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Q: Does AtheOS comply with the POSIX stanard?

A: Not fully. 100% POSIX compliance has never been a goal for AtheOS
   but it do support large parts of the standard. A greate number of
   POSIX compliant application compiles and run without modification
   under AtheOS.

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Q: How do I properly shutdown AtheOS?

A: Run "reboot" from a shell or press CTRL-ALT-DEL. AtheOS will in both cases
   kill all processes, unmount all filesystems and flush the disk-cache before
   rebooting the machine. The native FS is journaled so an "unclean" shutdown
   will not corrupt the FS but might leave you with corrupted files. If you have
   mounted a FAT-FS during a crash or power-out you should validate the FS
   afterwards to avoid further damage to the FS.

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Q: I've just installed AtheOS, what's the default username/password?

A: Try root/root or guest/guest

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Q: What file-format are used for AtheOS executables and DLL's?

A: AtheOS use ELF for executables and DLL's. Unlike many other OS's using
   ELF the executable-images is loaded and handled entirely by the kernel, not
   through a user-space interpreter. Images are loaded on demand and untouched
   pages (not written to by the app yet) in all images (executables and libs)
   are shared between different instances of the same image when loaded into
   different processes.

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Q: Is it possible to switch to real textmode in AtheOS?

A: No, you have to use the terminal emulator.

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Q: Will it be possible to switch to real textmode in the future?

A: No. Text-mode support is not planned for AtheOS. AtheOS is centered around
   the "builtin" GUI and will never support textmode.

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Q: Is it possible to make a bootable AtheOS CD?

A: No. AtheOS currently have no suport for CD-ROM.

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Q: AtheOS boot's from the install floppies and into the GUI but when I try
   to mount an existing FAT partition or format the AFS partition it appear
   that AtheOS have not detected any of my partitions. What can I do?

A: This is a fairly common problem but I am not 100% sure what might cause this.
   AtheOS currently use the BIOS to access the disk's and the problem is most
   likely related to the way your BIOS translate disk addresses compared to
   the OS you normaly access the disk from. The only advice I can give is
   to experiment with the BIOS settings for the disk in questions. Most BIOS'es
   provide LBA, and a few CHS modes. Try the various modes and see if you can
   find one that match the translation your OS are using.

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Q: Why does my serial-mouse dont work?

A: AtheOS only support one serial mouse protocol (The one used by MS and a few others)
   so the chances are that AtheOS don't support your mouse. At least some of the
   Logitect serial mices are known to not work.

   It could also be that the mouse is not attached to COM1, currently only COM1 is
   scanned for a mouse. If you use a serial-mouse you MUST use COM2 (the default)
   for the kernel debugger even if you dont have a serial cable attached to the port.

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Q: AtheOS booted successfully from the boot-floppies but print a lot of text
   messages and then hang when booting from the HD. What whent wrong?

A: This is probably caused by one of the video-card drivers. The S3-Virge driver
   seem to have problems when probing for the card and will hang on some machines
   (Even if no card is found). A possible workaround is to delete unused video
   drivers from the HD before booting. To do this boot from the floppy again,
   mount the native FS (like during the install) and delete unused drivers from
   "/<hd-mnt-pnt>/atheos/sys/drivers/appserver/video/"

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Q: Is AtheOS Intel only? How attached is it to the Intel platform?

A: At the moment AtheOS only run on Intel (and compatible) platforms. The
   reason simply is that I dont own any other hardware worth porting AtheOS
   to and that the vast majority of the "target" group is running Intel
   hardware anyway. That said, most of AtheOS is written in highly portable
   C/C++. There is *very* little assambly code and none of the design is
   centered around the Intel architecture. It use a flat paged memory model.
   It does not depend on "Intel-only" features like segmentation, more
   than 2 privilige levels, call-gates, etc etc. I don't think porting AtheOS
   to another platform should cause much problems, but then again I have never
   tried :)
   
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Q: What kind of architecture is the kernel built around? Monolitic,
   micro-kernel, nano-kernel?

A: I often ask myself that question to :) The kernel is very modular and the
   it have a well defined interface between the kernel and it's device-drivers
   and file-systems. So given that each component comunicate through a thin
   defined interface, and don't know much else about each other, it ressembles
   a micro-kernel.
   I am not sure if this is the right term though, since all kernel-components
   lives in kernel-space and is not protected from each other, this is all
   properties from a monolitic-kernel. I am a bit confused :)

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Q: Is it a BeOS clone?

A: No it is not. The AtheOS and BeOS GUI have a similar API but AtheOS is
   no clone of BeOS. At the class-level you will find many similarities
   and the message/event system is quite similar. Some similarities are
   inevitable between two API's trying to do the same (implement a OO GUI
   interface in C++) but the internal implementation and most finer details
   in how the API's work are very different. I think the BeOS API is nice
   in many ways and I have spendt some hours with the BeBook but I have never
   intended to make a BeOS clone.

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Q: The GUI look very Amigaish, is it an AmigaOS clone?

A: No. In the beginning it was actualy ment to be one, but this days there
   is nothing resembling the AmigaOS in AtheOS other than the window-borders.
   This seems to be rather hard for the Amiga-community to grasp though. They
   still think AtheOS is an Amiga clone :) Hey the Window borders look like on
   my Amiga! It must be an Amiga clone Right? I find it rather amusing to see
   that the Amiga-hord think that the single-most important property of an OS
   is the window-borders :)
   BTW: You can replace the border-look by writing a plugin to the appserver
   so I guess the Amiga look will go away quite soon.
