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New Sharp Zaurus Will Host Amiga Under Linux
Kozmik writes: "As somebody who once owned a fair number of Amigas, I still hold hope that one day they will make a comeback. This deal with Sharp will hopefully give the new AmigaOS some credibility. Since the new OS runs on top of many operating systems, including linux, includes one of the fastest Java virtual machines (provided by the TAO group), and has a shipping SDK, Sharp decided to partner with Amiga and its developer community rather then try to reproduce all of that. The end result is that the new Zaurus will become another AmigaOS platform." (Q: If a new Amiga falls out of a tree, is anyone harmed? A: It depends what year the tree is in.)
Well in that case, Linux isn't an OS either. And neither is NT.
Having used Amigas for years for various applications, I'm fond of the machines, but a little hard pressed to figure out how an Amiga like the one that sits under my desk at home could possibly compete in today's market. A faster processor alone won't do it. A better interface is needed. Improvements to Exec and provisions for protected memory environments, too. The dependence on Agnes, Denise, and Paula has to be tossed, also. And when all of this is done, and the new system with the name "Amiga" debuts, it won't be the same one that hit the scene 16 years ago.
It might have the same name. It will probably perform better, but it won't be the same machine. If this new Amiga is a great box/interface/whatever, then I might buy into it; the name will be enough to cause me to give it serious consideration before deciding one way or the other. But I won't be fooled into thinking that there is a direct lineage between it and the computer with all those signatures inside the case.
It's (arguably) an operating system for a virtual machine. If you run Linux on VMware on Windows, or Windows on VMware on Linux, they don't stop being operating systems. Versions that run directly on real hardware are supposed to be coming later.
There aren't always clear boundaries between the operating system and applications or application development frameworks, especially in a microkernel (or exokernel) architecture.
People aren't entirely joking when they describe Emacs as an operating system.
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rant
I don't know much about Amiga's, I never used them. I do know that BeOS was supposed to have some shit hot multimedia capabilities. It was built from the ground to do that kind of thing. It still died, at least as a desktop OS. What makes you think that AmigaOS will succeed where BeOS couldn't?
You're right, it's more of a software platform.
7. You're reading a trade mag which tells you that a certain popular operating system of the 80s is making a comeback. In plain terms this means:
A. Serious development has produced results at OS/2 central
B. Serious money has produced results at VMS central
C. Guru Meditation has produced results at Amiga central
D. Alcohol has produced results at the editorial office
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I've wondered about this myself.
//e's and Commodore 64s Back In The Day(tm), but I have no desire to use either one ever again.
I liked my Apple
As fun as those machines were, something about my modern P3 and UltraSparc-based systems makes me a little less than nostalgic.
Maybe it's that the memory is a little more ideal than the reality was. Go back and watch a TV show or movie you LOVED when you were 9 and see how it doesn't really stand the test of time.
-LjM
Who says that you will have to use JNI? The only thing that I ever needed (highly anecdotal!) was a function to return the amount of free diskspace for a directory. Fortunately, there is a library that covers many operating systems (JConfig).
File only has methods to get the size of a single file or list the set of files in a directory.
But if it worked for you, please tell me how you did it!
Hey, Digi-Paint wasn't written in Assembler. [Digi] was the original HAM mode paint program, and was pretty slow at the time (but still useable). You're thinking of Brilliance, the wicked fast paint package that took, I believe, 5 man years of coding.
Still, DPaint really did cane, although it was slower towards the end. I'm amazed there isn't a paint program like it for Linux.
Dan.
There are some successful examples of very big Pure Java applications running cross-platform. Borland's JBuilder and TogetherSoft's Together are two very notable examples.
JNI doesn't necessarily mean platform-dependance, just that you have to provide equivalent functionality for the other platforms you support, whether that's in Pure Java or using JNI calls. For example, you could use JNI methods to write log information to the Event Log on Windows NT/2000, or normal Java I/O to write to standard text-based log files on any UNIX-compatible system. That doesn't mean you're platform-dependent.
