Is it Xmas before Xmas?

It's an amazing time for AROS. Our great friend Deadwood has started refreshing ABIv0. This means that, for the first time in 3 years, Icaros will be able to provide new system files. The good news is I have already burnt an experimental ISO with new code and - after some changes here and there - it boots fine. There are some bugs to be addressed, but the new system already proved to be better: I could shut down the system correctly with AROS shutdown command and this literally warmed my heart. Unluckily, the new files completely break Windows and Linux hosted mode (whose files must be refreshed as well, but they will come with time...) and this led me to a wise decision: Icaros Desktop 2.3 will be released with the current software base, with current system files, as soon as possible. I sincerely hope to release them before Christmas, but there are two little issues I must fix before. 

First of all, the work on Windows hosted AROS introduced a bug in Linux hosted mode: HostBridge does not create icons for applications anymore, but I bet this will be easy to fix. The real pain will be understanding what's wrong, since I didn't change anything on the Linux side of things. The other problem is about Windows hosted mode: two months ago I compiled icaros_daemon.cmd to turn it into a proper Windows executable, so I could run it in background and kill it with taskill command when not needed anymore. But, immediately after, I had to face with Windows Defender misdetecting it as being infected by I-dont-remember-which trojan. I completed the procedure to let Microsoft know about the mistake and, after a couple of days, icaros_daemon.exe was allowed to run without issues. Two months after, it's now Kaspersky's turn to lock the program without a real motivation. Well, I have to be sincere about this: life is one, and I don't want to waste even a single minute of it, running against silly antivirus issues. Yesterday it was Defender, today it is Endpoint, but tomorrow? I can't struggle against this big and awful "security first" machine: if I don't care about antiviruses, I will end up being considered a provider of "unsecure" software, with browsers automatically rejecting connections to my site. I cannot afford a similar battle. So I am considering to revert my work and bring back the good old batch file that does exactly the same job. I will try to find a different way to introduce a 'break' function somewhere. I am sorry because this will delay Icaros release of some days.

Once version 2.3 of Icaros Desktop will be released, it will get bug-fix updates only, while all development effort will be redirected to version 2.4, which will be based on new Deadwood code. Unluckily, there's very little more I can do about this, but, hey! It is a good news after all! See you soon.

PS: the beautiful image of Santa has been taken from Freepik. If it breaks any copyright or license please warn me and it will be replaced by something else.