Submitted by The port of the Amiga USB stack Poseidon, whose bounty was reached in May, to AROS is almost complete and today officially entered its beta-testing phase, which will last a week. If no show-stopping bugs appear during testing, Poseidon will be officially added to AROS and its sources will be opened under the terms of the AROS Public License, similar to the Mozilla one. The AROS team, however, needs volounteers to test the current version on a wider range of PC configurations.
To do so, installing AROS on the hard drive is not needed. On the Icaros Desktop website there is an updated custom build which allows booting AROS from the CD-ROM drive, get debug logs, and send them to the AROS team. Both the .iso image and instructions about using it are available here. Results should be submitted to this AROS-EXEC discussion.
As most of you will know, AROS used to stand for the “Amiga Research Operating System”, but in order to distance itself from all the legal nonsense around the Amiga, it renamed itself to the Aros Research Operating System. It is basically an open-source Amiga-like operating system for various platforms, including the x86. There’s even a computer you can buy which comes with AROS pre-installed.
Happy testing!
AROS seems to continue picking up steam and the USB bounty goes a long way towards making AROS much more usable. When printer support gets added along with office suite, AROS will be a decent alternative computing platform . I hope the developers can keep their momentum going.