Slashdot Mirror
What MorphOS Is All About
Gentu writes "Genesi released today an extensive feature list of MorphOS, the pre-emptively multi-tasking operating system for PPC. MorphOS/Pegasos is a brand new platform (the last full OS+HW platform released was 7 years ago with Be's BeBox) so it is very modern and it has support for 3D cards, USB, SMP while it also features partial Amiga application binary compatibility! Additionally, OSNews today features an interview with the Eclipsis Project Manager, Nicholas Blachford, about MorphOS, and they include three exclusive screenshots of the OS."
Will this one offer HPFS file systems?
We as voters have given up essential liberty. We hoped to purchase a little temporary safety. We in fact deserve neither
MacOS Xe eBSD/ppc
LinuxPPC
MkLinux
NetBSD/ppc
OpenBSD/ppc
Fr
BeOS
Hell, even that old version of Windows NT.
Which one of these does *not* feature pre-emptive multitasking?!
I think people should put more interest in OpenBeOS than some new Amiga-ish thing
Sure there is the Amiga name, but there is so much more that solidarity behind (Open)BeOS can offer, increased driver support, ports to other platforms, and more robust and numerous applications can be a boon to the OSS community. Yes, Linux and *BSD are nice, but as a desktop machine, I have yet to see anything (on x86) rival the grace of BeOS.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
I'd like to run something non-x86 based.
What are the price differences though? If PPC for example is more, why bother if I'd be running the same operating system & GNU software base as I would with x86?
- temperature
- durability
- price now
- devaluation
A blog I run for the wealth
I looked at the screenshots, and there are icons for Quake 2 and Quake 3. I don't know, but IIRC Quake 2 is never released for Amiga, nor is Quake 3. To me this seems a bit fake, like "Look, we can run native apps released for other platforms".
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
You make some good points, and I think your basically right about the platform's chances (what can I say, I'm a pessimist) but there are two points you made I have trouble with:
:).
1. "IBM tried to do away with the ISA bus in 1987, by pushing their proprietary MCA bus as an all-or-nothing proposition."
It wasn't just a matter of it being all-or-nothing. If I remember rightly IBM wanted hugh royalties for making computers with the MCA bus. It was basically an attempt by them to reclaim the PC market they lost to the clones (attack of the clones anyone? sorry, that was uncalled for
2. "Of course, now ISA slots have almost vanished, but the transition period was eight years."
One reason for the 8 year transition was you just didn't need the PCI bus for say, a 28.8 modem or a SoundBlaster 16. Yes, the PCI bus behaves better than ISA, but that hardly matters to most people with only a few devices in their computers.
I guess my point is I don't really think a smooth hardware upgrade cycle is what keeps people locked to x86. If anything it's software. Heck, nowadays their's really no good reason to upgrade hardware for anything but games. If this company's going to make headway on the desktop outside of replacing aging amiga's, they'll need to interoperate with whatever software's popular (yes, probably MS-Office I'm sorry to say).
Anyways, that's my 2 cents.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
random thought... pertaining less to MorphOS and more to an insomniac's late night niggle post. hehe niggle... funny word. I think it is real. anyways... the gui is old, it is dieing... we need something less tiresome then double clicks and appearing windows. interaction needs to be efficient... not hollywoods "virtual reality", minority report style. no aqua interface. maybe instead of a mouse, our hands can be tracked... and really not have to leave the keyboard. hmmm.... imagine typing, and then lifting the right hand a couple inches above the keyboard and slightly outstretching the fingers, similar to the shape of a pistol and pushing objects in a mock three dimensional environment. picture a word processing cube- one side of the cube could be the document itself. another side could be temp clipboard space. type away at the keyboard, lift the left hand... spin the cube and punch the printer that is rendered on the "tools" side of the cube. to save, just punch the white typed document through the wall into the cube and push the entire cube to the side of the virtual space. The document was saved within the cube... would you like to play a game? lift the hands from the keyboard, with the palms to the air, grab the sphere that is dropping from the top of the monitor and punch a side of it to start up virtua girl... I dunno, what the hell I'm talking about. ahhh sleep...I'll try that !
Decaffeinated coffee? Kinda like kissing your sister. - Bob Irwin
I'm sorry, but the desktop looks dated and unprofessional. The icons, while detailed, lack a unifying theme other than photorealistic. OS9, OSX and BeOS have (about 99%) of their icons under their respective unified look. Dare is say it, it looks like a bunch of Linux icons I saw about 5 years ago.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
You're right that it's probably doomed to failure but your dismissal of its "partial Amiga binary compatibility" is *way* off base - this thing CAN'T run old Amiga games because it doesn't have the custom chipset, besides how many gamers are going to want to pay good money to run games that are at least ten years old?
What this machine and OS CAN run is the majority of serious Apps the Amiga has/had, and believe me there were/are tonnes, including stuff like Lightwave for example, as well as a host of other excellent creative/productivity software you'll almost certainly never have heard of, some of which still puts modern apps to shame: Wordworth 7 vs Word anyone? or Photogenics vs Photoshop? these applications were tightly programmed, smart, user friendly and incredibly feature rich, they're still more than capable of holding their own against much of the bloatware we're stuck with on other platforms...
Bearing in mind that there are corners of the video induistry where you'll still find dusty old A2000/4000 Toasters as the main creative workhorses, this could be interesting in a very limited niche way - I'd love to see how Lightwave performed on one of these in comparison to an x86 box for example.
