Guest post by AROS distribution Icaros Desktop v1.2 has been released. AROS is a lightweight, portable and independent operating system aiming to recreate the original AmigaOS experience on any platform and, after many years of development, has finally reached a good degree of reliability. Icaros Desktop provides a full, already pre-configured Amiga-like desktop environment on any PC, packing it with many useful or entertaining applications, games and so on.
The new point release adds lots of new stuff and features, like the ability to run old Amiga games and demos from their ADF files. You still need Amiga Forever or spare original Amiga ROMs to do that. Amiga games are not the only ones that can run with a double click on their icon: D64 files are also supported and assigned to the VICE emulator.
Icaros Desktop, however, doesn’t cater retro-gamers alone; 1.2 also adds some demos for the upcoming Gallium3D port to AROS which works on some GeForce cards. Owners of a GeForce 4, FX, 6 or 7 video card can run GLexcess and other MESA demos with full hardware acceleration.
Some important steps have been taken regarding hardware support, and Icaros Desktop can now run on some old laptops and also on many modern netbooks. An (incomplete) list of new features, with screenshots and download links, is available at the Icaros Desktop website.
amining ro recreate
Sorry, could not resist. That is pretty cool, and I love that more and more OS options are becoming available for netbooks.
[edit]
Btw this link is b0rk3n:
http://www.icarosdeaktop.org/
Edited 2009-12-09 18:24 UTC
change deaktop to desktop
http://www.icarosdesktop.org/
Yeah, I know. Just pointing it out.
Aros is getting cooler by the day.
all it needs is a few core apps and its perfect for a laptop.
Word processing
Spreadsheet
database
that’ll do for now.
If it can run old Amiga software you’re well catered for there. Might need to hit the yard sales/abandonware sites to get hold of them though!
Have I got a deal for you! Over 100 Amiga 3-1/2″ floppies. Make me an offer.
jimbot at frontiernet.net
This AROS/Icaros caught my interest enough to go and read more about it.
Later I was already booting it in Qemu.
Sadly, I haven’t got much to say (yet), but at least I got a chance to say that people do read about “alternative” operating systems here at OSAlert. Even people like me whose Amiga experiences are limited.
I ran some kind of live cd or emulated version a year or two ago, and though a bit buggy, it was still snappy.
Imho AROS and other small upstart OSs (Haiku) should really focus on getting a solid web browser before anything else. As more and more things have moved into the browser and we spend more and more of our computer time using it, it grows more important for each day.
I use Haiku with firefox as a dual boot option for mswindows when I only need to login to my bank to transfer money, or send a quick email or check the bus time table. Boot time is very short compared to the time I will have to wait until my win desktop is up and ready.
AROS has a nice WebKit-based browser already, so as long as it supports your network hardware, you can already do everything except for Flash-based sites.
And haiku has a webkit port that is working great with the recent QT port and a native webkit browser is in the works
Haiku also has a gnash port… not all that usefull though it has potential
Well, Aurora (qt browser ported to Haiku) is crashing a lot, so actually, right now, it seems the AROS browser is a bit more usable.
But Haiku is not far behind, though, and the desktop environment Haiku delivers is kick ass. AROS’ Wanderer leaves a lot to be desired, and hasn’t really been worked on since 2005 or 2006.