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ahah, funny that you mention Zune, I was its creator :) The geocities page is so old I dont remember how to modify it (if it's still possible at all).
Zune on X11 is pretty dead (especially vs. Qt and GTK) but the project got a new life with AROS, which is ... an AmigaOS clone for x86/PPC/m68k/whatever. As a side effect of the AROS port, it is also working on the original AmigaOS, although MUI is still far ahead.

Why not try AROS and start porting some simple but much needed applicatins from the Unix front?

Yes, the Amiga is dead and buried. The story is a bit misleading.

"Port Mozilla to AmigaOS and similar/compatible OSes" would probably have been more accurate.

AmigaOS might get a chance to live on in version 4, on off the shelf 3rd party hardware, if the company that whimsically calls itself "Amiga Inc." would only give it a chance instead of actively doing all they can to kill it in its cradle. Then there's things like the API compatible MorphOS and the open source AROS.

And no, Lionel Ritchie and skinny ties have never been great.

The Amiga's still around, as are various AmigaOS clones.

If you added protected memory somehow, then the OS would probably slow down a lot, and it would still be about nine zillion times faster than windows. Sure it doesn't do nearly as much, but it provides users with the majority of services they need: It handles graphics, including 2D acceleration. It has a TCP/IP stack. It handles a broad assortment of storage devices. Oh yeah, and scalable fonts, printing, you know, all the usual crap.

I think a resurrection of the AmigaDOS 2.x or 3.x operating system is in order. Combined with some well-written programs, you could use it to get a complete usable system on a pendrive that would beat hell out of everything else for some users. The best thing you could do to it to make it palatable would be to give it a really great journaling file system. The great news is that Amiga filesystems are user space processes just like everything else, and they can be attached to the volume itself just as they are on the macintosh, so no changes whatsoever are required to the operating system. It might not be fast, but it'll be a hell of a lot faster than any 68k Amiga ever was.

There is at least one project to do just this: AROS. Unfortunately they say they have about six developers working on it at any one time, and they're not going anywhere. I guess everyone feels it's unnecessary but it would be a dandy OS to run on small cheap embedded devices.

....mention any other open source that can be used as an example of already existing functionality that is like this or can contribute to it, perhaps directly.

Not getting into the programming details but AROS is open source Amiga clone I believe having some of this...

Shrug

This isnt a new concept and i believe its a terrific one. AROS's bounty program has been working for AROS for quite a while.

Its also being used to port Mozilla too Amiga compatible systems. Over 4000 dollars has been raised so far for the person(s) who decide to take it on.

Im sure plent of people are doing this and its working. Look at some of those people. Their puting in 100, 200 dollars. Thats a lot of money considering some major packets of software cost that much and these guys are only paying for a feature that is not specific to them, but a community!

Open Source people are good people!

Unfortunately while it works well, it suffers from the same problems as the original in terms of resource tracking and memory management. Still, it provides a framework to start from.

If you want to fire up something Workbench-like on your PC, it's a project worth following.

> Eyetech is building the hardware ...

Eyetech designs, decides and builds nothing.

Eyetech is a distributor, and has chosen to market this upcoming (maybe) board, which looks like it's Mai Logic's successor to their Teron CX and PX boards, under the "AmigaOne" trademark which is licensed from Amiga, Inc. With regards to AmigaOS and the hardware it'll run on, AInc does nothing but license IP.

> ... and Hyperion the software (PPCBoot ...

PPCBoot is dead, long live U-Boot. And it's not made by Hyperion. Hyperion is a rather new contributor to this open source project by making it support the Teron boards.

> Certain Amiga clone vendors ...

There are no more Amigas, and thus there are no Amiga clones. The Amiga is dead, thank $DEITY, and if it weren't for artificially added market restrictions AmigaOS could finally take advantage of a third party hardware market. Well, it can, but it's not allowed to.

OTOH, there are AmigaOS "clones", or rather new OSes providing AmigaOS API compatibility.
MorphOS and the open source AROS. Maybe that's what you were thinking about.

Problem with the Faithful Followers Of The Name Cult is they attempt to do smoke an mirrors with hyping products that are mearly badged with a boing ball. If you all would just give straight answers minus the tital wave of fluff and spin, perhaps you all as a group would earn some respect. Perhaps that may be a too tall of an order for you to accomplish.

Dammy

AROS - No Schedule and Rock'n!

I found a site about this ReactOS thing its a review
Reactos Review...

While it is nice to see all the work and effort that is obviously going to be put into the system, one really has to wonder why on earth bother?

One look at the monstrous blue screenshots , and the DOS prompt with a BSOD theme going on are enough to make me hurl.

