Description AFROS is a self-explanatory acronym: Atari FRee Operating System. It used to be distributed in the form of a harddisk image but now it's just a plain set of files creating preinstalled TOS compatible EmuTOS/FreeMiNT/fVDI/XaAES based operating system. The most exciting feature for me is its completely Free nature - all key components (EmuTOS, FreeMiNT, fVDI, XaAES and Teradesk) are completely free "as in Freedom" and can be redistributed under the GNU General Public License. This is the first time for Atari users to have a TOS/GEM compatible, complete, free and powerful operating system - from power-on all the way through to the multitasking GEM desktop with robust FreeMiNT kernel in the background and fast fVDI graphics on the screen.
Although AFROS contains software generally available for all Atari/TOS compatible platforms it's been optimized to be powered by the ARAnyM. Thus AFROS contains up-to-date NatFeat based hardware drivers for video, disk, sound, HostFS and networking and so is suitable also for updating your regular ARAnyM setup with fresh ARAnyM drivers.
In the combination of ARAnyM/Linux and AFROS you basically get a completely free TOS/MiNT compatible operating system running on any machine where Linux runs. That's a break-through for all Atari users - now you can turn almost any hardware into your familiar TOS/GEM system (can't believe? Check out the very, very old and outdated ARAnyM/AFROS Live CD).
AFROS can be found in the ARAnyM download area in a ZIP archive. After unpacking it please read the README.txt. You'll also find there the very latest CVS versions of EmuTOS, FreeMiNT and XaAES with finetuned configuration so it boots to a working desktop. It's evolving and releases usually occur together with ARAnyM releases. Make sure you use the AFROS version matching your ARAnyM version. Currently I am collecting ideas for adding some tools to the basic desktop setup (HTML browser, multimedia player, benchmarking utility...).
