AROS Research Operating System (AROS, pronounced "AR-OS") is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

multi media centric implementation of the

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early version ...

3.1 application programming interface (

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

). Designed to be portable and flexible. ,

ports A port is a maritime facility comprising one or more wharves or loading areas, where ships load and discharge cargo and passengers. Although usually situated on a sea coast or estuary, ports can also be found far inland, such as H ...

are available for personal computers (PCs) based on x86 and PowerPC, in native and hosted ''flavors'', with other architectures in development. In a show of full circle development, AROS has been ported to the

Motorola 68000 series The Motorola 68000 series (also known as 680x0, m68000, m68k, or 68k) is a family of 32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessors. During the 1980s and early 1990s, they were popular in personal computers and workstations and w ...

(m68k) based

Amiga 1200 The Amiga 1200, or A1200 (code-named " Channel Z"), is a personal computer in the Amiga computer family released by Commodore International, aimed at the home computer market. It was launched on October 21, 1992, at a base price of £399 in the ...

, and there is also an

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

port for the Raspberry Pi series.

Name and identity

AROS originally stood for Amiga Replacement OS, but to avoid any trademark issues with the

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...

name, it was changed to the recursive acronym AROS Research Operating System. The mascot of AROS is an anthropomorphic cat named Kitty, created by Eric Schwartz and officially adopted by the AROS Team in December 2002. Used in the core AROS About and installer tools, it was also adopted by several AROS community sites and early distributions. Other AROS identifiable symbols and logos are based around the cat shape, such as the Icaros logo, which is a stylised cat's eye, or AFA (Aros For Amiga).

Current status

The project, begun in 1995, has over the years become an almost "feature complete" implementation of AmigaOS which, as of May 2017, only lacks a few areas of functionality. This was achieved by the efforts of a small team of developers. It can be installed on most IBM PC compatibles, and features native graphics drivers for video cards such as the GeForce range made by

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

. As of May 2007 USB keyboards and mice are also supported. AROS has been ported to the

Sam440ep Sam440, also known by Sam or its codename Samantha, is a line of modular motherboards produced by the Italian company ACube Systems Srl. The Sam440ep version is a motherboard based on the PowerPC 440EP system-on-a-chip processor which includes a d ...

PowerPC board and a first test version for the

Efika Efika is a line of power efficient ARM architecture and Power ISA based computers manufactured by Genesi. In Esperanto ''efika'' means "efficacious, effective, or efficient". EfikaPPC The EfikaPPC, sometimes also referred to as EFIKA 5200B, was ...

was released in 2009. While the OS is still lacking in applications, a few have been ported, including

E-UAE UAE is a computer emulator which emulates the hardware of Commodore International's Amiga range of computers. Released under the GNU General Public License, UAE is free software. History Bernd Schmidt conceived of an emulator that can run Amig ...

, an emulation program that allows m68k-native AmigaOS applications to run. Some AROS-specific applications have also been written. AROS has

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

networking support, and has available an experimental version of

AMosaic AMosaic was a port to the Amiga of the Mosaic web browser, developed beginning in 1993, and was the first graphical web browser for the Amiga. AMosaic was based on NCSA's Mosaic, but was not distributed by the University of Illinois or NCSA. It ...

web browser, for test purposes, among other Internet-related applications. The Poseidon

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply ( interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...

stack has been ported to AROS. AROS is designed to be

source-compatible Source-code compatibility (source-compatible) means that a program can run on computers (or operating systems), independently of binary-code compatibility and that the source code is needed for portability. The source code must be compiled befor ...

with

. On m68k

hardware it is also binary-compatible, so binaries already compiled for AmigaOS 3 can be run on AROS. On x86 IA-32 32-bit platforms Janus-UAE, an enhanced

, integrates Amiga emulation directly into AROS to run AmigaOS m68k binaries nearly transparent to the user. , original AmigaOS 3 operating system files are needed for the emulation. The aim of AROS is to remain aloof of the legal and political spats that have plagued other AmigaOS implementations by being independent of hardware and of any central control. The de facto motto of AROS, "No schedule and rocking" both lampoons the infamous words "On Schedule and Rockin" from

Amiga, Inc. Amiga, Inc. is a company that used to hold some trademarks and other assets associated with the Amiga personal computer (originally developed by Amiga Corporation). Early years In the early 1980s Jay Miner, along with other Atari, Inc. staffe ...

CEO Bill McEwen, and declares a lack of the formal deadlines. A workable AmigaOS Kickstart clone for the

Motorola 68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector ...

processor was released on March 31, 2011 as part of a programming bounty. The memory requirement is 2 MB

Chip RAM Chip RAM is a commonly used term for the integrated RAM used in Commodore's line of Amiga computers. Chip RAM is shared between the central processing unit (CPU) and the Amiga's dedicated chipset (hence the name). It was also, rather misleadingly, k ...

and 1 MB Fast RAM. This software is a complete free open-source alternative to AmigaOS.

Distributions

The main AROS system files can be downloaded in many flavors from the project website. These files are compiled straight from the SVN source tree at night time, and are available as nightly builds. Nightlies also include some third party applications to allow people using the system to perform some very basic tasks. For final/average user, like Linux, there are several distributions available:

Icaros Desktop

Since April 2009, the name VMWAros has been changed into "Icaros Desktop" to avoid ambiguities with any existing copyrighted Virtual Machine of any kind. Amiga 68K emulation integration, 3D acceleration for Nvidia cards and latest updates of applications can be found there. The latest version of Icaros Desktop is version 2.3 (released 22 December, 2020).

Broadway

Broadway is a distribution of AROS begun late 2009. The goal has been to provide a simple and complete introduction to what AROS has to offer. Also added was commercial software like a media center, a cloud storage service, and an appstore. Last version is 1.0 preview 5, released April 16, 2016.

AspireOS

AspireOS is a distribution, begun in 2011, by Nikos Tomatsidis, which is focused on Dell Latitude D520 and Acer Aspire One 110, 150 computers. Latest version is 2.2, codenamed "Obitus", released November 2018.

AROS Vision

AROS Vision is a native m68k distribution, which can run on both real hardware or in emulators like

UAE The United Arab Emirates (UAE; ar, اَلْإِمَارَات الْعَرَبِيَة الْمُتَحِدَة ), or simply the Emirates ( ar, الِْإمَارَات ), is a country in Western Asia (The Middle East). It is located at th ...

Apollo OS

ApolloOS is an active m68k distribution, crafted specially for the Vampire V4 Standalone FPGA-based system.

Influence on AmigaOS and MorphOS

Haage & Partner used little parts of AROS source code for AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9. Large parts of MorphOS (

AmigaDOS AmigaDOS is the disk operating system of the AmigaOS, which includes file systems, file and directory manipulation, the command-line interface, and file redirection. In AmigaOS 1.x, AmigaDOS is based on a TRIPOS port by MetaComCo, written in ...

Intuition Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning. Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; ...

and more) have been ported from AROS.

System requirements

x86

* CPU, newer than Intel 80486 (recommended minimum clockspeed of 700 MHz for desktops and 1 GHz for laptops/notebooks/netbooks) *

Floating Point Unit Floating may refer to: * a type of dental work performed on horse teeth * use of an isolation tank * the guitar-playing technique where chords are sustained rather than scratched * ''Floating'' (play), by Hugh Hughes * Floating (psychological ph ...

(FPU) * 256 MB RAM