config Tool. The Profile Page will let you choose/import/export a complete network profile/config. It Also allows setting the Env Variables which affect AROSTCP.     Large version...

MesaGL v 6.5 alpha in development by Kalamatee. Not such a beautiful screen, but the latest.     Large version...

AROS programs catalogs was sucessfully localised to russian by Sergey Mineychev and some fonts were added (by kind permission from Michael Malyshev, ATO).     Large version...

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