First of All, Thanks to the ilCannocchiale staff for fixing comments; pity lots of more stuff need to be still fixed including permalinks…
This year had life going through and at the last moment prevented me to participate at SCaLE; might need to change home again, this time due to a problem with neighbors too long and complicate to discuss here; thank God the work side is good and have no complains.
Not too much news under the AROS front at first glance; however, as usually “look is deceiving” because we had a good amount of ports; Especially Slazard ‘Bszili’ Biro and Yannick ‘Yannickescu’ Erb are bringing to AROS a good amount of games and emulators i can remember Frogatto, TORCS (not released due to problems with GLSL), Flare, Gigalomania and lots of others; Joao Ralha, recently opened a new AROS blog called AROS Playground where reviews ported games and provides developer interviews;
Timothy ‘Terminills’ Deters is working on porting Gutenprint on AROS, on interfacing it with a generic Amiga printer driver.
Gutenprint, formerly know as Gimp Print are High Quality printer drivers based off the hpijs printer system; the name is from the fact that those drivers were originally developed for GIMP; were also adopted from Mac os X in the early version as printer drivers.
According to its plans Gutenprint will talk to the printer via a bridge software and to a generic 3.1 driver written by Jason ‘Ezrec’ McMullan; the driver written by Jason is also able to translate Gutenprint commands in Turboprint and 3.1 printer commands, however this implementation is not limited to Gutenprint; the printer driver is a 24 bit one and in the intentions of Terminills should also bring advanced features such as ipp (internet Printing Protocol), printer detection and driver auto detection; Terminills is also working at the zune based interfaces to configure the printers;
Among all the ports of Yannick ‘Yannickescu’ Erb, in 2010 was the long forgotten and neglected structured Graphics program Amifig to AROS; started a slow but steady work on updating it first improving the rendering, then adding file export and import with a side application; now a new version is available, with a new name, ZuneFig, a rewamped User Interface now in Zune, support for gradient and Library previews and a better redraw with Anti-Alias;
Nik ‘Kalamatee’ Andrews is working on the native Raspberry Pi port of AROS; on March 14 he has been able to make AROS boot to wanderer; the pictures of the first boot have been spreaded on the net via twitter and Amiga and AROS forums and communities; last week Kalamatee worked on debugging the SD card driver so to support also SDHC; the SD card support is also actually under further development by Pavel ‘Sonic’ Fedic to bve implemented as multiplatform device driver since the logic is changing form platform to platform; right now Kalamatee loosened a bit the grip on the port since he need to implement USB and still is trying to find a way to implement it. Curious is also that among the motivations of Kalamatee is the idea to finish its modular overhaul of Wanderer so that could be optimized for a less powerful machine like the Raspberry PI.
To finish,lately on aw.Net some threads appeared where people seems interested in a new kernel for amiga os or its like tastes; is known that in the past at least two attempts have been made: one was the well known Anubis, brought on by Alex ‘MrBIOS’ Perez, the other one was ARIX, started by Michal Schulz and from which the idea of Anubis took shape; summarizing, the idea behind those two partial forks is to have the actual exec kernel substituted by a linux one together with a wrapper that translates the AROS API calls in linux ones so that AROS binaries libraries and programs can run on top of it with no recompilation; is a similar approach to the system adopted by Android and can bring the advantage of memory protection, SMP and linux drivers to AROS; both projects have an actual unknown status and would like to know by the maintainers if there has been any progress since.
binarydoodles 