It makes me remember that the original reason I moved to Linux was not because it was free or open source. The reason I moved was because I couldnt stand the windows operating system. Using various flavors of *nix at university and fun at home with my old Amiga taught me that Windows was a backward step, even all those years ago. Linux just has a much nicer architecture than Windows.

On the other hand AROS seems to be coming along very nicely. AmigaOS was loosely based on Unix, but unlike Linux had proper PreEmptive multitasking!

The AROS (Amiga Research Operating System) site is also shut down.

There seems to be some confusion with regard to which OSes/solutions this effort is directed at. Currently there are 4 main 68k Amiga compatible solutions DiscreetFX would like to see supported. For two first one listed below PPC native versions would be preferable:

1) AmigaOS4

This is the official new AmigaOS developed for classic Amigas upgraded with PPC accelerators and new AmigaOne computers which are being sold with G3 and G4 processors.

Some of the latest but still unfinished screenshots of AmigaOS4:
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=560
AmigaOne motherboards can already be bought in combination with Linux at the following dealers (AmigaOS4 will be delivered for free as soon as it is finished): http://www.eyetech.co.uk/amigaone/dealers.php

With MOL MacOS X can also already be used with this system (as well as with the Peg below):

http://www.anythingamiga.com/XEPics/x2.jpg.html

2) MorphOS

Its ABOX environment is a re-implementation of version 3.1 of the Amiga operating system. The re-implemted Exec kernel is hosted on top of a Quark microkernel. The OS is fast and responsive and currently runs with G3 Pegasos motherboards. Interested people will have to wait for the Pegasos II, which is planned for release in September. An interesting review can be found at OSNews:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3589

3) AROS

An open source project intended as a multi-platform re-implementation of version 3.1 of the Amiga operating system. Most of the development takes place on x86 computers. Much of the source code was used for MorphOS. http://www.aros.org/

4) UAE, Amithlon and other 68 AmigaOS emulators

AmigaOS XL: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=604
Amiga Forever: http://cloanto.com/amiga/forever/

• AROS
  
• Virtual Acorn (an emulator but which emulates an OS, indeed)
  
• MenuetOS
  
• Debian GNU/Hurd
  
• Plan9
  

What about the AROS Project which has been running for long ?

The Amiga GUI actually wasn't all that hardware-dependent, at least in later versions of the OS. It was a simple matter for systems like cybergraphx to use exec.library/SetPatch() to reroute all graphics.library calls to different hardware.
And, actually, there's a re-implementation of AmigaOS on x86, that displays its GUI happily on any VESA framebuffer.

The amiga did have fancy gfx hardware for it's time - but the OS and 100% OS-legal programs used it in fairly pedestrian ways, via calls to system shared libraries.

it was completely GUI orientated.

Well, v2.0+ also had system-wide ARexx scripting, a powerful shell, user-space filesystem drivers/translators so you could install a driver to let you cd into compressed files, the window system itself, etc. The entire GNU command-line toolset was also ported to it via a compatibility library called ixemul. The OS was built on a message-passing-by-reference system, which meant that IPC was zero-copy. There was also a very powerful networking add-on called Envoy that provided network-transparent messaging services.
It also had fun late-binding shared libraries, that could be patched dynamically at run-time on a per-function basis, allowing third party hacks to theme the GUI and tune the OS on the fly.

So, it had a kick-ass GUI, but it was good at lots of other stuff too. :-)

Where the OS fell down was its complete lack of true memory protection - at the time however, this had some advantage, since it meant the computers could be made with cheaper MMU-less CPUs, and meant that task-switching was extremely quick. Amiga applications tended to be naturally multi-threaded with non-modal GUIs, so fast task-switching was a definite plus.

Interestingly, there's a re-creation of AmigaOS for x86 available here. It's actually coming along very nicely, but has all of AmigaOS's weaknesses, as well as its strengths - e.g. no memory protection, but ultra-fast reboots for when you do crash :-) (a soft "reboot" actually just vectors back into the kernel entry point, skipping the BIOS and bring the back system up in seconds.)

Scarily, the Amiga OS has been open-source cloned and ported to x86, in the form of AROS.

Unlike other projects that have drawn some inspiration from AmigaOS, AROS pretty much just tries to be a straight clone (with a necessary overhaul to the device drivers layer).

The project is quite far along, and has a few interesting features:

(a) Amiga OS had no true memory protection. Neither does AROS. There's a system of semaphore locking on some sections that is to true memory protection as cooperative multitasking is to pre-emptive.

