Hybridation of Icaros goes on...

 Two weeks after announcing the "hybridation" of Icaros Desktop (meaning that you will be able to run it either natively, as usual, OR hosted on Linux, with the same installation medium), works on this process continues. I've enhanced many steps of the "hosted-install.sh" script that you'll find in the root directory of the installation CD (or DVD, for the Live! edition) and I've started placing the basics for activating/deactivating some cosy features "à la Icaros way", for the simple reason I don't want to force anyone using Linux in a different way they are accustomed to. "Hosted-install.sh" will perform some tasks for you: it will create a script to enable the virtual tap network interface between AROS and Linux, it will copy all needed Icaros files in a chosen directory and will perform all needed modifications to AROS files to let the hosted flavour work. It will also add a nice "disk.info" icon to your home directory and create a proper ./icaros start script for the distribution. In the best case scenario (which means running on a recent Ubuntu/based distribution, like for instance Linux Mint), you will end up with a Icaros installation already being able to play sound and browse the Internet.

Icaros Desktop running hosted (with sound) on a very old Ubuntu release (32 bit).

But that's not over. Although this feature will be most probably disabled in the first 2.2 release, I've already found a cheap but convenient way to run Linux programs and scripts from AROS (using Icaros as a sort of remote command), and this should work on any Linux distribution without requiring further efforts or installing exotic packages. What I still need to do, to make it very easy for user, is creating a engine like AmiBridge which would allow running them with icons and so on, and I am afraid I won't have the required time to do this before releasing Icaros Desktop 2.2. The structure, however, is already in place (now disabled) and allows to do things like these ones (see the following video):