The RMS Titanic sunk on April 15th, 1912 with many hundreds of people still on board. May they rest in peace.

I finally had a chance to upgrade my AROS 1.4 installation on my 223II0 (Fujitsu, Alienware, Uniwill, Systemax, whatever) to the 1.5.x distro. Actually, I went ahead and re-formatted as I really didn’t have anything significant installed. Just a quick note that everything worked on 1.4 with no problems, although I had replaced the MiniPCI wireless card with an Atheros-based one (the original was Broadcom).

The first thing to note is that my installation took about 20 minutes, not hours as some report for their systems. Also, everything continued to work out of the box, with the wireless note above. Basically, if you want an AROS laptop and 3D isn’t an issue right now, this might be a really good choice. The Atheros wireless card was $4.95 including shipping. I bought the laptop new in 2003 (I think) and paid dearly…

I noticed that there is a GMA950 driver that I have not yet tried as I’m using the generic VESA driver. This doesn’t seem to be a problem so far but I’m hoping to try the other driver. My integrated video is an old version so it probably doesn’t support 3D, but I like to tinker.

If anyone expresses interest, I’ll try to grab a few screenshots. I’m going to be installing some software over the coming weeks, but so far I’ve been very pleased with the performance of AROS. One issue that I’ve had across the board is using Live Update; it doesn’t seem to work from the Internet, requiring me to download update files instead. Not a big deal, but kind of defeats the purpose.