Icaros Desktop wishes all a wonderful 2011, and would like to thank everyone involved in the AROS project at any degree: users, testers, developers, 3rd party application providers, evangelists and also simple curious people who downloaded the distribution, but never installed it. 2010 has been an important year for us, but it wouldn't ever been like this without your efforts.

We've received some complaints about problems running Icaros Desktop on the recently-released version 4 of VirtualBox. AROS developers have been made aware of the compatibility issue, and will surely look for a solution (that will be hopefully integrated in Icaros 1.2.6, if it will be developed in time). In the meanwhile, however, we must suggest Icaros users (and people who wish to use Icaros under VirtualBox) to stick with their 3.x.x version. The issue lays in the new way VirtualBox handles ATA peripherals. Other virtualization technicques like VMware and QEMU are not affected by the problem.

Icaros Desktop has been tested and introduced on Appunti Digitali, one of the best and most known italian sites about information technology. Cesare Di Mauro, who is a former Amiga user and already made many articles about our beloved platform, writes: "I must say I am enough satisfied (by Icaros), as I could find the same AmigaOS spirit I lost - quite sadly - 14 years ago, once I understood Commodore and its wonderful machines were bust. Just to be clear: look and feel are the same, and I don't believe I need to add much more, for anyone that already lived those years and those experiences". The italian version of the whole article (and the following, interesting discussion) is here, while a robo-translation - provided by google - here.

Here is a little patch for Icaros Desktop 1.2.5 users. It fixes a bug preventing people to install the Live! version to a USB pendrive and then install it again from the same pendrive to a hard drive. People that tried to do this experienced a warning message at the next reboots, due to the fact that the S:buffer-add script still expected to boot from the DU0: partition. This had been corrected in the Light version before release, since it is the one people should use for this purpose, however I received some complaints that made me change my mind. People that want to install Icaros Desktop Live! from a pendrive should do the following: 1. install the Live! Icaros from DVD to pendrive 2. boot using pendrive 3. install this patch 4. install Icaros Destkop Live! from the pendrive to hard drive

Since it's not good to force people to download patches just to fix things, I decided also to add a new feature and a bonus to existing installations: the new dt2thumb command from Yannick Erb, which allows making custom icons for picture files that represent real contents of images (look at the screenshot) and a new Zune theme derived from the one Cammy made available to Aros-Exec users some days ago. A bug which made icons disappear when resizing windows has been corrected. Please look into our Download Center, Updates section to download your patch. Or just click here!

INSTALLATION

Here's how to install the patch: please extract the archive wherever you like (even in RAM:) with ZuneARC, and move there with Wanderer. Inside the drawer "patch12501" you will find two files with icons, patchinfo.txt and Patch125-01: the first one includes a list of the changes applied by the patch, the other is the installer. Just double click on Patch125-01 to install everything in the right places.

Note: if you're downloading the patch with OWB, you'll find the icaros-patch12501.zip archive in MyWorkspace/Downloads drawer. To see it, remember to choose View -> All files in the Window menu of Wanderer.

Our friend Lorenzo Di Gaetano wrote a long and quite detailed article for the italian site GamesArk, analyzing and explaining the situation of the Amiga platform at the end of 2010. He defined AROS as the "most brilliant and flexible solution for a modern Amiga system", and also spent some good words about our distribution, Icaros Desktop (which I really appreciated, thank you!). Please click on the following links to read it, in your favourite language

> articolo in Italiano
> robo-translation into English (made by Google Translate)

We're experiencing some issues with our main site. If you can't see images and download Icaros, please use these download links from our mirror site:

> Download Icaros Desktop Live! (700 MB)
> Download Icaros Desktop Light (200 MB)