The leading distribution of the AROS operating system
Dear friends, as you’ve probably noticed, Icaros Desktop has been “frozen” for quite a while. Although I’ve occasionally checked in on the community and its forums, no new release has appeared in over five years. Yes, I’ve made a few small updates here and there, but nothing that truly justified a new release — or reignited the spark of enthusiasm that once drove both me and you. To put it simply
If you click on the DOWNLOAD button or links on this site, you will get a 404 ERROR. This is not my will, of course. Google's operators took this decision, disabling and hiding my download page, because they think Icaros Desktop violates I-don-t-know-what security or whatsoever community rule. Maybe this can be simply related to the fact that Icaros files are hosted on a old-school FTP space with
With a little delay we should apologize for, but also to make sure we were doing the right thing, we moved the support area to the "ICAROS" forum on Arosworld.org. We would like to thank 4play for hosting and managing Aros-Exec.org for all these years, and we'll surely miss his website, but there were good reasons for its demise. We wish 4play (and family) the best for all that is to come.
A long standing issue has finally been fixed. There was a security setting which automatically "promoted" http requests to https, and while this could not be a problem for other links, it prevented all file links to work when left clicking on them. You may also notice that real vmwaros.blogger.com urls are now visualized in the address bar of your browser: I decided to stop cloacking the
You know how it works: "make it work first, then make it better". I restarted toying with LUA to write a little configuration editor for Windows shares, making creation of share DOSDrivers files really quick and easy, but I wasn't satisfied at all. The first version only put them in Devs/DOSDrivers but you had to mount them by hand and, by the way, move them to SYS:WBStartup to make their volume
I can't deny Icaros Desktop, for the last 2 years, got a lesser priority in my schedule. Some other projects and real life events drew my attention far away from this distribution, but I never stopped lurking into Amiga forums and still followed AROS developments, downloading new stuff from time to time and finding some hours to keep the distro's software base updated. But recent efforts by
Hello dear Icaros users, supporters and friends. We sincerely hope 2023 will be an amazing year for AROS and, to let it begin the best possible way, here is a new beta of its most complete distribution. It includes all the 3rd party applications from the June 2022 beta and the current AROS system files backported by Deadwood. Precisely, the ones from AROS-20191209-D7-pc-i386-boot-iso
Hello our dear followers, here is a new build of Icaros Desktop for you. Our friend Deadwood has backported several new AROS features introduced into system files in the 2018-2019 time frame and I have integrated them into the distribution. That's not the only news. From a software standpoint, I have introduced a LOT of changes and new additions (but, since this is just a beta, I'm not listing
You might have noticed that listening to audio under latest releases of VMware can be difficult, and that following instructions on the user manual will not bring the desired result. Well, it seems that some changes occurred in the way current version of VMware Player (and maybe Workstation too) creates virtual machines suitable to MS/DOS and other generic operating systems, in particular the old
If you speak Italian, don't miss this event. This evening at 21:30 UTC+1, Paolo Besser will be hosted in the first episode of "Umani e Macchine" (Men and Machines), a series of interviews about technology with smart guys in the IT scene. We will talk about Icaros Desktop and Amiga in general. > https://www.facebook.com/events/939993083489684/
Our friend John Knight has written a lovely article for Linux Format, which has been already published on issue 271, about using a PC "the Amiga way" with AROS. And, guess what? He's using Icaros Desktop in the "classic Amiga environment" you may choose right after installation. Notice: Text has been blurred to make it unreadable. Please buy the mag to enjoy it!The article covers
A brand new version of Icaros Desktop is finally ready for everyone. What you have under your eyes is the result of a very long work of analysis and revision, which covers different aspects of the distribution, in its native soul and in the hosted one. We wondered what users would love and how we could make Icaros Desktop more useful and, thanks to the work of third-party application programmers,
It's an amazing time for AROS. Our great friend Deadwood has started refreshing ABIv0. This means that, for the first time in 3 years, Icaros will be able to provide new system files. The good news is I have already burnt an experimental ISO with new code and - after some changes here and there - it boots fine. There are some bugs to be addressed, but the new system already proved to be better: I
