Today, we are proudly presenting a brand new & shining release of chaos: version 0.3.0
The full set of changes is more carefully described at the GitHub release page; this blog post will highlight some of the things mentioned there a bit further.
Here is what it looks like in action:
(The screenshot is based on a slightly older version of the modplayer than the final one; we decided to add a few more modules while we were at it, so the list in the published version contains ten different modules instead of just five. The full list of modules can be found here: https://github.com/chaos4ever/chaos/tree/master/programs/modplay)
Starting the modplayer is easy: download the .iso from the GitHub release page linked above, create a virtual machine (make sure that SB16 sound is active) and set this .iso as the virtualized CD/DVD drive. Boot the system and type modplay at the command line.
If all goes well, you should now be listening to the classic axel f song. 
Enjoy!
If you run into any kind of issues, please report them at our GitHub issues page.
Today, we are happy to announce the immediate availability of chaos 0.2.0
Here is an excerpt from the release notes, as taken from https://github.com/chaos4ever/chaos/releases/tag/0.2.0
cluido properly, from the ramdisk using the boot, virtual_file_system,fat and initial_ramdisk servers together. This item itself is worthy of its own story; I have blogged about it at great length here: http://perlun.eu.org/en/2017/12/30/chaos-why-is-the-boot-server-unable-to-read-the-startup-script
grub-legacy to GRUB 2, the current version of GNU GRUB. This helped in supporting the next bulletpoint, namely:cp (on Linux) or Rufus (on Windows) to write the .iso to the proper device and you should be able to boot it. Please, give it a try and share any feedback about this here in our GitHub repo!master. Our image can be found here, and you should be able to run it by simply executing docker run -it chaosdev/chaos. (The container uses qemu under the hood, to simulate a physical machine.)For the first time in years actually, chaos development has a web site. How cool is that!
Some of you reading this may not be aware of it, but chaos development is a group with a long history. The group was formed when many of us where in secondary school/early in university. This was in the late 90's. The Internet (or rather, the web) was still quite new. Registering a domain name was an interesting challenge. You had to send an email to Network Solutions, signed with your own PGP key. It was a rather cumbersome process. Not to mention, the fact that you had to have somewhere with a "broadband" internet connection and a static IP address to host your (or their) hardware was a huge stumbling block for people getting their web sites onto the Internet. We were no exception. But still, it was an interesting challenge to try to solve. Like a big jigsaw puzzle of some form. Come to think of it, that's probably been one of the key reasons why I got into software development in the first place. I like solving problems, and the emotional feedback you get when you manage to solve a hard problem... it's amazing.
Registering domain names is no exception to this rule. It could be like this: I received the email from Network Solutions that I should sign. I signed it and sent it back to them, during a break in school. Then, at a later time, I was eager to have the chance to get back to my email again, just to see if the registration was successful or not.
Eventually, it was. That was great! We had some nice people who helped us back then (Gustav Sinder being one of them, Jonas Öberg being another one, and John Hennessey being yet another one - thanks to all of you!) which was a great help in getting our nice "something" onto the web. Of course, developing a web site was also one of the "side projects" that we had to get done to get stuff published. Back then, it was an altogether different business than it is today. Technologies like ASP, PHP and JSP were considered "good ways" to publish a web site on the Internet. All of these are based on a request-response model where the content for the web page is dynamically generated on the server, then sent to the web browser. We used JSP.
Today, luckily, the Internet and the World Wide Web has evolved quite a bit. Most of us, with a few exceptions have realized by now that PHP is a fractal of bad design. Please read that page if you haven't; I just had a good laugh when re-reading parts of it again. :)
This evolution has led to really nice frameworks like Jekyll. They provide an IMHO much "smarter" way to develop a web site, where the dynamism is kept on the development machine and where the end result is a set of static .html pages. Much faster to load, much easier to host, etc.
Anyway, back to the chaos web site again (which happens to be developed using Jekyll btw). We once upon a time had a domain name called chaosdev.org. Sadly though, as the years went and most of us who was involved in the project lost interest in it (which happens to most open source/free software projects at one time or another), we didn't renew the domain name. So what happened? It was taken custody by some feeble domain name nappers. See it for yourself here: http://whois.domaintools.com/chaosdev.org
Seriously. They want us (or whoever else is crazy enough to accept their deal) to pay $1499 for the domain. No-one in their right mind would pay that amount of money for a domain name, at least not something reasonably silly like chaosdev.org. Why would you? It simply makes no sense. The domain name isn't that good to warrant that kind of excessive price tag.
So, we have decided to refuse to accept their deal. Instead, now that the Google has helped make the British Indian Ocean Territory domains popular, we've decided to go with the chaosdev.io name. It has some resemblance to our old name, which is nice for kind of "nostalgic" reasons. Also, it is reasonably short and easy to remember. So, in short - welcome to our new home on the 'net!