AROS Research Operating System

The AROS Research Operating System is a lightweight, efficient and flexible desktop operating system, designed to help you make the most of your computer. It's an independent, portable and free project, aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS at the API level (like Wine, unlike UAE), while improving on it in many areas. The source code is available under an open source license, which allows anyone to freely improve upon it.

The goals of the AROS project is it to create an OS which:

1. Is as compatible as possible with AmigaOS 3.1.
2. Can be ported to different kinds of hardware architectures and processors, such as x86, PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc, HPPA and other.
3. Should be binary compatible on Amiga and source compatible on any other hardware.
4. Can run as a standalone version which boots directly from hard disk and as an emulation which opens a window on an existing OS to develop software and run Amiga and native applications at the same time.
5. Improves upon the functionality of AmigaOS.

To reach this goal, we use a number of techniques. First of all, we make heavy use of the Internet. You can participate in our project even if you can write only one single OS function. The most current version of the source is accessible 24 hours per day and patches can be merged into it at any time. A small database with open tasks makes sure work is not duplicated.