AROS — The Things You Missed
A beginner-friendly, zero-ambiguity guide to building, running, and developing for AROS x86_64 (ABIv11) — the open source, Amiga-compatible operating system.
What is this?
AROS is a modern, open source re-implementation of AmigaOS 3.x APIs that runs natively on x86_64 hardware. It’s a fantastic system — but the documentation for getting started as a developer is scattered across forums, wikis, and years-old threads.
This site fixes that. Every guide here follows two rules:
- Every command has been run, every path has been verified. Nothing is written from memory or copied from an old wiki. If it’s in a guide, it worked on a real machine.
- Zero assumed knowledge. If you can open a Linux terminal, you can follow these guides. We explain why each step exists, not just what to type.
The guides
| # | Guide | What you’ll have at the end |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Build environment setup | A working AROS x86_64 cross-compiler and a bootable hosted AROS on your Linux machine |
| 2 | AROS One in VirtualBox | A full AROS desktop in a VM, with working networking and file transfer |
| 3a | Coding on Linux | Your first C program, cross-compiled on Linux and running on AROS |
| 3b | Coding on AROS itself | Editing and compiling directly inside AROS One |
| 4 | Zune for beginners | Your first real GUI application, explained line by line |
Who writes this?
A long-time Amiga user who set all of this up from scratch, hit every pitfall so you don’t have to, and wrote down what actually worked.