Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 12:00:20 +0200
To: AROS Announce mailto:aros-announce@aros.org
Reply-To: aros-announce@lists.hepe.com
Subject: [AROS-Announce] Status update

BGUI has been completely ported to AROS, now. This means that the library
can be compiled and that all demos run. Cudos go to Stefan Berger.

Michael Schulz is working on making mice work on AROS Native/i386.
This includes work on a PCI.HIDD, an IRQ.HIDD, the VGA.HIDD and the
Serial.HIDD plus an IDE driver. Trackdisk is there, too, so the
next thing is to find a filesystem to use. We try to get SFS because
it seems one of the best filesystems for the Amiga at this time.
The SFS developers seem to be very positive to this, we'll see what
comes from it.

As for the Sowatec AG hiring
developers for AROS, all I can say at this time is that we had several
job interviews and things look quite good. The only thing that might
break it at this time (as I see it) is that we get not enough people.
We figured that we need four developers and last I looked, we had three
and one interview still open. Don't hold your breath but press your
thumbs :-)

Nils Henrik Lorentzen has begun to write a framebuffer.HIDD which
uses Linux' framebuffer for rendering. Right now, it's mostly for
debugging (it's a synchronous interface instead of X11s' asynchronous
one) but maybe, there will be a AROS Native/linux-i386, ie. a
version of AROS that will boot with the help of a Linux kernel
but without the need to install a complete Linux system. We'll
see what can be done here.

And I'm diving into the depths of Ami, the SDK for the next Amiga
by Amiga Inc.. As it looks, the
SDK is a bit disappointing because it's very rough and has lots of
holes but on the positive side, Amiga's crew is very helpful and
the developer support is just great. *sigh* Had we just had such
a support in the old C= days. Many thanks for their effort go to
Ray A. Akey and Gary Peake and all the members of the 
Tao and Amiga
support staff that I'm bombing with EMails ;-) If they can keep this
attitude, then I have no doubt that in five or ten years, people
will name Ami in the same breath as Windows, EPOC and Linux.
Something really to look forward to.

As for stats, I'm proud that we made 40k hits on our web page and
this year has also been very productive from the EMail side: Last
year, there were about 300KB mails/month in the developer list.
This year, we have 1MB mails/month ! Thanks go to all those
members of the development team that have not been mentioned here
but who do important stuff, nonetheless (in no order): Henning
Kiel and Lars Bischoff for reporting bugs, Georg Steger for
cleaning up after the other developers have raged through the
code and calling me back to earth when necessary, Jaime Dias for
asking "stupid" questions that make us think what we're doing,
Manuel Lemos for trusting us with BGUI, Requin Frederic for
helping Michael Schulz, Tobias Seiler for continuing the NetBSD
port, Bernardo Innocenti for bugging people to allow us to port
their software to AROS and last but not least all those people
who I forgot :-) Thanks to you all; it's your
work that makes this possible.

And at the end, a short note to all those people who started own
ports of the AmigaOS: Good luck to you all. I think you will find
out soon enough why AROS took soo long. The AROS team is still
willing to share their knowledge and code with everyone out
there. And we can do this because of the MPL, the only true Open
Source license :-)

-----------------------------------------------------------
==============================================
Sowatec AG,       CH-8330 Pfäffikon (ZH)
Witzbergstr. 7,   http://www.sowatec.com
Tel: +41-(0)1-952 55 55
Fax: +41-(0)1-952 55 66
----------------------------------------------
Aaron "Optimizer" Digulla, digulla@sowatec.com
==============================================

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