(the latest article on my blog focusing on the intervention on SCALE last February 22nd and on the release of the modern browser for AROS: it took too much time to be translated and so I put it up right today after the publishing on my own blog.)

Sunday February 22nd, despite is already noon the sky is cloudy, with all the clouds getting flat on the low quota high pressure in a sort of whitish steamy ceiling over the city of Los Angeles.

My wife drops me in front of the Westin Hotel's parking lot in Century Boulevard, better known from LA people as the "Hotel Strip" just above LAX then she starts the car and head towards north. Carrying my two bags -one of which is my laptop- i too start to walk towards the hotel main door excited.

Despite the opening might be good for some family drama, i am just talking about my arrive at SCALE (Soutern CAlifornia Linux Expo) for my AROS intervention, listed under the Open Source for Beginners section; i am expected to talk at 1.30 pm and have still one hour left so i go check in at the reception and they give me a speakers red badge, some promotional stuff (cloth bag, a XL american size t-shirt which i can use as a camping tent as much is oversized for me) and start walking towards the hall ehere will held my speak.

My speak is expected to last one hour only so i need to follow my script thoroughly; this is my absolute first advocacy in a convention; so far the biggest crowd I have been in front with was together with the choir I used to sing in italy as Basso chorist; we had the honor, together with other four choirs, to sing all together for the Pope in Porto Recanaty in 2005, with a crowd of around 600,000 people: too big to realize it.
Here i have not even ten people in a theatre with at least 100 places, but is different: this people is MY own crown and I am the focus of them, together with AROS that in my laptop, don't look at the best of its shape: my laptopis a DELL VOSTRO 1000 with AMD sempron, 1.5 gig of RAM, 100 gig hard disk, broadcomm wireless card, EHCI USB card (PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4386&SUBSYS_022A1028&REV_00\3&2411E6FE&0&9D) and a Sigmatel sound card: definitely not the most OpenSource friendly laptop but, as a take its defense, it was bought to work on it, not to advocate on it...

i tried to make it boot from the live CD and the first sensation is good: AROS seems to perform quite fast and well (despite the widescreen is not supported by my ATI card and the aspect ratio of the screen looks a bit weird) and my sound card give no signs of life; plus i was unable to set my virtual machine to get connected [now solved, but i opened at the time a topic on aros-exec here] and still did not had (yet) the OWB beta version to show. Despite that i have been able to use poorPDF as a slide projector and also to show the VmWAROS Wanderer desktop complete with Ken's icons.

The overall intervention lasted one hour; guess all my inexperience in doing introductions showed up - i admit it - in missing to fully follow the script that I prepared and in making the slides getting along iwth the speak, so at the end i jumped some slidesand in some cases i indulged a little longer in details rather than in the focus points; at the end i had to show the available software a bit on a rush, but i hope to have been able to transmit the enthuisiasm, my own and the community itself one, in developing and promoting the use and further development of AROS.


The public, those few that came, were surely with an amiga background: almost everybody knew what Amiga OS was and many of them seemed to approve the concept; there has been questions on the toolchain and about memory consumption but, in general, i am afraid that without showing adequately AROS on the run - as i haven't been able to that day - they considered the project just a small curiosity: or not? Wish to see how many contacts came to aros-exec from Southern California lately...

But guess that anyway i have been able to show the commitment and the passion of AROS supporters: if i sohuld choose a sentence to describe what I did that day guess will choose the one from Joe "Zonker" Brockheimer from its own SCALE intervention (page 16 of the enclosed PDF file): "Do something,even if it is wrong".

Beside my own intervention i had very little time to wander around the expo: my wife could not park around the place (the parking fee for the hotel was a $14 flat fee and being at the end of the month cash was tight) and was waiting for me outside the hotel doing "pings" every two minutes:P therefore i tried to do a fast tour of the main lobby and i had the luck to meet Gregory John Casamento, a.k.a. bheron, GNUStep mantainer and assigned to the Kickstart replacement bounty in its own GNUstep booth: i introduced myself as an AROS advocate and had a short talk with him about the subject: he told me that is undoubtly difficult to retrieve reference material and also old hardware as well in order to complete the bounty (material such as Rom Kernel Manuals, technical newsletters, developers kit,etc). In case you want to provide some material to Gregory you can get in touch with him through his blog or his AROS blog, the AROS developer mailing list (subscription required) or in aros-exec.