(b) When the system goes down (see (a)), it reboots in a fraction of a second - a soft "reboot" does not jump back to the BIOS, but re-enters the AROS kernel init after zeroing some choice areas of memory.

(c) due to the absence of memory protection between user-space tasks, context switches, such as they are, are extremely lightweight. Not much of distinction between threads and processes. Amiga applications have always tended to be very muyltithreaded. The OS is true pre-emptive multitasking.

(c) It uses message-passing-by-reference for IPC. Rather than copying data from one process to another, they pass references to the data around. Very quick.

(d) it has support for amiga-style logical volumes, assigns, and pluggable filesystem drivers, which are pretty cool - cd'ing into compressed archives, ftp sites, and so on, as well as the OS having a clear notion of the distinction between a particular floppy/cd/partition and the drive it is in... (woirked example: why the hell don't linux distros configure cdroms to automount and show up as both /mnt/cdrom and /mnt/cdlabel/ or something - the amiga got this right, allowing you to say "CD0:path/to/file" for "the file on thedisk that I've got in the CD drive" and "LABELNAME:path/to/file" for "the file on the particular volume that is named "LABELNAME", wherever it may be!)

EROS is a very promising O.S. - orthogonally persistent, cool security.

An "interesting" OS is AROS - it's AmigaOS, but open-source on x86, complete with Amiga-style:

pre-emptive multitasking.

total lack of memory protection, except for "cooperative" m.p. via semaphore locking.

blazingly fast IPC by by-reference message passing

on-the-fly shared library function patching

user-space device drivers (though, without any memory protection, user space is a pretty abstract concept :-).

integrated GUI + unix-like shell.

Also has a fun "soft-pseudo-reboot in a fraction of a second" feature, based on just freeing all memory except the kernel + vectoring to the kernel entry point - whcih means, you may crash due to lack of memory protection, but you'll be back up,very,very quickly :-).

The Amiga DE has little in common with the original AmigaOS besides the name - although the DE is pretty cool in itself -based on the Tao virtual machine architecture.

Intersting that you should mention PalmOS - the old AmigaOS is being Open-source cloned by the aros project, and, it's recently beern ported to Palm hardware - if anything, the old amigaos, let alone the new DE, is better for palmtops than Palmos (which is quite limited - no preemptive multitasking, dodgy shared libraries, yadda, yadda) - then again, EPOC32 is better than either...

You mean non-free (as in beer) nature of it.

The issue is not paying money. I have plenty, and will pay for what's worth paying for. The issue is support. As I've said before, I've been burnt several times now. My first machine was a Sinclair QL in the late eighties. Then Sinclair was bought by Amstrad and the platform died. I upgraded to an Amiga. A fantastic system. C= went tits-up, and there was noone to catch the OS when it fell. Right now there's notional support in that after its gone through the receiver several times, someone's been given an OS that hadn't been updated properly in 8 years, but it's too late.

Open Source and Free software isn't about getting stuff for free. It's about not having your entire system tied to the fortunes and whims of a vendor. It's about being able to support yourself, regardless of what the vendor wants, and regardless of what happens to the vendor, and if you can't support yourself, to at least know that programmers out there can support you independently of what the vendor chooses to do.

If RedHat went to the wall tomorrow, would Linux die? OTOH, if BeOS went to the wall tomorrow, how much longer would you be able to use BeOS for before the drivers ceased to work on your upgraded PCs and third parties stopped producing programs for the platform because it had gone stagnant?

1) You're using an over half decade old OS even now because it does something that you're Windows/Linux can't.

2) You never bothered to upgrade to the next version but feel free to deride it.

WPS is so easily configurable as to be almost unrecognizable with the installation of just a few freeware/shareware packages (and some commercial too.) You can even replace the damn thing if you don't like it (there are several WPS replacements), try doing that under Windows.

I hate discussions like this because there are people who have used OS {you name it here} exclusively for years, or exclusively but for Windows at work in an environment where they're not allowed to load their own software (oh the joy of being a developer ;), and assume that feature {XYZ} that they found in {you name it here} isn't possible in Windows because big-bad-MS sucks, and Windows sucks, etc, etc.

I remember going through the same enlightenment process too. "You mean Windows 3.1 does have dynamically linked libraries too? My god, you'll be telling me it has a hypertext based help system like AmigaGuide next! What? You're saying it does??"

Any OS that's sufficiently modular, and Windows is nothing but modular (someone jokingly said here, only half kidding, that Windows is the first example of an exokernel OS) can be patched to change any aspect of it. Spend enough time, and you can pull IE out of Windows, thanks to 95Lite or 98Lite, you can have bash instead of command.com, LiteStep instead of Explorer, WindowBlinds to remove that, er, Windows 95 look, have the Windows directory called "H:\MyOS\OSFiles.SYS", and make it as torturedly different as you want.

