AROS Coding

I have been involved with the operating system AROS for over 2 years now. Up until now, I haven’t done any coding for the project. I have been writing a news site/blog called The AROS Show. Surprisingly it has become a popular site for AROS fans and I am glad! It receives over 80 visits a day.

So, AROS is written in the C language. I have dabbled in C before and I don’t care for it as much as other languages. I have no experience with memory management either. But, I am starting to dive into it again lately. Why you ask? Because there is a project in the works that has me excited and very interested. The project is a web browser for AROS using the WebKit engine. AROS developer Robert Norris has started the project and is in the process of porting WebKit. WebKit is the engine used in Apple’s Safari web browser. Robert documents his progress extremely well on his blog. He has named the browser Traveller. My interview with Robert about this project is here.

I would like to contribute to the Traveller project in the future. That means I need to learn C and the GUI environment in AROS called Zune. It is nearly a clone (at both API and Look&Feel level) of MUI, a well-known Amiga shareware product by Stefan Stuntz. I started last night by downloading the AROS SDK from AROS.org. Linux or BSD is recommended for AROS coding. I followed the directions in the AROS Application Development Manual to make sure I had everything setup correctly. I wrote a quick Hello World program in C and compiled. I copied it over to AROS where I have it running in a hosted environment in Linux. I went to the AROS shell and ran it. It worked just fine. That is all I had time for last night. My next adventure will be in Zune itself.