So in short this is the essay about my SCALE partecipation. If only i had the OWB beta under my hands a couple of hours earlier probably my introduction should have been even juicy than it has been, but then my network problems with VmWAROS surely could have made it look again stuck, who knows?

By the way, the most important news of the month and fo the whole story of AROS is that finally OWB beta is here!

After the first attempt made by Robert norris on provide AROS with a modern web browser trying to convert Webkit and that lead to the december 2007 semi-working alpha version, able to navigate but slow quirky and quite unusable comes - also thanks in part to Robert's job - the AROS port of Origin Web Browser comes bringing javascript and CSS support, along with tabbed browsing and a download manager.

To install OWB is required to have a recent AROS build (february 19 or later) or to copy the files muimaster.library and arosc.library from a recent nightly build in your libs: directory.

For VmWAROS users Paolo besser prepared an update .iso based on a newer build that contains both the new required libraries and a stacksize icon fix (before of this update assign the stack size from an icon does not work). This update has to be used together with the VmWUpdate script. The iso can be downloaded from here.

Please BE VERY CAREFUL in doing the update and follow the enclosed .pdf file: i missed to read it and simply done the upgrade as a simple VmWAROS upgrade and lost amistart, the configIP stopped working together with arosTCP and, after i made the fatal mistake to try to reinstall the old version of VmWAROS with the installer i was greeted by a sudden reboot, followed by a skinnless error requester in old topaz font "Mountfile 'AROS:Devs/DosDrivers/PIPEFS' is invalid: wrong number of arguments" and an OK button. Pushing the OK button the system rebooted and showed the same requester again, over and over. The only viable option I found to restore the system was to boot from a recent nightly iso and install again the system. Then, in order to get the net working again had to reconfigure AROSTCP by hand; so, in case you might do a mistake like mine and you might not find the instruction to do it on net (usually in the AROS wikibooks) am going to repeat it here:



Hmm, guess is about time to restart that project of mine to configure AROSTCP made in lua...


Before and after the problem I tested OWB on VmWAROS (form the office, where the virtual machine has no issues in connecting) and also contributed on its debug; the actual veersion 0.9.2 is already out and includes some of the fixes and features requested by the users; still there are some problems in sending attachments from yahoo (the attachment does not get recognized) and in saving mails in gmail; beside that my OWB experience has been quite pleasant; despite the obvious slowliness of the Virtual Environment enhances some small glitches such as the not full asynchronicity of CURL library (that load the page components), the browser is fast, mouse wheel is fully supported, the page rendering is quite good and the user interface, although a bit basic, is clean and enjoyable. If you want to see OWB in action, nikos posted avideo on youtube. Best performances can be achieved by assigning a stack size of 1024000.

Future plans for OWB include bookmarks and history support; furthermore, some threads are already started on aros-exec to propose a phase 2 browser bounty that should provide a plug-in system and a flash player port as in example SWFDEC or GNASH; for the latter one there are some concerns due to the results of a recent static port on Haiku - where with static port is meant that all libraries and dependences were included in the binary file - and that turned out to be quite heavy: 135 megabytes...

Stanislaw also prepared a bug tracker for OWB that, after a little stay in google code, now hgas been relocated for good in sand-labs, together at the OWB download link. The description page of all work occurred in OWB,instead, is still here.

