A new preview version of Icaros Desktop 2.3.0 is now available for download. This time, however, it won't be available to everyone, but to a precise audience only: patrons and beta-testers, in a nutshell whoever actively supports our distribution, either by helping me paying the fees or by providing bug reports and feedback. Public betas, by the way, weren't an habit for Icaros Desktop: once upon a long ago, we had an active team of developers and users who tested the distro, finding bugs and weak functionalities, reporting them to me, so I could fix them and release 'stable' versions and updates of the system. Unluckily, Icaros lost most of its beta-testers over the years, and this meant less bug reports, less fixing, less reliability.

For this reason, I started releasing betas to the public, even if this collided with the costy '$15 tier' on Patreon, which granted exclusive access to beta versions. I hoped this would have increased bug reporting but, honestly, the results I got weren't exactly the ones I expected: very few precise feedbacks, but a general feel of unstability increased. I also lost all $15 pledges, but this wasn't unexpected. Well, it's time to clean the mess and reorder.

No more unstable beta versions will be released to the general public, unless for special reasons (for instance, a Xmas present after many months of no updates, like it happened for v2.2 and v2.3), no more '$15 tier' on Patreon to access betas, but only two ways to get them:

1. Becoming a Icaros Desktop betatester. This means being added to a mailing list, receiving a link from time to time to download a ISO of either Icaros Desktop Light or Live!, try things as soon as possible and report feedback or bugs to me. I might also ask to test specific functions when they are added to the distribution and, obviously, the beta-tester status expires if no any answer is given for a reasonable amount of time.
   
2. Apply for a '$5 tier' on Patreon, which will continue giving early access to final releases and updates of Icaros Desktop and, starting with today, also to beta and preview versions. 

THE NEW BETA

BECOMING A BETA TESTER

This video shows how you can perform a clean installation of Icaros Desktop onto the hard drive. The whole procedure is described on the user manual, and this video covers the following situation:

• Installation from CD/DVD-ROM
• 2 AROS partitions already created (AROS and WORK)
• Default packages for the Live! version
• FTP file share being activated at first post-installation setup
  

The user manual can be downloaded from the Download page.

In Italy there's a old motto saying "anno bisesto, anno funesto", which we might translate into "leap year, fatal year", and it basically places its roots into superstition. Rationally speaking, the need for adding a 29th day to February every four years just compensates a 6-hours error accumulated by our way of computing years, and the fact that this year is '2020', and not '2019' or '2021' or '10767', is just a matter of convention. I never believed into fate, or into numerology or other forms of new-age superstition. But, that's odd, this year can really be considered a very unlucky one, at least according to the news during its first three months. My country (but others are following) is dealing with the scariest and hardest crisis since the end of World War 2, and probably this is not the right time to think about light matters like an AROS distribution, but I would like to thank some people here.

First of all, I would like to thank our patrons for their support, and anyone who still donated to Icaros in the latest weeks. I have some good news for them, at the end of this post.

This site remained untouched since last Christmas, and not a single news or screenshot has been posted here. This can be an issue for a project like ours. Well, reality is that Icaros Desktop didn't proceed with the usual pace, for a series of reasons: I continued collecting 3rd party software from people releasing it on Aminet and on the Archives, but I could start integrating it into the distribution only recently. In the weeks before, I had been quite busy at work and all my spare time was taken over. Moreover, there had not been so much progress on the AROS side, at least on ABIv0, while almost all the effort on ABIv1 has been directed to the M68K flavour, in order to make it work as best as possible on Vampire cards. I cannot blame anyone for this. For the last 10 years, Icaros got much attention and time from AROS developers, and now it is something else's turn, with different goals and a different vision. Icaros Desktop, however, will continue refining its features and adding new ones, while continuing its difficult and very slow transition to 64 bits.

Second, I would like to thank people on AROS-EXEC and Amigaworld who continued advocating the project. It's so sad to read that x86 AROS is "completely useless", by people who have actively collaborated to its success until yesterday. We've always done this for fun, but all this delusion and bad wording is not funny at all. Get real: not only we'll never catch up with Windows or Linux, but we've always been aware of this since day 1. We're only making our best to do something different, something good, even if it's difficult. Demotivation is not something which will help here.

Third, let me thank some people in particular. Michael Riddle for his improved BMP datatype: I could finally run Xabier Payet's SnapShoter on AROS, which always crashed at startup, before I installed the bmp datatype he kindly sent me. SnapShoter is amazing: it handles fullscreen and portion grabbing, taking both still and videos, it includes a post-it like function and has even an integrated image editor; so I sent an email to the author asking for permission to include it with the distribution. Let's cross our fingers. :-) [update: permission gotten :-)]


Then I would like to thank Nicola Scendoni for his efforts on the hosted soul of Icaros Desktop. We share the same idea of what HostBridge should (and can) do, and I sincerely hope this will bring many "former Amiga, now Linux" lovers to join us.