Another little step in the right direction has been done. Windows programs icons are now resized to a 50x50 pixel square while being imported by the automatic script. I now have to do the same for the usual, manual scripts (hbadd). Isn't this much better?By the way, while importing icons I encountered a little obstacle: many Windows programs come in different versions along with their names,
Works on Windows hosted mode of Icaros Desktop are almost complete, at least for my side of things: although I couldn't in any way enhance the way AROS itself behaves under Windows (so: no 3D acceleration, no sound support, no networking, less stability etc), I'm almost done with Icaros features and, in particular, I am really proud about HostBridge under Windows. It got far better than what it
Great news, people, great news! Windows hosted Icaros is now able to parse Windows Start Menu entries and automatically add to HostBridge almost all installed programs:The import procedure is a little slow, but with some luck you'll have to launch it just once and, after all, it runs asyncronous with the rest of Icaros Desktop, so you can ignore it and keep working with whatever else you're using
This is funny. While I was still working on Hostbridge, I had to test a procedure on Windows Server 2019 Hyper-V Core, which is a interface-less stripped down version of Windows Server acting only as hypervisor. But, after all, it's always Windows and, if you add some 3rd party software, you can still use it like any other Windows release, although many Windows applications will refuse to work,
Windows hosted mode is getting some love. When started this way, Icaros mounted all the Windows volumes it found without giving them a proper icon, using Wanderer and Magellan default disk icons for them. Well, I've added some icons for this purpose to Storage/Icons and the S:mount-hosted script now copies the Windows one on the root of the drive if there isn't any.I may also consider writing a
People running Icaros Desktop on Windows might be interested in the latest developments of their Icaros hosted mode. First of all, the icaros.cmd launch script has been improved.As promised, the launch script now accepts several switches and allow customizing Icaros options on the fly, as like as the Linux version does. So we now have these options available:icaros -rResets/Restarts the current
Hello and welcome to the new Icaros Desktop's website. Starting from today, this will be the new look of our home in the Internet. We've changed our old blog template with a new one, because it didn't behave well with Blogspot's new interface and preview images got corrupted in the home page. We kept the old look until the old interface was still available, but once Google got rid of it we had no
In the latest months, HostBridge for Linux gained several new features, among them the ability to scan your Linux distribution for installed applications and integrate them automatically. This led to a huge quantity of changes to HostBridge scripts and, although I tried to keep them as much platform-agnostic as I could, with no surprise at all they basically broke compatibility with Windows
One of the best commodities of Icaros 2.3 will be the fact that the 'icaros' launch script for hosted version will be able to accept parameters. Unluckily, I could not work on linux hosted and windows hosted features at the same time, but after releasing beta 3 I started working also on the latter. For now, Windows "icaros.cmd" script accepts some of the Linux parameters, but my goal is having
Hello, I am very happy to announce that a brand new beta version of Icaros Desktop 2.3 is now available. As usual, the direct download link has been sent to our beta testers, to interested 3rd party application coders and patrons pledging $5 or more. You may have noticed that our "Support us" section on the right has slightly changed in the latest days: the Patreon button has been removed, and
Today I've been testing some new components of Icaros Desktop, including unrar 5.90. I had to modify ZuneARC'c configuration file, because the stack I already set for version 5.80, 400000, wasn't enough. I raised it to 800000, and now RAR archives can be easily managed, as the following screenshot demonstrates. By the way, what do you think about this Commodore-128esque font?
Today Icaros Desktop 2.3 has made some real progress. I have now included in the distribution most of the software that has been published for AROS for the last 4 months. I can't hide that my favourite ones, at least for this summer, are RNOPublisher and SilkRAW. The former is the first attempt to a DTP application for AROS, and it's an incredibly sleek tool for compositing PDF documents. You can