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New AmigaOS On Top Of Linux
tommy.tonteri@arcada.fi writes, "Amiga released (yet another) plan for the future at an Amiga-show in St. Louis on Sunday. They plan on making a new OS that will be hosted on top of (Red Hat) Linux. Amiga's partners in this new effort include Sun, RedHat and Corel. Yet another impressive-sounding plan, hope they will finally be able to pull this one off..." I of course will believe it when I see it.
So now there'll be GNU/Linux and Amiga/Linux. Kewel. I hope the Open Amiga (COSA) people have convinced them it should be Free.
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Open mind, insert foot.
So you know, QNX is not a cheap OS. How licensing works is every utility has points associated with it. You want grep? that's 10 points or whatever. They then add up the points multiply by some magic numbers and that's the price. Unless you need real-time capability, QNX is ludicrously expensive as you end up paying for a lot of things which are basically standard BSD utilities.
I'm still trying to figure out what the obsession with QNX is. It's just another OS, occasionally useful, occasionally useless.
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While I agree with the sentiment of your post, you're wrong about the flexibility issues you listed.
When I was using my Amiga 3000 as my main workstation, I was running MiamiDeluxe as a network stack, and was running Apache, qmail, MySQL, NAT (the Amiga was my LAN's modem server), and SOCKS.
Did I leave anything out? Yes, Amigas have the "flexibilty" required to run the tasks you mentioned, and no, I'm not exaggerating the list of running services. They were all fully functional (including mod_perl CGI stuff and qmail virtual domains) and online.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I thought the point was that this box will allow developers to create content/apps for the new Amiga, while the computer is still being developed in a similar style to Sony's PSX2 development kits. It's not finished product, but part of a transition from AmigaOS Ontop Linux Ontop X86 > AmigaOS On X86 > Amiga On New Amiga chipset.
Excuse me, but how do you run an OS ontop of another OS? /. linked to had known what he was talking about, or even elaborated on just HOW they were going to run the next Workbench ontop of Red hat. (and why not just say Linux?)
Not counting things like VMWare, Plex86 and others, running an OS straight ontop of an other is impossible.
Unless they mean compiling things and such?
And no, using a "launcher" doesn't count either (Like the BeOS PE).
It would have been nice if the author of the article that
My email addy? should be easy enough.
This is not an insightful post. It is an extremely *REDUNDANT* post. Every time there is an article about the Amiga someone has to jump in with the "This isn't original Amiga hardware, so this isn't really an Amiga" post.
There's no insight in that anymore.
Elvis, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix aparently have come back from the dead...once again... and will be touring the country this summer. A cadre of fans rioted in New York City this morning when the news was released...chanting "We knew they were alive...We knew they were alive" while carrying banners that said "Elvis Lives" The New York Times called the rioters "Elvis Zealots who have refused to accept the death of Elvis and have been clinging to the hope that someday maybe...jsut maybe... this would happen.
While we don't know if anybody has actually *SEEN* the deceased rockers yet, there appears to be much celebration in anticipation of their tour.
Also in the news today... Ford has announced they invention of a special carburator that will enable any car on the road to get 500 miles per gallon.
sigh...
You know, I thought there were legal penalties for this sort of behaviour. I loved my Amigas - all 5 of them. I wrote freeware & shareware for them and I had programs published in the AmigaWorld Tool Chest. But the time comes to just let the dead go. At the end, my A3000/25 was running NetBSD and using a Retina video board.
Obviously it isn't the hardware or even the OS, silly geese. It is the legacy Amiga software and the Amiga community which keeps the Amiga alive. It will not be relevant if the new Amiga isn't the "real" Amiga, provided it offers an upgrade path for the existing community.
Oh, cool - just what I want, in the year 2001 I wanna run digipaint in 320x400 mode with golly, 4096 colors.
Don't get me wrong, I still squeal in pain at the mis-designs of Wintel and Macintosh (Although Macs are considerably better than Wintel) but the answer to current computer limitations is in the future, not the past.
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Clear, Dark Skies
1) If you talking pgcc, it doesn't come standard with most distros. If you think I am going to recompile every app on my system with pgcc, you've lost it.