(Note very carefully - I'm not saying Java is truly platform-independent; just cross-platform capable without a ton of porting work or a complete recompile.)
Right...
Remember folks, the Amiga DE is basically a fast VP and Java core with a lot of supporting applications and software. Amiga is being used as a brand name here. The Amiga DE is not the old Amiga OS or Amiga hardware in any way, form or manner. It could have been called the "Haddock Java and VP engine from the company called Amiga".
However, Amiga Inc are also working on Amiga OS4.0 (PPC native Amiga OS, July 2001), OS4.2 (AmigaDE host, December 2001), OS4.5 (new front-end, etc, July 2002) and OS 5.0 (SMP, December 2002). There is a lot of info in the amigaone group at groups.yahoo.com, also at http://ann.lu/ and http://www.amigart.com/.
New Amiga hardware is almost here as well. PPC motherboards that will also run Linux from bPlan, etc. A lot of people on Slashdot want PPC motherboards - now you will be able to get them. There will be several makes, all conforming to the zico specification from AInc (6 PCI slots, AGP, PC133 memory, CPU slot for PPC ships (PPC processors are CBGA chips, so they need a slot based interface unless you mount them directly to the motherboard - no PGA processors like those from Intel and AMD), Firewire, USB, etc).
Have a laugh at the Amiga Politics. There are 3 Amiga OSs now - AROS (x86 native), MorphOS (PPC native) and now the official AmigaOS4.x from Amiga. The people don't get along with each other in general, although AROS are acting as the "Mozilla" to Amigas "Netscape" and MorphOSs "Netscape". So for a general idea of the next gen Amiga OS, look no further than AROS with bells and whistles attached.
The wonderful intergration of custom chips and a well designed OS (Guru errors aside, but that was class - nice, evil-looking flashing red error box!) and a dedication to the hacker community at large is what made the Amiga succeed in spite of everything Commodore did do kill it (although they eventually succeeded). How many computers and video cards do you know that actually ship with hardware schematics, now?
What's needed is someone to take hardware - be it G4 hardware, GF3 chips, whatever, standardize on it and then say "WE WILL SUPPORT THIS TILL DEATH DO US PART". This lets software developers push that metal to the limit, just like they did on the Amiga.
Hey Redhat: You want to get onto the desktop in a big way? Use some of that IPO cash to cut a deal with some hardware vendors. Make a sleek box, it doesn't even have to be X86. Just put state of the art 3D hardware in there; Fund the development of the API's to make it happen, e.g. OpenGL, SDL, whatever - and then make sure that the hardware runs out of the box. Need to get NDA's from NVidia? Fine - just make sure that it works with your product. Give people the platform, and good things will happen. The platform isn't just linux, and it's not just hardware, either.
That's why all these Amiga resurrections fail. They miss the point of what made the Amiga grand. Does anyone else remember Digi-Paint? The product that bragged about the engineers spending months hacking a pure assembly paint package? That thing was FAST. And it had a spirit to it, too. (*Grin* all those ads with Kiki.. I wonder what Newtek is doing these days..)
My $0.02cdn.
..don't panic
The difference between the Apple II, The C=64 and the Amiga is that the Apple II and the C=64 weren't 10 years ahead of their time performance-wise, and (indefinite) years ahead of their time design-wise. The Amiga was.
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Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
Come on guys...
April Fools Day is over. Enough with the impossible stories; I mean who would believe that Amiga was making a comeback really?
-pos
The truth is more important than the facts.
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
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 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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BeOS personal edition could be taken as an OS that runs on WinXX and Linux. Since you install it and launch it from WinXX and/or Linux.
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Free Mac Mini
An operating system that runs on top of Linux? That's not an operating system, is it?
Got Rhinos?
I didn't see anything in there about AmigaOS, just software developed by Amiga.
