| 08.Aug.2003 AROS (Website)
 
 
 
 | AROS Status Report 08/2003 Die Entwicklungen am Betriebssystem AROS verlaufen weiterhin planmäßig. 
In den letzten Wochen waren folgende Update-Arbeiten zu verzeichnen:
 
(nba)Hardware: Michal Schulz is still working on the PPC port, having 
received the Pegasos board donated by Genesi, and more recently a Voodoo3 
card donated by Randy Vice.
Hardware: Johan Grip is implementing the OpenPCI specification, and 
also reworking our buggy ide.device, which attempts to write too much 
data at once instead of splitting the requests in smaller chunks. However 
this is going to be more a rewrite than a bug fix. If someone just wants 
to do the bug fix, there is an open bounty (currently 40 USD) for the 
ide.device bug at TeamAROS.
Build system: GCC 3.2 is now the minimum requirement to compile AROS, 
which now compiles fine with GCC 3.3, thanks to Stefan Reinauer and 
others who fixed the various deprecated bits in the tree.
Build System: Staf Verhaegen continued to improve and simplify the 
build system. Lately, he reorganized the kernel build to use only 
objects, no more static or shared libraries.
Build System: Iain Templeton, one of our South hemisphere developers, 
did his fair share on the build system too, especially on the configure 
scripts (which now require autoconf 2.53, hopefully a generated configure 
is kept in CVS for those missing it) and to ensure that AROS compiles and 
runs fine hosted on FreeBSD.
Build System: Also mawk (which comes as default on Debian GNU/Linux) 
will generate incorrect headers while building AROS, but GNU awk (gawk) 
and FreeBSD awk work fine.
i386-pc Installation: John Gustafsson and Adam Chodorowski earned the 
first TeamAROS bounty for their "Automated Disk Prep and OS Installer". 
It will install AROS on the first disk of the first IDE channel. Don't 
try this on a disk with valuable data anywhere on it, you've been warned. 
Unfortunately it isn't fully usable yet, due to the ide.device bug: some 
files get corrupted during installation.
i386-pc Installation: As part of this work, new Format and Partition 
commands were implemented.
User Interface: We now have a beautiful About dialog, thanks to Pixel 
Art's logo and Adam for the code, as well as an in-progress Mesa port by 
Nic Andrews. And before you ask, the beautiful Broken.miho wallpaper is 
here.
User Interface: Adam did major improvements to the workbench and icon 
libraries (which handle much of the "under the hood" desktop work), and 
also to Wanderer itself. The framework for Wanderer commands is in place, 
and there is already the Delete tool implemented.
User Interface: As a bonus, there is now an identification hook in 
icon.library to display proper icons depending on the file type and take 
appropriate action on double-click, for files without disk icons.
User Interface: Sebastian Bauer added arbitrary angled gradients to 
Zune images.
User Interface: David Le Corfec, Adam and especially Fabio Alemagna, 
who came up with a multitude of ideas and algorithms, brainstormed on 
a "perfectly" MUI-compliant implementation of Zune layout algorithm. 
Hopefully the new one seems to do the trick.
User Interface: The Zune string gadget also got a rework and is now 
slightly more usable, the prefs program got a few more pages, and many 
Zune classes were put in their own loadable modules.
User Interface: Georg Steger implemented the Cybergraphics' 
WritePixelArrayAlpha() and BltTemplateAlpha(), so we can show even more 
eye-candy, with alpha blending this time :) Adam used this to implement a 
nice grayed-out disabled effect for Zune gadgets, instead of the usual 
grid pattern.
User Interface: Georg is also porting back the intuition.library from 
MorphOS, and still does a lot of impressive bug finding and fixing 
elsewhere, which for example led to find and report an longstanding bug 
in stipple drawing to the XFree86 project. And when you're faced with a 
strange memory corruption, try his invaluable trick : call a check 
routine in the scheduler ! This allowed to fix bugs in several Prefs 
programs.
User Interface: But maybe the best for the end ... With 
BltTemplateAlpha() to blend the anti-aliased glyphs, and the work from 
Staf on freetype2, diskfont and bullet libraries, TrueType fonts now 
work - and look - great! It also draws upon the work of many others, 
including the MorphOS team (and especially Emmanuel Lesueur) and the 
FreeType project. The Bitstream Vera font family is now included in AROS.
User Interface: Use FTManager to install TrueType fonts in a few 
mouse clicks, and enjoy the new Font Prefs program.
Localizations: We got a Spanish keymap contributed by Albert Astals 
Cid, several French catalogs by Olivier Adam and Hungarian catalogs, 
language and country files by Mark "Bôregér" Balogh.
Localizations: The applications localization system has been cleaned 
up a bit, and as a side effect, much more applications are now localized. 
So if your favorite application has been localized but misses a catalog 
for your language, don't hesitate to send it to us!
TCP/IP: Will be available next week. Nah, just kidding ;-) One of the 
most requested features. A couple of people are working part-time on 
this, so don't hold your breath. This is a huge task, spanning from 
low-level drivers to interface libraries and support applications. It's 
currently not the priority for most of the developers. Use another 
network appliance in the meantime, or come join us :)
Softwares in contribution: As usual, some new software or updated 
versions were imported in contrib: UAE 0.8.22 (a Zune GUI is planned), 
the free DeluxePaint clone 4P 0.09, TCC 0.9.19 (you can now directly 
create AROS executables!), GNU tools (make 3.80, diffutils 2.8.1, patch 
2.5.4, grep 2.5.1, m4 1.4), abcm2ps 3.7.1, sploiner 1.0
Miscellaneous: After some benchmarking, BOOPSI method calls were 
optimized using macros, and are now about 20% faster. 
Miscellaneous: Roughly 2000 CVS commits since the last status update, 
with a record of 1063 in July. Check it there. So obviously this status 
update is not exhaustive. 
 [Meldung: 08. Aug. 2003, 12:00] [Kommentare: 0]
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