Linked by Dmitar Butrovski on Wed 13th Sep 2006 16:04 UTC
It was 1997 and in these dark ages of the Amiga history, a few brave ones have embarked on a seemingly impossible journey. It is difficult to start from a clean slab, but complete rewrite of the AmigaOS Application Programming Interface (API), in open source domain, was the only option for Amiga community to gain control over destiny of the beloved platform. The Amiga Research Operating System (AROS) was born. Under, at times slow but steadfast progress, the vision is nearly complete. Not only is AROS almost feature-for-feature complete when compared to AmigaOS 3.x, but it has excelled many of the original design specifications.
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Member since:
2006-09-13
Without make it's hard to jump in and port code that uses it for its build system. Making you own projects without it on the other hand is possible. It's not ideal without all the build tools though, but I've not run into problems.
As for self compiling AROS - I guess it could be done with allot of modifying of the AROS code, as it's right now dependent on the AROS build system on Linux. You can't compile AROS on Windows either, nor any other system. That's the choice the devs made in the beginning, and yes you could question it now. But feel free to help changing the situation ;-)
Regarding the dude that said Linux is just a kernel and AROS is a whole OS. I don't know how well he knows about AROS, but the point is that AROS isn't nessesarily a whole OS. Many Amiga people have problems with grasping this fact. AROS can have replacement parts just like any distro can in context with Linux. AROS is an open source project, so different elements of a would be OS solution can be exchanged for others, to deliver a wholly new OS solution. Furthermore, I expect that you very well will see several distros, and perhaps really soon. But they won't be exactly like Linux that's true. They will most probably remain faithful to the basic file structures of AROS and - the KERNEL. :-) Does it sound like Linux/BSD yet? That's right. Open Source projects gives the same *choice*. What it is or isn't is up to you.
As for some of the shortcommings, they could be remedied with some help, over time. But let's not forget that AROS doesn't try to be the end all be all OS. I think it's refreshing with an alternative operating system that isn't created to "fix" the flaws in "inferior predecessors". AROS isn't like that - it's not an experiment and exercise in being new and original - it's about the good old simplicity and easy of use that many OSes had/have, but aren't focusing on at the moment. Elegancy in simplicity anyone? Also, it's a 80's era OS philosophy that should issue an interesting challenge for OS developers in every camp. It's not unix! How many new Open Source OSes can you say that about!