I appreciate that the initial layout is somewhat high, but considering the package you get for what you pay it is quite a good value. Equivalent of getting Win2000+Office-Pro plus many other commercial / noncommercial apps. Compared to Retail Windows + Office, I'll grant you it's "cheap". For most of us, we'd never pay those prices for that when we have the choice. Linux is a high quality, solid, product with a great deal of natural openess and flexibility, and while it's not perfect, it's a good fit with what I need out of a system. OS/2, unfortunately, is not. The default GUI is, to me, clunky, though I respect the rights of others to disagree with me on that, and the system isn't open enough, and free as in speech, for me to be happy about basing my future on it.

The problem with Indrema is that their plans did not include the very latest cutting edge graphics technology. That's right - if only they'd designed their console around the Bitboys XBA 3d chipset, I'm sure there would have been plenty of buzz, and they'd have had no trouble getting further funding!

(also, I think AROS would make a more suitable console OS than Linux)

What kind of software? Conventional OSes like Windows NT, Linux and Solaris are buggy, slow and complicated. There is only one system which can save the operating system market.....AROS!

The URL is www.aros.org
--

And when I "sold out" in 1996, and got hold of what I needed to run Linux, I regretted it and still do. It's not that it wasn't the "right" decision, it's just Linux, wonderful though it is, is not the platform AmigaOS is. Neither are any of the other oft-proposed alternatives that I've tried. I've used OS/2 Warp 3, BeOS, QNX, and OpenStep, and while I thought all were pretty nice, they still don't quite get there.

I'm not saying AmigaOS was perfect, it's just that it defined an environment closest to the smoothest way of working I've ever come across. From the oft-maligned screens, which with later versions of the OS were done perfectly (you could decide whether an App would run in the current screen, a new screen, a new screen dedicated to that app, etc - I've yet to come across anything as dynamic and flexible since), to the CLI/GUI integration (but Workbench should have had a REXX port), to REXX, to the pre-emptive real-time multitasking, to the microkernel 'exec' that drove the thing and made the OS design so logical and intuitive.

Currently, a group at are trying to put together a decent platform independent version of the operating system. There are plusses and minusses to the approaches they're taking, they're keen, except on some hardware API issues, to duplicate AmigaOS as closely as possible, which means all of the good things but also some nasty holdovers like non-tracking of resources and a lack of memory protection. It's still great what they've got out so far, and I'm looking forward to the point a 'Slackware AROS' installation (or something similar...) becomes available.

Above all though, AmigaOS taught me something which, at the time, was an unpopular view - that the operating system makes the machine. The Amiga in 85 was revolutionary for its hardware, but if it had taken the Atari ST approach of installing a cruddy MSDOS clone and Mac-like interface emulator over the top of that harware it would have died on the spot. Amiga's genius wasn't to produce good hardware, but to, almost accidentally, produce an environment that made that hardware sing. And most of the approaches taken when building that environment could be applied to today, on hardware that is heavily influenced by what happened in 1985.
--

AROS

Why is almost everyone here bringing up the long-gone-and-deadness of the old Amiga machines, and then in the same breath writing the SDK off as DOA?

This SDK has nothing to do with the old Amiga machines. They kept the name, but that and maybe a certain degree of technical unconventionality are about all this has in common with what Amiga used to be.

This is a cross-platform, hosted application environment. It has a virtual-processor architecture, such that the same binary will work for all platforms (through dynamic recompilation). Everything is based around the Taos kernel, which is (supposedly) the only thing that actually has to be ported to a new architecture for the entire system to support it.

So what this really is is something like Java on steroids, or GNUstep sans native binaries. I love that the core system is quite compact (apparently the Taos kernel is 12kB!), and that it is highly geared toward efficient parallel processing. That the whole thing is called Amiga is a bit odd, but looking into this, one explanation becomes clear: What Amiga boxen were to the hardware peers of its day, this seems to be to the software of today. This really does look like advanced stuff. Read more about it.

I am disappointed, however, that the system is proprietary. Don't wanna go there. But then, hey, these guys are way ahead of the curve. And who knows, maybe the AROS folks will begin their own implemetation of the new API once they finish with the old one :-)

Hmm... that means there are 4 Amiga-Like systems available today - two closed source and 2 open source:

Closed source:

AmigaOS itself: closed source operating system, now severely outdated, but groundbreaking for its time - soon to be replaced by a completely different OS from Tao, which is rather cool in itself, being a VM a bit like a Java VM, but without the language dependency (it includes a gcc/g++ port...)

