Michael Reed take AROS for a spin – an open source, somewhat modernised re-implementation of the Amiga operating system.

ICAROS DESKTOP

Credit: https://vmwaros.blogspot.com

OUR EXPERT

Michael Reed was friends with an Amiga when he was a teenager (Amiga means female friend in Spanish).

EXPLORE THE AROS INTERFACE

1 Visit the dock

AmiStart, the dock that comes with the Icaros Desktop distribution. It’s highly configurable.

2 Simple background

Like AmigaOS, AROS makes quite a lot of use of the backdrop.

3 Manage your files

The backdrop and the file management windows are provided by Wanderer, a Workbench replacement.

4 Customise menus

It’s possible to switch Icaros Desktop back to using the traditional AmigaOS pulldown menus.

5 Plenty of choice

The Icaros Desktop distribution comes with quite a lot of software ready to run.

6 Modest beginnings

Many of the AROS applications started life as AmigaOS applications before being recompiled for the new OS.

Back in 1985 a new computer system called the Commodore Amiga hit the scene, blowing most of the competition away with its excellent graphics facilities and a superb multitasking operating system. For many, it gave users their first taste of a workstation-class computer in their own homes. In addition to being a handy platform for serious applications, it was one of the leading gaming systems of its day. Unfortunately, after a 10-year reign at the top, the system was in decline by the middle of the 1990s.

AROS is an open source recreation of the Amiga operating system. It can’t run old, classic Amiga software natively, but it is compatible at the API (Application Programming Interface) level, meaning that many Amiga programs have been ported to run under it. What you get when you run AROS on a x86/AMD64 PC (or a virtual machine) is a lightweight operating system with many of the foibles and much of the charm of the system that inspired it, along with some improvements and modernisations.

Base installation

The easiest way to get started is to download an AROS distribution. A few of these are listed on the AROS download page (https://aros.sourceforge.io/download. php), but we spent most of our time with the Icaros Desktop distribution (http://live.icarosdesktop.org). This is largely pre-configured so that it’s ready to use and comes with a large library of software that can optionally be installed.

The installation procedure is started by booting from the ISO image and into a live environment. From this moment on, you’re living in the world of an updated AmigaOS. Long story short: the installation routine is a bit on the flaky side, and we’re not sure that we’d trust it to do a parallel installation alongside an existing setup. It doesn’t help that much of the terminology and the toolset will be unfamiliar to anyone who isn’t familiar with AmigaOS. If you choose to install the optional extras (recommended), expect it to take a long time.