2) Correct, XFree4.0 is pretty good. But he is talking BeOS level here. Even XFree4.0 is nowhere near the performance you get with BeOS. (Lets put it this way. On the SDL demos, BeOS is about 25% faster that Windows95 without hardware acceleration (SDL for BeOS does not support hardware acceleration.)Now Windows is pretty fast, especially considering that SDL for Windows uses DirectDraw (though I ran the test without a hardware blitter.) Now you go into BDirectWindow an you leave everything else in the dust.
4) Actually, the important Linux GUIs, Qt and GTK+ are not thread safe. Qt is very not thead safe and GTK+ requires a bit of a hack to be thread safe.
5) Well, no-one ever said that Unicies are good at threading. Linux is worse than WindowsNT at threads (in management, switch time, and spawn time) and BeOS is about 10 times faster than NT. You do that math.
6) Yea, and if I use TWM I'll have to burn my eyeballs out. If you want speed you can use DOS, but no sane person would.
7) Yea BeOS is free. Maybe not OpenSource, but free. It is a very open system, has some open source parts and in general the guys at be are pretty good with the source. Now I would rather use a fast, mostly closed system, than a slower OSS system.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
> How in the world can you call OSes like Windows or Linux modern?
If you would take a OS course you would recognize certain "modern" features:
- Pre-emptive task switching
- Multi-threaded
- Virtual Memory
- Protective address space for each application and the kernel (although hardware kind of needs to support this before the OS can)
> ? Linux can be traced back to the late sixites, whereas Windows still is the 1981 beast it originated from
Irrelevent. ALL _OS's_ can be traced back to the sixities. Does that mean that ALL of them are 40 years old?
> Put against these, the 1985 AmigaOS is wholly modern.
_IF_ the AmigaOS has all those features, then, yes, you are correct.
Cheers
I hope Amiga finally pull one of these resurrections off - it's been eight years, after all...
Although the developers' box isn't a real stormer when it comes to hardware, it should all be decent enough to let things that work nicely on it really scream when let loose on a later system. It remains to be seen what kind of performance Elate will give, but that should become clear over the next few months.
As an aside - the partner list looks pretty impressive, and I'd like to see the case designs that Disney animators (that is confirmed, BTW) came up with.
This is the developers' box that Amiga have announced. I've already seen several posts that seem to think that this is a Linux front-end, but these systems will actually be running the Elate OS on top of RedHat Linux. That may seem nonsensical (an OS running on top of another OS?), but Elate gets around this by treating the underlying OS as another abstraction of the hardware (as far as I can tell). Eventually, the Elate OS will be completely separate from other OSes, although it will still be able to run as a small compatability layer (much like Java) on other OSes to allow them to run Amiga applications.
Isn't this when Microsoft started having problems? When the started putting a new "OS" (Windows) on top of DOS? Guess I should wait and see how this turns out before commenting on it though :)
kwsNI
A long time ago, Amiga inc. did buddy up with Transmeta. Then Gateway discovered that Amiga were actually building a machine and put a stop to it. Shame really. According to certain insiders, they really had an impressive product.
Whilst the developer machine will host Elate/Intent using the red hat Linux kernel on the developer box, the OS itself will be based around A kernel developed by Tao.
For more links go to Czech Amiga news or Amiga Aktuell or Amiga News
The new kernel is itself is contained in 25 KB, the complete OS with GUI and JAVA needs 3 MB RAM. Currently the Amiga kernel runs on x86, PowerPC, MIPS, ARM processors.
Other current Amiga rumours doing the rounds:
1)AMIGA is expected to become the general interface for Corel-Linux-applications. If anything its got to be more user friendly than using X.
2)Newtek are to release the source code of the Video Toaster and Flyer for free
3)Sony and JVC are also going to be Amiga partners
Will it allow you to develop in 68000 assembly language, using a trap-based AmigaOS API? Maybe they can make this an embeddable library, sort of like a scripting engine only based on a 68K emulator...
Also, will it come with a BCPL compiler?
With some ex-Macintosh designers working on a new interface (for GNOME?) and articles like this, I think that this will help with the perception that "Linux is good for servers but terrible for new users" that I hear again and again.
Of course, if it works on top of Linux, I hope to see some efforts in getting it to work on top of one of the *BSD's and other free systems.
