Two major developments related to Linux hosted version of AROS reached significant milestones in November. Jyrki Koivisto continued development of the USB driver that communicates directly to Linux USB subsystem and brought it to a state where storage devices now can be accessed on the AROS side. Second development, the ALSA based AHI driver developed by Krzysztof Smiechowicz reached release level and is now included in the AROS nightly builds. It replaces the obsolete OSS based driver. This development was done based on bounty hosted by Power2People.org and this bounty has been closed as well.
While on topic of bounties, a bounty to deliver a working implementation of FUSE filesystem and read/write driver for NTFS filesystem has been completed by Frederik Wikstrom. The bounty was also hosted by Power2People.org. The sources of the port are not yet integrated into AROS, but are freely available on GitHub.
AROS has finally been posting development news on its website again, making it a little easier to follow what’s going on. Great progress!
This trend of reusing linux system code in alternate operating systems is probably the mark of the times. afaik kolibrios does the same thing wrt some drivers. It’s probably a great way to speed up development of smaller projects, but i feel like it kills the innovation.
This work doesn’t apply to native AROS, just the Linux-hosted version. Linux-hosted AROS has been around for longer than I care to remember. So I agree with your points, but not in this specific case.
“innovation” really is not a factor in a project intended to re-create an old OS.
Now if only they could complete Zune … 🙂
I can’t see an x64 port. Only 32-bit.
If I’m wrong please correct me, but why switching from my Linux distribution, only to downgrade to a 32-bit OS?
G.
I’m not trolling here but does you actually need a 64 bit OS? Most people don’t unless they have a computer with a lot of RAM and/or applications that demand it. For most people, the difference between 32 and 64 bit is irrelevant.
Yes I agree, but x64 is the present. 32-bit is history. 🙂
Anyway!
For actually answering to you question…Yes x64 really makes a difference IF you are using a program with a big number of complex math calculations.
The most well known (that I’m using) is XBoard (or actually, the back-end command-line chess engines, eg. Crafty), for analyzing positions.
Of course, for an older machine (with <1GB memory), x64 could be a problem (and actually a dissadvantage), because it’s cpu registers are double the size of the 32-bit respectives, consuming double the memory.