Introduction
Using the setup section, Aminet’s web interface can be configured to suit your exact needs. You can decide which download server you would like to use and which architectures you want to have displayed.
These settings are stored in a cookie, so you need to make sure your browser is configured to accept cookies. This also means that the setup is browser specific: If you’re accessing Aminet using more than one browser, or from different computers, you need to configure each browser/computer seperately.
The download server
Aminet’s web interface is hosted by what we refer to as “the main server”, but the actual packages available on Aminet are stored on various mirrors from all over the world. If you click on a download link, the package you requested will be retrieved from a randomly selected Aminet mirror.
If you’d rather use a particular mirror for all your downloads, e.g. because it turned out to be more responsive for you than the other servers, you may configure Aminet to always use a particular download location using the “Default mirror” setting.
You will notice that each Aminet mirror appears twice in the list of available download locations: once with a “http://” prefix, and once with a “ftp://” prefix. This lets you choose the transfer protocol by which the files are transferred to your computer - if you’re not sure which one you should choose, just stick with the HTTP protocol.
Architecture filtering
In the 21st century, Amiga software can be compiled for a host of different architectures - in addition to the traditional AmigaOS for m68k CPUs, there is now a PPC version of AmigaOS, there is MorphOS, there are different flavours of AROS and even CPU-specific extensions for good old AmigaOS 3 like WarpUp or PowerUp.
Each package on Aminet has an architecture flag that indicates for what platform(s) the program has been compiled. Chances are that many packages are not interesting for you, simply because you have no means of executing them. Architecture filtering will allow you to hide certain architectures: If you can not execute AROS programs, why have them displayed at all?
To use architecture filtering, make sure it is enabled and then select the architectures you want to have displayed. Once you hit the “Save” button, Aminet will now only display the architectures you want to see. This setting affects all aspects of the web interface: the list of recent uploads, directory listings and the results listed by the search function.