AROS

AROS for which platform ?

- AROS already runs on ???...
AROS is currently available for Amiga/AmigaOS, Linux/i386, Linux/m68k, FreeBSD/i386 and Amiga/PPC.
The PPC port of AROS will allow to boot the Amiga just like LinuxPPC does and therefore, it will be independent of the PPC kernel (and the war between H&P and p5).
Unfortunately, the different ports are not at the same level (the Amiga/AmigaOS port is very poor, for example) and there is Native/i386 (AROS which boots off a floppy or HD) :-). Also not very advanced but exec works.

- What do you think about other Operating Systems, compared to AROS...
The AmigaOS is definitely missing some very important stuff but I also believe that it is a very strong foundation to build something on it. One of the main advantages is that it is very simple to understand what is going on behind the scenes; on other OSs, there is alomst no way to find out (e.g. Windows is completely obscure) and this makes it harder to write simple/good software.
We try to stay compatible but only to the outside. Inside, AROS is different from the AmigaOS, when that makes sense (eg. Dos Handlers have been dropped as well as BPTRs and such strange things).

QNX is really nice because it is some kind of a revolution: memory protection, multi-threaded, extreme stability and more...
But it's not AmigaOS and a lot of people prefer a REAL AmigaOS instead of another OS even if it's a good one. And QNX doesn't have enough applications to be interesting now. We have more apps on the Amiga.

BeOS is nice but it is not more than a Linux with a GUI and there are not enough apps yet. And it is not to be ported to G3/G4 processors. The AROS port has started.

What other OS can be a solution for us ? PowerOS ? There is nothing about it yet. Do you have any other idea ?