AROS V1.10

TITLE

  AROS - The Amiga Replacement OS V1.10

AUTHORS

  Aaron "Optimizer" Digulla - Head of Development
  Th.-Heuss-Str. 8
  78467 Konstanz
  Germany

  irc:    Optimizer
  email:  digulla@wi-pc44.fh-konstanz.de (for AROS related mail)
     digulla@home.lake.de      (for private mail)
     digulla@fh-konstanz.de    (for large mails)

  Matthias Fleischer - Exec, DOS, drivers
  Peter Boeckmann - Sparc, Alpha
  Iain Templeton - FreeBSD, utility
  Peter Bortas - WWW site
  Martin Recktenwald - WWW, misc.
  Lennard voor den Dag - Amiga port
  Chris Lawrence - Linux/m68k
  Geert Uytterhoeven - Linux/m68k
  Nils Henrik Lorentzen - diskfont, icons, iffparse
  Stefan Ruppert - Datatypes
  Kars de Jong - misc
  Harald Frank - Amiga port

  Note: It's no mistake that the addresses of the other persons are
  missing. It just that I want to protect them from beeing swamped
  by EMail :)

DESCRIPTION

AROS is an effort to re-write the AmigaOS V3.1 (40.70 or later) in ANSI C
(mostly).  The goal is to have the power of the AmigaOS without beeing
limited by the hardware.  We try hard to maintain source compatibility
which means that, if you want some Amiga application on your mainframe, all
you have to do is to get its source and compile it again.

 Right now, we have implemented these features:
 - Almost the complete exec. Only interrupts and some more
   esoteric functions are missing
 - Much of DOS
 - A shell to run DOS commands
 - A set of working DOS commands: Dir, List, Echo, Cd, ...
 - Parts of graphics.library, intuition.library and
   locale.libary
 - Enough of Intuition to open a window, receive IntuiMessages
   and process them.
 - console.device with RawKeyConvert()
 - Several demos
 - The following parts are finished: icon.library, iffparse.library
   and utility.library.
 - A very basic RTG

 If you want to participate, then you can choose between these two:

 a) The Preferred Way: Get your hands on CVS and follow the
    instructions on our WWW pages.

 b) The Usual Way: Get the latest source, make your modifications
    and send me patches via email. Since this takes some time,
    make sure you allocate your work with the jobserver.

 If you write something for us, make sure to check if that job
 is not already done by someone else. To achieve this, use the
 jobserver. You can reach it by writing an EMail to

aros@aros.fh-konstanz.de

 with the Subject "jobserv" (without the ""). It reads the
 contents of the mail and executes it. For help simply use
 the command "help" on a single line.

CHANGES (since 1.7)

 - Implemented PROPGADGETS
 - Many new functions (we have now 377 of 1109 funcions, that's 34%)
 - NIL: and RAM: devices from M. Fleischer
 - AROS now uses the AFD-COPYRIGHT
 - New CLI commands: Mount, Assign, MakeDir, Delete, Ask, Date, ...
 - Real preemptive multitasking like on Amiga
 - FreeBSD/i386 support
 - Much easier to port to a new hardware. Moved OS specific files from
   the various directories to AROS/config/$(ARCH) and the CPU
   specific files to AROS/config/$(KERNEL).
 - Worked on docs
 - Many (50+) new functions in c.lib and amiga.lib
 - Big endian IO functions in aros.library
 - Amiga native and Linux/m68k versions. Amiga is still alpha.
 - A *pre* alpha of VBCC with i386 support. This is only loosely
connected to AROS. See the README in the directory
\filename{AROS/compiler/vbcc/}.
 - iffparse.library completed
 - First version which runs on the Amiga

SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS

You need a PC with Linux or an Amiga.  For more information, please visit
our WWW pages.

AVAILABILITY

Aminet, eg. ftp://ftp.doc.ic.ac.uk/aminet/misc/emu/AROS*
ftp://aros.fh-konstanz.de/pub/aros/ (Main FTP Server)
http://aros.fh-konstanz.de/~digulla/ (Main page)
http://www.lysator.liu.se/amiga/aros/ (Sweden Mirror)
http://home.worldonline.nl/~ldp/aros/ (AROS for Amiga)

On Aminet on misc/emu.  There are two archives: AROSdev* which contains the
source and AROSbin* which contains ready compiled demos which you can start
in an XTerm under Linux.

PRICE

Free.

DISTRIBUTABILITY

(C) 1995-96 AROS - The Amiga Replacement OS
It's freely distributable as long as all files are distributed unchanged. 
The source may be used in commercial product with written permission by the
authors.

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