Moreover, I would like to thank Salvo on AROS-EXEC, who kindly asked me to add econding options to OGG and Flac formats for Wave files. The option is now included in Magellan, and - for now - they encode WAV files at fixed compression/quality ratios. I already have some nice ideas about how this can be furtherly improved, so stay tuned and... thanks again for all your patience, Salvatore!

Then, a sad news about this site: as of today, I can't reach mirror files stored on lezard-visuel.com, the site which has been helping us from the beginning of our journey. While I'm trying to contact them, I hope this will just be a temporary issue. Lezard-visuel space is really precious to your distribution.

...and now the good news for our Patrons: I am uploading a new beta version of Icaros Desktop 2.3 which will be available to them only, at least at the beginning. You will receive notification of its availablity as soon as possible.

It's Christmas again! And, as like as we did three years ago, when we early-released a preview version of Icaros 2.2, we would like to repeat ourselves with a quite advanced beta of Icaros Desktop 2.3! After a short patrons-only early access, this new version of the distribution is now available for download (only the Live! edition is being "released" this time).

But what's new, exactly? Well, if you followed our recent development, you'll find in this version everything we put in last october's early preview, plus a far more advanced, simplier to use, version of HostBridge (this is for Linux hosted users only, though). Isn't this enough? So why not playing guitar with Frets/C++, AROS port of Frets on Fire? You will need an accelerated card to enjoy it, and even better a Guitar Hero controller to make the most of this game, but if you're into Bemani/Music games, you won't stop playing this for months! And if you're a more serious user, you can now show and edit spreadsheets from OpenOffice and Excel, while Icaros keeps track of your meetings.

WHAT'S NEW

DOWNLOAD

With the precious help by Nicola Scendoni, we are trying to enhance the integration between AROS and Linux when running Icaros Desktop in hosted mode. Many things are changing, with one of them being how current MyWorkspace subdirectories and their ASSIGNs will be handled. Back in 2009, when I decided to add the 'MyWorkspace' drawer to Icaros environment, I wanted to mimic how Linux "/home" and Windows "\users" directories behave, placing also some nice subdirectories inside, for Documents, Pictures, Videos, Music and Downloaded files (let's call them 'user projects'). More recently, with the addition of Magellan, also a Desktop directory was made, to let people store their files (and not only aliases) on the workbench. This makes sense on a native installation, because these folders do not exist on AROS. But on hosted installations, where user project folders already exist, there is no need to create them again.

There are many little changes I should have really made long ago. One of these is changing the way AmiStart preferences are handled. You should know that Icaros Desktop provides three different settings for its lower side application dock:

1. Compact - the default one, at the center of the screen, with selected applications and no task management on the bar (window management is available, though, in the "Start menu" on the left corner)

2. Full - almost the same application shortcuts on the left, followed by tasks list populating when opening windows and programs

3. Custom - ideally, your own customizations that should be accepted and kept like they are. In theory, because this setting never worked and was somehow a "keep it like it is" option in Icaros Settings.

Well, this implementation has always been really poor, due to my very basic skills when done. The ugliest consequence was the fact that your customizations to the bar were lost every time I decided to change the default applications shown within the icons bar. This happened because I went for an even uglier solution: inside the System/Amistart directory, you would find the following ones:

AmiStart - the program itself
AmiStart.info - its icon
AmiStartCompact - ready to be used icon for the compact layout
AmiStartFull - ready to be used icon for the full layout
sm.prefs - preferences file for the full layout
smlite.prefs - preferences file for the compact layout

A mess. And Icaros Settings handled these files in a very dumb way, renaming the proper info file into AmiStart.info, so that either AmiStartCompact+smlite.prefs or AmiStartFull+sm.prefs were used by AmiStart. This was, and please accept my apologies, plain stupid. A far smarter solution would have been keeping a single icon file (so: AmiStart.info only) and change sm.prefs according to your selected behavior. Luckily, from now on this will change. First of all, starting with Icaros 2.3, there won't be all those files anymore, but I created the /shape/sm directory in AmiStart's one, populanting it with three different settings: full (as usual), lite (the compact one) and... well, "Hosted", a new setting which includes also host applications imported with HostBridge. Since AmiStart.info's tooltypes will now point to Envarc:Icaros/sm.prefs, settings will survive to updates. Unless you decide to change behavior with Icaros Settings, obviously: in this this case, your current settings will be (obviously) overwritten.