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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.
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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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.