Dear fellow Amigans,

  the last few weeks were very exciting regarding the news that we received
about the future of the Amiga. Amiga Inc. now has decided to build their new
Operating Environment on top of the Linux operating system. Linux has also 
served us very well over the last few years in developing AROS and we therefore 
are in the very fortunate position to say that we will be able to provide an 
emulation layer for the software of the "classic" line of computers once AROS 
has reached a decent state.

       The current status

  Since our last public statement in March we have been able to make steady 
progress in integrating new code and finding remaining bugs. The code has 
increased by 2MB to a total of 30.8MB now. 57% of all functions are implemented 
12% are in work now and the rest is still available. AROS now also works on 
Linux 2.2.x kernels for i386 compatible machines. The commodities library has 
been integrated just recently and the user interface related libraries 
intuition, layers and graphics are in good condition now. The very much needed 
menu functionality of the GUI is also approaching and we are sure to say that 
it will not take very long until we can present applications that make use of 
menus. Actually this should soon give us the ability to compile and run 
larger applications that were originally written for the Amiga.

  By the time you read this, a new version of AROS should be on AmiNET in
misc/emu/.

       The new license

  It should also be mentioned that we have put AROS under a new licence.
This license is a derivative of the MPL, the licencse which is used for
the Mozilla Project (www.mozilla.org). This license allows us to continue our
work freely and create Open Source distributions from it. For companies it is
also very interesting as it allows them to create products from the same
code and sell them.

       Our intentions

  We would also like to take the opportunity of pointing out our general 
intentions in case you havent read about them. 

  Although Amiga OS 3.5 is just around the corner we're still focussing on
recoding version 3.1 of the OS for the simple reason that we don't know more 
about the changes between the two versions than most of you. 

  AROS is almost completely written in 'C' and actually the only few lines 
that needed to be implemented in assembly exist on the version for 
Linux/M68k.

  As it has already been mentioned above Linux is serving us as the underlying 
development operating system. There are a couple of reasons for that of which 
the most important ones are that it is freely available for everybody and 
lets us debug our code rather comfortably. Also very important is that it 
provides stability. Nevertheless one of our goals is to create a version of
AROS that does not need Linux as the underlying OS. A standalone system
would be the result of this. The target for this are i386 compatible machines
and we already have a working version of the core of the Amiga OS, the exec
library, working on that system natively. Throughout development we payed 
close attention to separating the hardware dependend code pieces from the rest 
and this will help us to create such a system. M68k and especially PPC driven 
machines are a target as well and we realize that the latter ones could be
are real success for our efforts. 

  Yet another desired goal is to merge AROS and UAE such that the original 
custom hardware of the Amigas can be emulated and possibly mixed binary 
executable code could be executed, which means that this would allow you to 
run natively compiled code and the original Amiga compiled code at the same 
time. 

  We will decide which direction to go by ruling out how we can be most 
successful in. Our main focus will remain on further extending the Linux 
version, however, as this will also contribute to all other directions.

      Looking for people

  There's no public statement from the AROS team without an intention. As
you can clearly imagine AROS very much depends on some factors of which the 
most important ones are time and help. These are the same factors that helped 
Linux to become such a big success and we hope that the Amiga community is 
capable of completing a similar project. Therefore we would like to ask you 
whether you can provide one of these factors as we really need people who

- are willing to contribute time into further development in their favorite
  parts of the OS,
- let us know how certain things work on the Amiga and are willing to
  compile and test applications on the Amiga (some of us don't even have
  access to an Amiga)
- would like to give us their Amiga code for us  to use for testing and 
  presentation purposes,
- who would like to port AROS to other CPUs and maintain it there.

We're looking forward to hearing from you!


The AROS Development Team