BeOS - what most people think of as the AmigaOS done right. While it has been market mostly to Mac-like media people, in fact it attracted a load of ex-amiga people, particularly developers too. It's OS structure is undeniably similar to a refined AmigaOS.

Open Source:

AROS, the Amiga Research OS. An Open-source clone of Amiga OS 3.x, ported to architectures including x86. Many Amiga os-legal apps work with just a recompile. Not finished. Work progressing slowly due to legal complications - the OS depends on Amiga-copyrighted system include files and infringes on several Amiga patents. However, the current amiga intellectual property owners seem to look quite favourably upon AROS, and it looks increasingly likely it will get their blessing, since the Amiga is now going to be based on a completely different OS from Tao, and does not use any old AmigaOS code, so AROS is a good option for keeping the "classic" amiga alive and up-to-date. There's already Quake and Doom ports, so they've got the important stuff going. :-)

Atheos The new kid, the subject of this discussion. People have noted its UI similarity to the AmigaOS UI already on this thread, but architecturally it is also very similar to AmigaOS and BeOS. But it's open source, unlike AmigaOS and BeOS.

Check out the AROS project for an open-source attempt at an AmigaOS clone, with source compatiblity on non-amiga hardware, including (bleurgh!) x86...
Progress is being made - there's a Quake port. :-)

They're currently in discussion with the Amiga trademark, copyright, and patent holders about the legality of the efforts - it looks increasingly likely that things will be resolved favorably for AROS in the near future.

Why don't you check it out for yourself?

The Amiga Research OS (AROS) are making an Amiga OS "clone" running on standard pc hw. It's even possible to run it under Linux.

Aros is for Amiga kinda what Wine is for Windows. You can even play AmigaQuake under Aros under Linux. Great stuff.

The Amiga OS is hardly dead, it's still being actively developed, in two main streams:

1. a next-gen distributed architecture based on the Tao VM (think of it as a language-agnostic generalised VM a bit like Java, but that can run on real hardware too).

2. the "classic" Amiga OS was extended to PowerPC with WarpOS (no relation to OS/2) microkernel. This allowed the user community to use more modern hardware, such as G3 accelerators, and 3D gfx cards.

The Amiga OS design, in the form of AROS - the "Amiga Research OS", which recently received blessing from Amiga itself, also lives on.

For more amiga info, go to www.amiga.org

Then there are lots of next-gen AmigaOS replacements occurring, some of them are actually making headway now, such as AROS. Other interesting ideas include trying to get the Linux Mac emulator (than runs on Linuxed Macs) to run on PPC enabled Amigas... That would be fun. Amigas have a wealth of OS's available to them, OpenBSD is the latest, others include Linux, NetBSD, QNX (well, it must run on the hardware, but it won't be released for a while I am sure), AmigaOS (never!) and probably a lot more.

Interestingly, the next-gen Amiga OS was going to be called Aqua - until Apple released their new UI. The Amiga has had a pretty rough year, even by the Amigas standards! Hoefully Tao will improve the fortunes, and maybe they should take a gander at OpenAL as their sound system. Sony also have relationships with Tao...

Everybody talks about putting the AmigaOs under GPL. Well, some people are trying to do something which could lead to this. It is called "Amiga Research project".
They are rewriting all the OS from scratch in order to make a cross-platform OS with the Amiga look and feel. I haven't looked at their homepage for a long time but they seem to still be sure of what they do.
For example:
" [Reaction when someone says that] AROS won't make it.

Yeah, we hear that all the day from every person. But most of them either don't know what we are doing or they think the Amiga is already dead. After we explained what we do to the former, most agreed that it is possible. The latter make more problems. Well, is Amiga dead right now ? I really can't say. Just a few hints: Did your A500 or A4000 blew up when C= went bankrupt ? Or when AT did ?

Fact is that there is only few new software for the Amiga (although Aminet has never seen better times) and that hardware is also developed at a lower speed (but the most amazing gadgets appear right now). I say, the Amiga community (which is still there) just sits and waits. And if someone releases something which is a bit like the Amiga back in 1984, then that machine will boom again. And who knows, maybe you will get a CD along with the machine labeled "AROS" :-) "

See http://www.aros.org for more informations.

The source would probably be picked up by AROS - Amiga Research OS
They have from scratch written several of the key amiga libraries, just by looking at the API. They have a working Exec kernel + some of the libraries that can run under Linux or i386 native, several amiga programs just have to be recompiled using GCC and they can run in an X window. Personally im waiting for the native i386 version to become more complete. And no.. with todays CPU power you dont need custom chips :)