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.
