How to move AROS forward

[cicero790]

To Bloodline:  I see.  It's very interesting to hear great programmers talk about this, and I think the Aros will gain a substantially larger support the moment it gets modern browser support.  That's all it takes.  On Google you have a complete office and mail and it will be possible to use it in daily life. That will draw the old Amiga users back and the supporter base will grow bigger.

[cicero790]

And with bigger supporter base, more bounty that speeds up further development.

[Louis Dias]

bloodline wrote:

lou_dias wrote:
Back on topic...

How to improve AROS:
Instead of the wants and desired being separate, come together, form a consortium, pool the bounty money and decide in order which bounties AROS NEEDS and prioritize them.  Then let programmers bid on only the top one.  They declare how much money it would take them to code it...  Then onto the next bounty if their is money left over...  Etc...  So 3 coders offer to code the top bounty, coder 1 says he'll do it for $3,000, #2 for @$2,500 and #3 for $2,750.  Bids can be private, bounty is publicly assigned to #2...

A bounty doesn't work like that. If I put $10 into a bounty it's for a spcific task, for something that I want.

Perhaps we could set up a GeneralBounty, that people can submit to, and let a "board of directors" decide where the Money goes depending upon what is considered most important. But honestly, I doubt it will be as sucessful as what we have now. There is no money in the Amiga platform anymore, what we do now is totally for fun... that includes funding bountys and developing for the various AmigaOS Clones.

I know it doesn't work like that currently, but it seems people donate to what they want (niche), meanwhile what AROS "needs" remains neglected...  Typically, the needs of AROS benefit everyone, not a niche set of users...
I say refund all the bounty money.  Set priorities and then accept general bounty money then let the programmers with skill bid on the bounty for what they think it (and their time) is worth...

How much money would it take for you to do the Kickstart replacement?  That would benefit more people (CloneA, NATAMI, MiniMig) than a port to ...even though I'm sure you'd like to port it to an ARM platform, for instance...

[Trev]

Part of the problem with a Kickstart replacement is Kickstart itself. Its internals are so well-known that it would be difficult to support a clean room design, especially on a 680x0-based platform.

Of course, you could also argue that the internals are so well-known that it's a de facto standard. The fact that Amiga hardware is no longer commercially available weighs heavily in favor of a new implementation.

Speaking of L4, if Kickstart were reimplemented, it would be very cool to see it done as a hypervisor.

@HenryCase

Don't give up. Binary refactoring (either dynamic or compiler-assisted) isn't a new concept, but it is a young one. Take a look at the literature. The traditional approach of catching exceptions and working around them will work, but it's definitely not as sexy.

Do keep complexity in mind, though. The P versus NP problem is a very real one. As noted, it doesn't take much (around 266 branch instructions or 2^266 combinations) before the number of possible outcomes is more than the approximate number of atoms in the universe (10^80). Really. All you need in that case is a quantum computer with n qubits, where n is the number of branches. ;-)

[Zekaric]

To cicero:  I'm not sure if a browser would be the magic bullet that will bring AROS to the fore front.  I still see AROS having a big problem with attracting developers to the project.  The big problem, as I see it, is the inability to bootstrap AROS from inside AROS as the development environment is not complete enough to do full AROS dev inside AROS.  A lot of devs will still have to cross compile from other OSes which is a pain.  Not to mention that some people don't have that many free machines that they can risk knobbling.

The virtual machine AROS is a good start.  This at least allows someone to not sacrifice a computer to AROS just yet.  I haven't played enough with it though.  

I think a good turtorial on AROS navigation, design ideas would be a good idea.  AROS is unique in certain ways compared to other operating systems that someone who has never had a serious involvment with AMIGAs will be a bit frustrated and lost with AROS.  Potentially another roadblock to attracting new developers to the project.


So, IMO, get that dev environment in AROS complete.  From the looks of it, it is coming along but just isn't there yet.  When that is done, make it clear how to develop AROS from within AROS.  Even down to how to edit a file, bring up a command prompt, etc.  Some basic system navigation so that new devs don't feel like retards in AROS.  The more 'happy' devs you have working on AROS the more AROS will benefit.  The cross compile is a bit of a killer I think.


However I found a little something over on the SDL mailing list.  If a browser is wanted maybe this will be at least a bare minimum until someone has the time to port over something like FireFox.

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS9883020354.html
http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT5894497943.html

SDL based Web browser.  AROS has an SDL port doesn't it?  Or at least SDL'll probably be easier to port over than all that window manager stuff that FireFox will need.  A thought.

[cicero790]

To Zekaric: I was seeing this from my own point of view (what else could I do?). I was an Amiga user. It was the first in a long line of computers that had an OS, and this OS was, as it probably was for many Amiga users, almost like a second home. I left this for pc then the company crashed. I left Amiga completely but some year’s back I discovered winuae and thought it was great. And I also discovered that Amiga lived a prosperous underground life. I learned about the AROS. The first thing I did was to take out one of the older PC’s and hoped that AROS was possible to install and use for browsing. It did not work out, so I have it in VM like a goldfish. This behavior is something that I think many former Amiga owners will do with their second pc’s that stand in the basement.  I do not like Linux very much. Windows is a workhorse but I would prefer to use an OS that derived from that former sweet home. I just guess that many former Amiga owners and users would feel the same. There will always be hardcore enthusiasts but I think that AROS could also attract the “lighter” former user and by that broaden the supporter base. There are a lot of former Amiga owners out there and since so much of computer time is connected to the internet I think many will return if it’s a real OS that can be use on pc for daily internet tasks. If just the browser works I think people will have patients and wait for the other bits to fall into place.
 It’s just a thought.

