I really wish to thank Neil Cafferkey: in this exact moment, I am writing this post with Icaros Desktop 1.2.4, connected to the Internet without cables using his atheros 5000 wi-fi driver. I'm not the first AROS man surfing the web this way, and a few steps are still needed before this new addition to the OS will be mature enough for the mainstream, but it works, and this is the most important thing.

VirtualBox is a quite good virtualization platform for Icaros, since it allows both AC97 and fast networking support, but it has a little drawback for today's standards: it allows using AROS at traditional VESA 4:3 resolutions only, and not all of them, just the most common ones. To get ahead of this, however, there is a quite simple procedure that has been discussed on this AROS-EXEC.org topic (see message #3 and followers). Here's how to add custom screen resolutions to your VirtualBox virtual machine. This is for the Windows version, but it should work without many modifications on the other versions too.

1. Open VirtualBox and look at your virtual machine name for Icaros Desktop. My one is simply "Icaros Desktop", but yours obviously depends on the name you gave to it.

2. Run a command prompt in the installation path of VirtualBox, or change directory with the 'cd' command. The most simple way to do this is right-clicking on the VirtualBox icon on the desktop or the Start Menu, selecting Properties and then Find Target. Once you have reached the installation path in Explorer, go up to parent, press shift + right click on the VirtualBox drawer and choose Open command prompt here. The command to go straight to default VirtualBox installation path, anyway, is:

cd "\program files\oracle\VirtualBox"

3. in the command prompt, run this command:

VBoxManage.exe setextradata "vm name" "CustomVideoMode1" "XXXXxYYYYxZZ"

where "vm name" is the name you got at point 1, XXXX and YYYY are the horizontal and vertical sizes of your custom resolution, then ZZ is the depth of your palette (16 or 32 for thousands and millions of colors).

For instance, on my notebook I have a 1366x768 panel, so I'd like to have a custom widescreen resolution of 1366x768x32 running on VirtualBox. Icaros is running in a virtual machine simply called "Icaros Desktop". My command would be:
VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Icaros Desktop" "CustomVideoMode1" "1366x768x32"

4. Once done, launch VirtualBox and, at GRUB menu, move the selection bar to the standard VESA best-fit resolution (the default selection if you haven't changed it) and press E

5. modify "VESA=32bit" to the same resolution you've set at point #3. In my case, for instance, I had to change it to "VESA=1366x768x32".

NOTE: the resolution you choose there must match the one you've set at point#3.

6. press Ctrl+X to continue booting, and enjoy Icaros in whatever resolution you'd prefer to watch it!

7. To make this change permament, edit the \boot\grub\grub.cfg file according to your needs, following user manual instructions.

Here we are again! Icaros Desktop v1.2.4 has officially been released. 24 hours after the release of the update for Icaros 1.2.3 users, also Live and Light have been put into our download center (mirrors and torrent will follow). The new version provides more games and applications like MegaMario, OpenUniverse, LodePaint and the latest upgrades to AmiFIG, YAM, ProTrekkr, YTDM and many others. System files had been refreshed to 27th september nightly build, while Wanderer and its tools had been taken from today's one, in order to fix an annoying bug that killed our beloved GUI when showing some types of icons. But there a many little and bigger functionalities added to the distro: a new keyboard shortcut (leftAROS+Esc) opens Scout and allows users to recover the system when a task crashes and slows down the whole system (a reboot is always the best solution, but at least Scout lets you kill offending windows and almost-dead processes in a safer way), another one (leftAROS+F3) runs HFinder and makes finding files and drawers much easier. A complete list follows in the "news from..." section of this post. The funny thing abut this idea is the way it's born: during a flame on a well known IT-related blogsite, which has published a nice article about AROS (here's the robo-translation) and already promised to talk again about Icaros Desktop in the future. There are also very good news on the hardware department: Icaros Desktop 1.2.4 now supports the 1st generation of the ION platform, so it is now possible to run 2D and 3D application using AROS' Nouveau driver. This is really interesting, because Icaros already proved to perform well on Atom boards, and 3D functionalities of the GeForce 9400M board are just sweet for current AROS games and programs (the just-included LodePaint graphic application uses OpenGL as target renderer, so it's really better to use it on a hardware-accelerated systems). But many other components had been updated, like for instance the HDAudio driver, or the Intel GMA 900 one. Many bugs have been fixed under the hood and Icaros 1.2.4 includes all fixes, here's a list of what's changed from the latest release.

New from Icaros Desktop 1.2.3
- Added MegaMario and other 3D-accelerated games
- Added OpenUniverse, LoView, Annotate, LodePaint to applications
- Updated YAM, NowinED, ProTrekkr, AmiFIG, YTDM and others to the latest version
- YTDM now cheks Live-CD mode to avoid running from read only media
- Updated system files to Sept. 27th 2010
- Fixed a bug that crashed Wanderer showing some kind of icons
- Fixed a bug that prevented PS/2 mice scroll-wheel from working
- Updated AmiBridge and LUPD scripts to newer shell behavior
- Added history and text scroll bar to shell window
- Enhanced Wanderer list view
- Added new keyboard shortcuts to make life easier:
Alt+Home: toggle window size
Alt+Up/Down: enlarge/shrink window
lAROS+M/TAB: switch screens
lAROS+F1: open manuals drawer
lAROS+F2: open prefs
lAROS+F3: run HFinder to search for files and folders
lAROS+Esc: run Scout to manage windows, tasks, processes and resources
- Added diskimage.device to handle virtual media
- Added AROS port of MAME with launcher
- Updated 3rd party libriaries and Zune classes
- Updated OWB to latest build (1.02, even if it still shows 1.0)
- Modified Icontrol prefs to stick menus by default (better for laptops)
- Better Nvidia support: ION 2D and 3D graphics now supported by Nouveau drivers
- updated HDAudio drivers
- updated Intel GMA9xx drivers
- added sound to XRick and lBreakout
- added Kotler's icons for OWB, ArosPDF and MPlayer
- added new RTL8139 driver that doubles download speed

Please notice the above specifications are fully true for Icaros Desktop Live! only. Due to inferior size of the targed media, Icaros Desktop Light is missing of some games and applications.

DOWNLOAD AND INSTALLATION OF THE UPDATE
Icaros Desktop 1.2.4 Update Disc can be downloaded from Icaros' Download Center, and it must be installed using the LiveUpdater application (included in sys:Tools/LUPD drawer). For better reliability, we warmly suggest to burn the resulting ISO onto a rewritable CD media, since the installation from ISO may give problems at the moment. So that's the best way to go:

1. Download the Update Disc
2. Extract the ISO contained in the .tar.gz (.tgz) archive
3. burn the ISO on a CD-R(W)
4. boot your Icaros system
5. mount the CD-R and launch LiveUpdater
6. wait for the files to be copied
7. extract the CD-R when prompted to do so, and reboot your system

Please don't use "Internet" or "ISO" options in LiveUpdater! Another way to install the update can be this one (which basically mimics what the ISO option would do):

1. Download the Update Disc inside AROS
2. extract on a temporary directory under a shell
untgz Icaros_UpdateCD_123-124.tgz
3. copy the resulting ISO as Unit0 for the fdsk virtual device:
copy aros-pc-i386.iso TO sys:DiskImages/Unit0
4. mount it as virtual cd-rom
mount cd0:
5. start LiveUpdater and choose the "CDROM" option.