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"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
What you fail to understand is that some of us disagree with that hypothesis. Oh, maybe it has moved on, but it hasn't advanced. I'll be the first Amiga user to take the old Amiga out back and shoot her if something better comes along. I'm still waiting. And my Amiga must know a thing or two about the computer industry, because she isn't sweating. ;-)
The lich cannot let go of existence yet, because her purpose has not yet been achieved. She left no legacy, so she cannot yet welcome the long sleep of the grave. If she were to give in to the compelling call of oblivion, then that all she toiled for would amount to nothing. Or, to put it another way, if Amiga users let the Amiga die, then the qualities that made the Amiga great, will never be manifested in a "modern" system. When the Amiga has a successor, then the Amiga can die.
Whether this new system which happens to bear the name "Amiga" is that successor or not, remains to be seen.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Running something built on Red Hat Linux running on commodity PC hardware might make for a real nifty Linux machine, but it still won't be an Amiga. Although the article makes it sound like this is just a development platform, I can't imagine that any new platform could actually regain the glory that the original had.
Let the Amiga die with some dignity!
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Elate is an entire OS, but it runs on top of a "virtual processor". This is the machine specific code that deals with things like calling the real processor. As I understand it, Elate will run on top of any OS you care to write an abstraction layer for (much as with Java, but more efficiently), so Linux is acting as the processor (and graphics, sound, etc. systems) for the Elate OS.
Maybe, if something came along that *genuinely* felt better/smoother/quicker than the old Amigas felt in their day. But what has happened in computing since then? Bloated systems, ever hungry for resources in the name of companies shifting more units?! It's the attitude that keeps Amiga alive. Jay Miner would be turning in his grave if he saw how computing had 'advanced', bloatware style.
Amiga is not just a computer, it is a by-word for excellence, elegance and simplicity by design (let us forget that CBM made sure it is also remembered for ham-fisted marketing, underfunding and management disasters). We can't use the old 68k+Agnus+Paula+Denise, because they are precisely that. But keeping the spirit alive with new hardware is a more than acceptable solution (Maybe it would sit in its old position, straddling the games/home computing markets. You have to wonder, especially with the X-Box around the corner). I'd have preferred a PPC solution, but you can't have everything.
I'd hope that most Linux people would be on Amiga's side, after all, anything that takes market share from Microsoft is a Good Thing (tm)
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
Hopefully, it is true that this is just a development platform, and that Tao's Elate kernel will eventually ship. I haven't seen this system in action yet, but it's hard to believe that anything running on top of an OS like Linux is going to have satisfactory performance for Amiga end users.
Linux has a lot of neat things going for it, and x86 boxes are awefully fast these days, especially compared to 68k-based Amiga hardware. But put a 700 MHz Linux box right next to a 50 MHz Amiga (which is exactly the situation that I have at home) and then copy a few megabytes from a CD to hard disk. See how slow the GUI gets? Now try it on the Amiga. Ah, smooooooth.
People tell me that it's a good "feature" when a modern dynamic-scheduling OS keeps low-priority processes from starving even if it means that high-priority processes have to slow down a bit. Well, once you've used an Amiga, you know that "feature" is worse than useless. Maybe it makes sense for servers, but if you're running a GUI and there's a user sitting there who expects the machine to be snappy, it just doesn't work. (Low priority tasks are supposed to starve when the GUI needs to update! I don't give a rat's ass if copying a 20 Megabyte file takes an extra 400 milliseconds, but I sure as hell do care if the GUI ever makes me wait that long!)
This was one of the reasons that QNX Neutrino looked so promising. With a realtime kernel, you should be able to guarantee that the GUI keeps up with human perception. QNX Neutrino had the potention to meet (or even exceed!) Amiga users' expectations. With something like Linux, the GUI's responsiveness is held hostage by the machine's load. (And apparently even an I/O bound process is enough to screw things up?!)
Let's hope that Tao's Elate kernel avoids the same technological mistake that Windows and Unix made. Otherwise, it seems unlikely that users of ten-year-old Amigas will be interested in downgrading to the "technology" of the 21st century.
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The new Amiga OS is supposed to be the Tao Elate. This OS can be run hosted on for example Linux. However the announcements so far just states that the developer boxes will run the os hosted (just to speedup development).
Does this strike anyone else as an attempt to get extra publicity by slipping the word linux wherever possible. Most of us can agree that the Amiga was a lovely machine in it's day, but a machine as this described will be no more Amiga than a PC with the badge changed. If there is any respect left isn't it about time we turned of the life support machine and let the platform rest in peace.