[hardlink]

Going back to the original post:

uncharted wrote:
Start off as simply a bunch of replacement files that goes on top of an OS3.1 install and keep building them up until you have replaced everything.  ...  Really, it's how AROS should have been done from the start.

I don't follow AROS that closely, but you mean this is not being done for the non-hardware banging code?! GCC should be able to produce both 68K and x86 files; load the 68K on a hardware Amiga in place of the regular library or whatever, test the heck out of it, and if it passes try the other version in AROS.Isn't this rather standard procedure for trying to develop identical functionality on two different platforms?

[bloodline]

hardlink wrote:
Going back to the original post:

uncharted wrote:
Start off as simply a bunch of replacement files that goes on top of an OS3.1 install and keep building them up until you have replaced everything.  ...  Really, it's how AROS should have been done from the start.

I don't follow AROS that closely, but you mean this is not being done for the non-hardware banging code?! GCC should be able to produce both 68K and x86 files; load the 68K on a hardware Amiga in place of the regular library or whatever, test the heck out of it, and if it passes try the other version in AROS.Isn't this rather standard procedure for trying to develop identical functionality on two different platforms?

This is being done... check out AFA by Bernd

[uncharted]

bloodline wrote:

:-? Quark isn't AmigaOS, it's modern microkenel. It's also proprietory, if we wanted to move the Amiga platform forward I would prefer an opensource solution. L4 is a cool system, but if you really want a MicroKernel, then I would probably choose something like Darwin, which has more real world useage and is being activly developed by comercial interests.

Darwin is not a kernal it is the OS (and XNU is not a strict microkernel)

Sorry, I don't often get the chance to be pedantic these days, have to grab every opportunity ;-)

What is the problem with using the Linux Kernel? It's far better supported than L4, I think it was Staf who proposed a minimal Linux with AROS-Hosted on top. You've never know Linux was there and you get all of Linux's Driver support... nice idea really.

Why not go the whole hog and host UAE with 68k AROS on Linux and get full compatibility?  That's what I've been trying to propose.

[bloodline]

uncharted wrote:

bloodline wrote:

:-? Quark isn't AmigaOS, it's modern microkenel. It's also proprietory, if we wanted to move the Amiga platform forward I would prefer an opensource solution. L4 is a cool system, but if you really want a MicroKernel, then I would probably choose something like Darwin, which has more real world useage and is being activly developed by comercial interests.

Darwin is not a kernal it is the OS (and XNU is not a strict microkernel)

Sorry, I don't often get the chance to be pedantic these days, have to grab every opportunity ;-)

You are quite right, but I was trying to think of a system that would bring with it Drivers/Hardware support... and yet was still based on a Microkernel (though I realise Mach is now really a hybrid)...

What is the problem with using the Linux Kernel? It's far better supported than L4, I think it was Staf who proposed a minimal Linux with AROS-Hosted on top. You've never know Linux was there and you get all of Linux's Driver support... nice idea really.

Why not go the whole hog and host UAE with 68k AROS on Linux and get full compatibility?  That's what I've been trying to propose.

That's what I think most sensible people would want...

[uncharted]

bloodline wrote:

This is being done... check out AFA by Bernd

This is not what AFA is doing.  AfA only replaces a couple of libs in quite an awkward way.  It is not some kind of systematic 68k port.

[bloodline]

uncharted wrote:

bloodline wrote:

This is being done... check out AFA by Bernd

This is not what AFA is doing.  AfA only replaces a couple of libs in quite an awkward way.  It is not some kind of systematic 68k port.

It's not systematic, but it's achieving the same result... the number of bugs that have been fixed by this method is quite considerable...

[cicero790]

Hi
I glanced back at my last post here and saw it could come across as rather negative. I think AROS is great and the AROS team has done a fantastic job. I Just wanted to have that said. Also, it was an issue with the first pc not AROS. The second pc I tried the AROS livecd on installed without any problem, so no shadow over AROS.
How is the current situation with the browser?
Is traveler at a standstill?

Zekaric wrote his:
However I found a little something over on the SDL mailing list. If a browser is wanted maybe this will be at least a bare minimum until someone has the time to port over something like FireFox.

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS9883020354.html
http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT5894497943.html

SDL based Web browser. AROS has an SDL port doesn't it? Or at least SDL'll probably be easier to port over than all that window manager stuff that FireFox will need. A thought.
End quote:

Is this the way to do it? My programming skills are not up to date, so I am of no use here.
Is it possible to get a browser going so AROS could be used as the main OS and move from pre-internet state?

[SamuraiCrow]

The port of SDL to AROS is rather old but it works for some things.  Also, Origyn Web Browser has been ported to AmigaOS 3 and 4 but the license isn't listed in the article.  The OS 3 port might work on a hefty AROS box if Joerg is required to hand out the source.

As for Wanderer, Rob had some emotional problems to work out so he ducked out of the bounty.  The bounty is valid again if you want to take it.

[SamuraiCrow]

Update:  It's BSD Licensed but Joerg said he would post the changes needed to make an OS4 version on the Sand-Labs Subversion server when he's done with the latest version.

[cicero790]

Oh, it was my programming skills that were insufficient, but Zekaric seems to be a dev. Maybe he could be talked into doing it.  He also had some ideas for pawing the road for new devs that haven’t been deeply involved with Amiga. And all ideas that lead to more devs and more users sounds good.

AROS is different and different is good.