All those arguments aside though, you missed the main reason why this venture is doomed which is (imho) that its declared target market has largely vanished. I'm an ex-Amigan myself and interesting though this is I wont be shelling out for one in a million years, it's VERY expensive for what it is, and only just keeps pace with the competition in terms of modern features. I held out with my modified A1200 until just over a year ago, so I reckon I qualify as being about as die-hard a user as they come (before insanity/fanaticism creeps in at least) if even people like me have moved on (and are now very happily using stuff like Mac OS X, and investing in a different hardware platform) then there can't be a viable market left for these boxes beyond the fanatics and (well off) nostalgics. The rest of us will either dismiss it because it's ancient history that we never bothered to learn (like you have) or shrug sadly and fire up our emulators (which incidentally can run most of the old games as well)
No joke: it would be really great to see if someone could get MorphOS running on a TiVo.
Obviously, just to be able to say "well... I got tired of linux on my tivo, so i put morphos on" brings a certain amount of geek kudos.
Or should I go and get a life now?
--- My dad's political betting
While that is funny, I don't think anybody who has ever used an AmigaOS back while it was still reasonably modern would ever be able to honestly complain about it's multitasking capabilities.
It was quite an efficient system. I personally ran a 10 line BBS off of a single 28 mhz computer, and it was often packed full of users that were doing a combination of playing games, chatting, uploading or downloading. The single system was running the BBS software, any of the online program files for the users were running, and hosting a very large mud game. It also had FidoNet feeds and was very frequently tossing large message packages and network mail. The system never slowed down and had months of uptime only interupted by power failures. Not bad for 28mhz and 16 megs of ram.
I have been debating buying a new PPC system to run MorphOS and or the new AmigaOS on. Not as a main system, of course, but as a neat toy to poke around with. I already run several other operating systems, and I hate them all equally. I can name less reasons not to toy with new operating systems than I can to remain exclusive to the ones I'm already using.
It's not like my other computesr are going to get jealous if I use another OS.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Well, there is GNU Hurd. I guess you could argue that's old too, but the concept is exceptionally powerful and the new L4 development efforts can be utilized (in theory, at least.) Innovation is slow. But things aren't completely frozen.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Well put,
A while ago I read a post here on slashdot that has stuck with me. Had to do with Slackware, and them not having the success that RedHat and SuSE, even Mandrake have had.
Basically the poster has said that just because their definition of success (being Patric & Co. at Slackware) isn't the same as say, RedHats, doesn't mean that they are not a success. Reaching their goal is what defines success. I found the original author of that comment quite insightful and really tweaked my perspective on things after that.
I'm not into games much, so 2GHz CPU speed doesn't do much for me. I like the YAM email client, I don't like Outlook or Mozilla's email side. While there are Amiga viruses and security holes, they are fewer and less frequent than for Windows or Linux, because the people writing viruses and taking advantage of security holes don't care about us Amiga users. It's easier to use than Linux, and I just haet Windows from the user interface/experience perspective. Ido also have a couple Windows PCs and am trying to get another running Linux, but linux is still too hard to get configured before normal use can happen.
I'm trying to get MythTV working for PVR stuff, but am still trying to get Linux installed and configured with the new drivers, Xfree doesn't seem to want to start at all if I select ATI drivers that came with Debian 3 (Woody) on my AIW 8500DV Radeon card, and even with apt-get I've spent a lot of time searching and searching for the right versions of the right dependencies. I've also tried Red Hat 6.x and 7.x and given up on getting it configured for my purposes. Call me stupid or lazy or whatever, Linux is still just too much work to get it to go for us non-kernel-hackers.
I heard good things about BeOS back in the day, but it flopped and at the time I went searching for apps to run on it, I found far less to choose from than was available even for Amiga.
Now, I do of course realize a lot of stuff in Amigaland is out of date. We do need OS feature updates, not just simple PPC ports of the old OS. We need new apps, not just the ability to run old ones. We need our apps updated, such as getting web browsers up to speed with current standards.
But I have looked at alternatives and found them unsuitable to me. Windows, well, it's Windows. Linux is beyond my attention span to install and configure the first time, I have yet to get it to the general usability state. BeOS didn't have enough stuff to do with it. QNX looks cool, but again lacks apps more than Amiga does. I haven't found a reason for me to leave Amiga.
I also feel that no Amiga related posts should be made to Slashdot, because these people don't care. They don't care to learn the reality instead of the "It's been totally dead for 10 years and has zero apps and zero games and nobody in the universe can possibly find it useful anymore" illusion they revel in. A very small number of people here know the truth, like the poster I'm replying to, but most of you guys don't even want to know if or why someone finds it useful.
Just like a friend of mine that cannot fathom what I would ever actually use Linux for, you guys are wrong, there's plenty to do with AmigaOS and it's variants like Morphos or AROS. Just because the vast majority of Slashdot types stopped following all things Amiga years ago doesn't mean that nothing has happened since then. That would be like me saying I tried Linux 68K 6 years ago but it wasn't useful back then and I quite watching Linux, so obviously absolutely nothing in Linux land has happened since. It's just silly.
Anyway, I do still find my Amiga useful. You didn't anymore. You found something else more useful to you, I have not, so I remain with Amiga.