Another innovation made by Stanislaw Sszymczyk is the possibility to build AROS parts outside the source tree: in other words is now possible to compile AROS in other directories beside those supposed to be used in the source tree; this characteristic comes out handy for the development of alternate versions of applications (such as hosted, native, with or without debug output) in parallel; plus, with updated cross-compilers it is also possible to compile binaries for different processors at the same time (sam,efika,i386,i3856/64,etc.) and that allow to the developers to only run "make" to update the components without need to reconfigure everything.
So far the compilation outside the source tree can be done on few applications only due to the fact that some tools need to get required files from the source tree and that might cause problems; furthermore is not possible compile both inside and outside the source tree at the same time yet.
(Thanks to Nick "Kalamatee" Andrews for a better explaination of the function).

Recently the boot mechanism of AORS is changed: if the system is updated with a recent build it is required that the file aros.boot is present in the root of the system disk; said file needs to be copied manually form the build iso, else the system will complain about a bootable drive missing in the hard disk and will not proceed further.

Steve Jones can be an unknown name to the most of the new member of the Amiga/AROS community and for those that left Amiga as main system before 1995/96 while for the old guard members this mane is linked to the Siamese System, the system created to readdress Amiga graphical output on PC graphic boards through RTG and that was supposed to be one of the cornerstones of a PCI based Amiga system; the plug on thje project has following been pulled by Gateway and nothing came out of it.
Now Steve comes back in the AROS landscape introducing a new compact PC machine based on Intel Atom with selected hardware for the best performance under AROS, and is equipped with the latest VmWAROS distro version: the machine name is iMica (purposely reminds Amiga) and the price is quite affordable, around 250 UK pounds - around 400$. The AROS support has also been endorsed by Kalamatee efforts in provide a working network card drivers; on the sound side iMica uses for the moment a SoundBlaster Live with EMU10k chip (supported and proven working), in the hope to see more sound card drivers available in the next future; as usual, if somebody has experience in low level programming and wish to join the developers team for writing new drivers is welcome. More informations about iMica are available in the AROS Show.

Pavel "Sonic" Fedin has released a new beta of the Windows hosted AROS; despite still has problems in the refresh, also due to the way AROS actually manages themes, this new version will allow developers and users to run AROS in Windows without the need of a virtual machine.
To distribute the Windows-hosted version, Pavel resurrected the old Snapshots functionality of Aros.org; the latest version of AROS windows hosted can be downloaded here.

Michal Schulz is still going on in the Efika port of AROS; being the most of the code done, now he is focusing in optimizing the port; just the last March 9th, Michal released a new test iso downloadable here, to fix some third party MUI classes instability that caused Zune preferences to crash or not to be launched at all, and he further fixed USB stacks including a OHCI bug that brought not to update some periferals status or to retrieve some "zombie " periferals; then ha added a new Efika port feature: a specific debug that will show precise particulars on where a program or a library crashed; in the todo list of Michal there will be also some way to prevent AROS to freeze in case of system crash in a similar fashion to the os4 Grim Reaper.

Oliver Brunner is still working at its Janus-UAE; latest features are the amiga public scerens support as AROS screens and the GTK-MUI GUI update made similar to the windows UAE in order to handle the full screen support.

Fabio "Allanon" Falcucci has recently released a pictures and thumbnails viewer made with Hollywood and that uses its own SCUI-lib routines for the user interface; the program, called LookHere, can be downloaded here.

And to finish, good news from Paolo Besser: the version 1.1 of VmWAROS is in progress; Paolo decided to increase the version number due to the new boot system and devices fix as mentioned above. The new version shows very interesting features, as the IconDress script, that allows to exchange icon sets extracting it from .ipkg archives and replacing the actual ones; new applications will be bundled such as the new ArosPDF by Craig Kiesau, the new MPlayer build and, of course OWB; and last Paolo intends to give a mahjor clean-up to the distro, removing those applications that still use the old muimaster.library which is responsible for the non functioning zune Preference panel. The removed applications list is available in this thread on Aros-exec; in the same thread Paolo ask those applications developers to recompile it linked to the latest library version so that he will add the fixed application again to the distro. The latter is particularly important for Simple Editor and for marranoFTP, especially the latter one, having no other FTP clients available on AROS.

Posted by saimon69 on March 30 2009 08:54:18 · 2 Comments · 853 Reads ·