AROS has no chance in the future if...

[Gojirax]

iamaboringperson wrote:
One thing I see very often, are companies/organisations which use x86 and MS-Win for POS and kiosks.

That bothers me - for numerous reasons.

AROS would be a great to use with these machines.

Perhaps it would be great if a group of AROS enthusiests were to get together and workout how to market (and actually sell) OS's to these kinds of users.

Certainly if it had memory protection and a decent built in TCP/IP stack it would be great for these types of applications.

Of course, it would also probably need some included tech. support, and a hell of a lot of 'how to program for' material. That would be the hard part.

But overall it would be better than buying 100's/1000's/10,000's MS-Windows licencess, IMHO.

The solution to what you're suggesting is Citrix and Terminal Services support.

We've made PXE boot and small flash boot disks at the hospital I work at with a teeny tiny DOS Based Citrix client. Using Citrix it takes 10 seconds to get from Bios splash screen to a Windows XP login.

AROS could do it better, and cheaper. There are already Linux solutions for a Citrix boot environment too, so there would be some competition.

The area it could make huge advances is to make a thin client and make it as simple and easy as possible to setup. For us it wasn't all that simple, and we haven't installed the 300 thin clients we need.

Realistically, to survive in the current world you need support natively for the following: (Totally just my $0.02 worth and not anything I put a lot of stock in.)

Web Browser with support for Flash, Shockwave, CSS, SSL, XML, Citrix, Anti Spyware/Virus etc.

Active Directory support, support for Group Policy and TCP/IP Printing, COM, DCOM, RPC etc.)

Citrix and Terminal Services support.

Office Suite (Not just Word, but Outlook, Excell, Powerpoint, Access, Front Page... even if you are going to use alternatives to these they need to be able to open and work with these formats or you won't be able to integrate your services seemlessly, which is critical.)

Remote management services. (Things like LanDesk, WSUS, SMS, Dameware etc.)

Full Media service (Audio/Video/Streaming Media etc.)

Authoring for Media Services as well.

Encrypted and secure Wireless networking, USB2.x, Bluetooth, Java.

Support for (And Exchange server conduits for) Mobile devices like Cell Phones, Cameras, PalmOS and CE devices.

Can it be done? Yeah, with a team of about 100 zealots.

I downloaded the AROS CD and booted it up. It was impressive, but missing everything. Nice to look at and responsive though. It was enough that I'll check in 6 months from now to see what they've got, but a Citrix client and decent Media player would be enough that I would actually attempt to make it work in some projects I have.

[Gojirax]

Dammy Wrote:

Being a member of a community with a public OS, means that things only happen if the individual makes it happen.

There's a community? What do people do with this OS exactly? I might be missing something, but from the 2 hours I spent tinkering with it I saw what appeared to be an interactive demo without sound.

People run this as an operating system? I'm honestly asking that because I didn't see enough there to provide a real computing environment, but close to one.

Dandelion Wrote:

And they provide a real, viable alternative to MS. AROS isn't that yet, but it has, if we all stop complaining and support it, the potential to do so.

Not that I was complaining, but I saw a lot of it, I was offering some consultation and advice into what the OS could easily do, and what would be required to be what the author of this thread wanted it to be (Not that AROS wants to be a mainstream OS, but since that's the thrust of the thread I stayed in context.)

What would one (A non-programmer) do to "Support" it? I hear rumors of bounties, what do they do? Is that the only form of support it has?

I remember reading about AROS in Amiga Format back when that magazine was still alive, but really had no idea why it was being made.

The ISO image I fired up on my PC was really neat looking though, for what it's worth.

[Gojirax]

Someone asked:
"Will AROS be able to hold the interest of the casual user for more than 10 minutes, and if so when? Is it taboo to ask? "

To which Fats replied:

It's not taboo. The problem seems to be that some people can't ask this question without becoming confrontational.

While later Dammy replied to the same question with:

So you installed AROS, setup TCP/IP, did some IRCing and then customized your prefs, played some games, did some art work while listening to MP3s all in under 10 minutes? You must have been REALLY bored out of your mind with the old school Amigas.

Dammy

I'm finding this to be a fairly decent thread for getting some discussion underway for the average onlooker like myself. I've used AROS for all of 1 hour from an ISO that I downloaded.

I can see where the Devs and Fans would feel beset upon from the types of questions. (The title of the thread alone is enough to put someone on the defensive.)

The thing I see here is that even though people are giving harsh criticism of AROS, the good thing is... they're at least loooking. At some point they tried it out.

Whilst Dammy's reply was one of moderate defensiveness, it held within it some good detail on what can be done with AROS. Thanks Dammy. A more detailed version of what you typed there would be awesome.

I too wonder what I can do with AROS. I like the fact that it's fast and smooth and very Amiga-Like.

Is there a listing of applications that work with AROS compiled somewhere? Maybe an AROS fan could write up some quick guides titled something like "Things you can do with AROS"... even if you aren't a programmer, you could contribute a tremendous amount with just something like that. I'd give it another shot if I didn't have to scour the internet to put the pieces together.