Status Update 2006-09

It's been a while since last time, but that doesn't mean we haven't done anything in the meantime. Following is an update on the newest stuff happening over at Aminet.net.

The Aminet Wiki

Aminet has its own Wiki now: at http://wiki.aminet.net you'll find manuals, FAQs, information about the team and Aminet's history aswell as our changelogs, todo lists and bug 'database'. The section covering Aminet's usage urgently needs more info added though: if you'd like to help out with creating a nice user manual covering archive formats, the tools required to handle them, various ways of transfering archives from a PC to the Amiga, using an FTP client etc. - get in touch with us, please.

Translating the Wiki into other languages is planned, but our ressources are somewhat limited and there are lots of things to do - so this might take a while.

New directories

Several new directories have been created, amongst them misc/os, which is intended for operating systems and updates. The first uploads to this directory are "Amiga Minix", an open source Unix like operating system for Amiga 500, 2000 and 3000 computers and the final m68k-amiga distribution of OpenBSD. The former was kindly provided by Thomas Unger, while the latter is a mirror of ftp.planetmirror.com and was moved to Aminet because OpenBSD-Amiga is discontinued und slowly gets removed from the official BSD-mirrors.

A complete list of the new directories:

• dev/lib (static libraries)
• game/edit (game editors)
• game/strat (strategy games)
• misc/os (Operating systems and updates)
• pix/picon (PNG icons)

We already started to move files into these directories, if you stumble across further packages that should be moved, don't hesitate to tell us. Thanks a lot to James Jacobs for both suggesting game/edit aswell as providing a complete list of files that should be moved in there.

More mirrors

Three new mirrors have been added (de5.aminet.net, se.aminet.net and dk.aminet.net). For more info about mirrors and who to thank for the various ones, see http://wiki.aminet.net/Mirrors. Aminet now consists of seven mirrors - with more coming up. As the question has been brought up several times now: Yes, we do accept big files, a CD ISO shouldn't be a problem. For anything significantly bigger than 80-100 MB we'd appreciate it if you would notify us upfront though.

New filetypes supported

We now accept PDF documents (you don't have to put them into an archive anymore) aswell as music and video files in an Ogg container. The most popular ones being Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora. In addition we encourage you to use the open OGG formats rather than the proprietary MPEG (MP3, MPEG1/2) formats which often come with patent and license issues.

As we're still getting DMS uploads occasionally: Please note that Aminet does not support DMS. If you need to upload a disk image, convert it to ADF first. We accept both plain ADF files aswell as gzipped ADF (.adz).

A reminder - server abuse

Recently we encountered postings on various forums where people announced they would download the whole Aminet repository, others explained that they already did it or gave instructions how this can be accomplished easily. Apparently, we really need to address this issue.

Downloading the whole Aminet repository is considered abuse. No ifs, buts or whens - end users are not entitled to run personal mirrors. Aminet has a total size of more than 32 GB right now, individual users downloading that much data from our servers just for the sake of having their own local copy are not just acting rather impolite, they are actually eating up resources that somebody has to pay for.

Aminet isn't going away anytime soon. It's going to celebrate its 15th birthday soon, and we do have the resources available to make sure that there are going to be quite a few more birthday parties. We also have a bunch of 100% mirrors up and going, so there are no excuses really.

If you really feel like leeching, go download Google - compared to Aminet, that whole WWW thing is a relative newcomer and might be gone any day now.

As usual, an extensive change log can be found at: http://wiki.aminet.net/Changelog. If you want to get in touch with us, either drop us a mail at aminet@aminet.net or join our IRC channel #aminet on irc.amigaworld.net (irc://irc.amigaworld.net/aminet). We *love* feedback, feature requests and complaints. Honestly.