This is a statement on the Amiga site saying that "The Amiga OS can run hosted on Linux, Embedded Linux, Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT, CE and QNX4," but this strikes me as someone strange. Is an operating system that runs on top of another operating system really an operating system, or just a shell/SDK/whatever?
Got Rhinos?
Ya know, I'm surprised that I haven't seen any insightful commentary here on this - AmigaDE (NOT AmigaOS, there's a difference) actually does hold at least one interesting promise.
While JavaVM presents the ability to be cross-platform, it really only does so with a single language - Java. Not one of my favorites. AmigaDE, on the other hand, is more like C# in the idea that it isn't nessisarily tied to a single language. But even that isn't THAT Earth shattering.
The real issue here is a single methodology for all platforms, and basically a single 'desktop' environment for all platforms. Yes, there are ways of doing this now, but quite a few of them are far from being slick, and many of them aren't ready for things like being plopped into a PDA OR a desktop machine - one or the other. AmigaDE is designed to be ready for both (does it really live up to that? Well, that's a different story - I can't really vouch for it!)
Many persist that Amiga is a dead platform. Well, in some ways they are right - going out and buying an A1200 or A4000 right now probably isn't the wisest course of action (I'm sure some Amiga advocates will jump me about that because of the PCI connectors and PPC cards, etc. But seriously...!) But on the flip side of that, there's the AmigaDE which is a run-anywhere 'OS' (or application framework really), and then the whole roadmap for AmigaOS 4 & 5. Amiga seems to have a fairly good head of steam behind them, and a fairly good plan. I'm acutally planning on buying one of the new AmigaOS based G4 boxes when they come out - AmigaOS 4 + a nice speedy processor and the Matrox video card onboard should really make for a machine to make people drool again when they see how snappy it's UI is (and, hopefully, it once again raises the bar on 'multimedia'). The original Amiga is dead - but, that's not a bad thing. How many people have whined that x86 machines suck because of all the legacy support behind them, and that we should just chuck it all and start from scratch. Well, Amiga got that chance really, and is taking it.
They are a company to watch - but, just don't expect them to be taking on Microsoft really. More likely than not, they are going to be picking up the nitche market that Be held for a while, chipping at the Macs, and probably even getting in the road of Linux a little. Sounds like a good thing to me - everyone get forced to be a little more competitive again.
Ok, I put on the flame retardant suit. Do your worst.
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
I think what is added is that its an environment that contains a VERY good Java VM, along with several other features such as ease of multiplatform development for things that are cumbersome in Java, and rather than attempt to write their own VM etc. they have decided its simpler to use the Amiga one.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
This is a serious question and not flamebait.
I just can't figure out what AmigaOS adds to a system. It runs on most OSs, which will provide process, thread and other system functionality. The Java VM provides the cross plateform capabilities. So just what does the AmigaOS provide for a program compiled to java that you don't get with just a good Java VM.
Can anyone enlighten me?
Paul Leader
Is it just me or does this sound like "The third best football team in Cleveland"?
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Jonathan Swift
One of the Amiga's driving factors that kept it alive through the 90's despite a complete lack of support was its incredible multimedia capabilities.
If all hangs on this statement: "Amiga based applications can run unchanged on x86, PowerPC, M Core, ARM, StrongARM, MIPS R3000, R4000, R5000, SH 3, SH4, and NEC V850 processors. The Amiga OS can run hosted on Linux, Embedded Linux, Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT, CE and QNX4."
If this is true, it will help eliminate the last reason I have to use Win32 over Linux for multimedia and graphics. I truly beleive that Amiga will score mulitimedia apps like BeOS and Linux just haven't managed to do up until now.
Here's to hope...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
It was fun; it was a great computer, but like the rest of the 80's, I think the party is over.
Isn't time to move on? Promote BeOS, or GNU/Linux/GNOME/whatever_desktop instead.
To restoring the glory of the almighty TANDY!!!