Hi all,

many years ago I made a Live CD that allowed anyone with a PC to test
ARAnyM easily. It was fun and also useful demo thing. But it´s been
getting old and couldn´t even work on nowadays hardware. Also the
integration of ARAnyM into the host OS wasn´t as tight as I wanted. So I
decided to start from scratch and create a new ARAnyM+AFROS Live CD.

After long search for a small and customizable Live CD I ended up with
SLAX that I managed to strip down to nice 95 MB. During some fiddling
with the internal boot structure I found a way of starting ARAnyM as
soon as possible - even before an X11 login prompt or window
manager/session manager/whatever manager startup. So basically what
you´ll see in this Live CD boot up is probably the shortest ARAnyM
startup on a linux based host - from the desktop side of things there is
just the X11 running, nothing else (well apart from the current huge
HAL/udev/other_daemons machinery that is required for getting all the
modern hardware working). Then I managed to add the AFROS, figure out
the dynamic network setup, added boot menu, boot splash and other visual
eye candy and here we go - ARAnyM+AFROS booted from a CD!

BTW, this new Live CD can be converted to boot from a USB flash as
well It´s very easy - you simply copy the files from the CD to FAT
formatted USB flash and run the /boot/bootinst.sh or .bat script.

Anyway, what we have here is a bootable CD ISO image that you can burn
onto your CD-R or CD-RW and try booting from it. And if you don´t want
to spend the money you can use VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org) for
booting from the ISO image directly, though running ARAnyM inside of
VirtualBox is virtualization^2 :-)

When you boot it up you´ll get four choices that are basically a matrix
2x2 - either you want to use standard ARAnyM or the JIT version (up to
10x faster). And then either the SLAX graphics auto-configuration works
properly on your setup or you´ll need to resort to the VESA graphics
limited to 1024x768 with god knows what kind of acceleration (probably
close to none).

The Standard vs JIT selection is up to you while on the Best graphics vs
VESA graphics selection will say its final word your computer For
comparison, on my 2008 computer with onboard nVIDIA 8400 graphics the
auto-config works OK while on my 2005 computer with onboard nVIDIA 6100
graphics the auto-config fails and I need to use the VESA fallback. As
for VirtualBox there the auto-config works fine.

This release of ARAnyM/AFROS contains the latest ARAnyM (fresh build
from CVS, mainly for the JIT FPU fix for Anders) and the AFROS 8.12.
It´s good to know how the GEMDOS drives are mapped:

C: - system drive with all the Atari TOS/GEM software

D: - host /mnt where you´ll find host disk partitions, USB mass-storage
devices etc. Very useful if you want to read something from your host
drive like images, music or videos. But beware! You can also write to
those drives and that could be dangerous so be careful and don´t mess up
your valuable data. You have been warned!

E: - host /tmp, you´ll find here some logs

F: - host / - you can see here the whole structure of host OS running in
memory. I have made it available just for one thing - it allows you to
see how I solved the networking auto-configuration in F:usrin
setupnet


A word about the graphics resolution: the ARAnyM is preconfigured to use
1024x768 resolution. You can change it in the ARAnyM Setup GUI. There is
also the fVDI configuration that allows you to select one of 800x600,
1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1400x1050 (or something alike) during the boot
up - you just need to press the right key (0-3) at the right moment
(when it prompts you). Normally the fVDI drives the resolution but if
you check the "Fixed Size" checkbox in the ARAnyM Setup GUI->VIDEO
section then the ARAnyM resolution wins. So use either of it to set your
desired graphics mode. Ideally the AFROS would find out the best host
resolution and would use that but I don´t think we finished this
DDC-like protocol implementation in the fVDI driver (or if we did then
we are missing similar communication in ARAnyM Host via the SDL).


A note about networking: the SLAX manages the host networking by itself
and does it well for a PC in LAN with DHCP server. When DHCP is not
found the host networking stays unconfigured, I suppose. In normal SLAX
you´d boot to KDE desktop and there you´d be able to configure your
networking but in this Live CD there are no GUI tools for setting up the
host network so you´re basically on your own. So basically get a router
with DHCP server or this Live CD will not allow you to browse your
internet. If you have an idea how to setup SLAX CD networking without
DHCP semi-automatically then please let me know.


This SLAX based Live CD allows for many cool tricks but I don´t want to
run into details. Suffice to say that it is able to remember your
changes to AFROS or anything else in the Live CD structure - on the USB
flash it´s just a matter of setting the ´changes´ parameter the correct
path. There are also some boot time cheat codes (described
in /slax/cheatcodes.txt) - you might want to explore them if things
didn´t work for you automagically or you´re just curious (e.g.
"copy2ram" makes the AFROS run faster :-)

Enjoy the Live CD and don´t forget to bring it over with you to your
Atari meetings/sessions to present both the ARAnyM and the AFROS
progress :-)

Petr
http://aranym.org/