v0.2.0-alpha

Welcome to release v0.2.0-alpha of Serena OS.

This marks the first binary release of Serena OS. The OS and the shell are packaged into a single ROM file for the Amiga. It runs on any Amiga computer with a 68030 or better CPU.

This release contains many bug fixes, additional user space libraries and a much more useful shell. The shell now supports running scripts, variables, flow control constructs and many more built-in commands. Libc is now more complete and correct and a new library (libclap) has been added to parse command line arguments in a way that is in-line with the Serena shell behavior.

The ROM contains the boot filesystem. This filesystem is copied to a RAM disk at boot time and all filesystem operations are executed in the RAM disk. This means that files that you create will not survive a system restart.

You can build SerenaOS from sources with the BOOT_FROM_ROM option disabled in the project Makefile to create a version of the OS that will boot from an Amiga floppy disk (image). However please note that the floppy driver does not currently support writing to disk and that there is no disk cache yet to speed up I/O operations.

The quickest way to run Serena OS is to set up an Amiga 3000 or 4000 profile in an Amiga emulator such as WinUAE, and to configure the profile such that it uses the attached Serena.rom instead of a genuine Commodore Amiga ROM. No separate boot disk is needed since the boot disk is packaged into the ROM file.

After starting up the OS, the current directory contains a couple of demo shell scripts. You can run them by typing 'shell file_to_run.sh' and then hitting return.