MorphOS 3.0 Released: Refusing To Let the PPC Desktop OS Die Gracefully

An anonymous reader writes "Version 3.0 of MorphOS has been released. It's the independent PPC OS designed for outdated Apple systems like G4 PowerBooks (5,6; 5,7; 5,8; or 5,9) and eMacs (1.25 GHz/1.42 GHz) and PPC Mac Minis, and some G4 PowerMac models (depends on graphics hardware). It further runs on discontinued and niche Genesi desktop systems (Pegasos) and the stunted 128-megabyte-of-RAM tiny Efika. MorphOS is a nice-looking, low-resource, and nimble OS that can't match the capabilities of current Windows, Mac, and Linux. Its installation/live CD is free without caveat, and runs for 30 minutes at a time, as many times as you like. You may purchase MorphOS to remove the time limit. A particular weakness of MorphOS is its lack of support for wireless networking."

Comments

Another weakness

[twilight30]

... might be the price. Good luck, I guess.

Re:Another weakness

[rudy_wayne]

runs for 30 minutes at a time . . . . . . .lack of support for wireless networking

Free crap is still crap.

Re:Another weakness

[O('_')O_Bush]

Just for reader enjoyment, prices range from 49€ (Efika) to 111.11€ for PowerPC. That seems like a lot for an OS that can't even do wireless.

Re:Another weakness

[Dexter Herbivore]

2 words - Why bother? Alternatively just one word - Why?

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

"That can't even do wireless" is a dubious way of assessing its worth.

If most PPC systems still in use are desktops with no WiFi, it might simply not be worth porting a wireless stack for the few laptops or wireless-connected desktops that might buy it, but the rest of the system might be rock-solid. Or it might not -- lack of WiFi doesn't really say anything about it.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

pay more for the OS than the obsolete computer is worth.

what's wrong with running debian on these things?

Re:Another weakness

[Anubis IV]

Seriously. I have an old PowerBook G4 that I still use on a weekly basis to run a particular piece of old software, but I thought it might be fun to fool around with a different OS for a few bucks. At €111.11, it's well beyond the "let's have some fun with something different" range.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

Weirder still, its like 30 euro more on a Powerbook than a desktop, and yet without wireless networking, its far less useful on a Powerbook than on a desktop!

I'm a big Amiga fan, still run one for nostalgia gaming sake, but MorphOS is crap developed by arrogant krauts.

Re:Another weakness

[davydagger]

so we are going to pay money for a proprietary system only so we can put time and effort into porting wireless. its an indication its not feature complete. Is there any reason to go with morphOS over debian on PPC? Once you'd stated your willing to do code work, you might as well go with an open system. It will make your life as a coder easier(more straight coding, less "hacking"), and you'll get the same results, with less money effort.

Re:Another weakness

[Bert64]

Yes, if it was free or at least very cheap people might consider using it, but at 111 euros? That's more than the price of OSX or many versions of Windows...
And being such a niche product, i doubt it will even tempt anyone to release a cracked version.

Creating a niche OS that only runs on obsolete hardware, and costs more than that hardware itself does? That seems to be an extremely poor business model...

If it was free or dirt cheap, people might be tempted in it to breathe new life into old hardware... But at that price, you might as well just buy some newer more capable hardware.

As for the lack of wireless support, the changelog for 3.0 cites one of the biggest new features as "PowerBook support for 1.67GHz models"... So a laptop with built in wifi, but you can't use wireless on it?

Re:Another weakness

[AmiMoJo]

What the summary fails to mention is that MorphOS grew out of AmigaOS and can run a lot of Amiga software. People who like Amiga software find it useful to continue running it on hardware that can still be maintained to some degree, which has built in ethernet and USB ports - all stuff the original Amigas lacked.

Re:Another weakness

[dreamchaser]

"That can't even do wireless" is a dubious way of assessing its worth.

If most PPC systems still in use are desktops with no WiFi, it might simply not be worth porting a wireless stack for the few laptops or wireless-connected desktops that might buy it, but the rest of the system might be rock-solid. Or it might not -- lack of WiFi doesn't really say anything about it.

Bullshit. It says it isn't ready to be sold for money. There is nothing dubious about that assessment. It means it is not complete and should not cost anything if they want to use people as beta testers. Hell, I have an old G4 tower that I connect via wireless. I'll bet a lot of people do the same. You're either astroturfing for them or just trolling.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

No, dumbass, he said it's not worth it for THEM to port it -- you just don't buy it if you need wireless. The other 90% who don't need wireless could try it, and IF it seems like a solid system, go ahead and buy it.

What it gets you that Debian doesn't is Amiga compatibility without emulation overhead.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

> If most PPC systems still in use are desktops with no WiFi,

The only PPC survivors i've seen hanging around are G5 towers, which Morphos doesn't support anyway.

Apple sold a shitload of iBooks and the like, but most probably have been dumpstered by now.

Re:Another weakness

[MichaelSmith]

Apple sold a shitload of iBooks and the like, but most probably have been dumpstered by now.

I see quite a lot of them around actually but I am sure the owners are happy to be running macos on them, and linux is stil available for ppc.

Re:Another weakness

[PopeRatzo]

If most PPC systems still in use are desktops with no WiFi,

My wife has a G4 MacBook Pro (maybe a Powerbook?) that was the last PPC laptop Apple made. She won't throw the thing out. It's got 10.5.8 I believe.

She runs Octave and AUTO on it for wave simulations and other PDE shit I don't understand (she's a mathematician). Python and believe it or not, Fortran (I guess a lot of fluid dynamics types use Fortran still for some reason).

I keep wanting to buy her a new laptop, but she always says she paid more than $5000 for that thing and won't give it up until it dies. I practically could have bought her a i7 gaming laptop for the price of all the new batteries I bought for that thing. Put Linux on it and she's got a numerical math monster. Maybe I'll go buy her a brand new Macbook Pro and switch them and hope she doesn't notice.

I am SO sick of having to look for old versions of XCODE and other software for PPC.

I have to admit though, the thing was built like a tank. It just keeps working and working and after a few hours you can grill a bratwurst on the keyboard, it gets so hot. It looks almost exactly like the new 17" Macbook Pro.

So my question: is this grounds for divorce? (just kidding hon'). I don't even think she likes OSX all that much. It's just because the thing was so expensive and it has worked and worked. How do I convince her to give it up without actually smashing it to bits?

Wait, I know. I'll tell her that new machines will let her watch Netflix.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

The only version of Windows thats cheaper than 111 euro is an upgrade, OEM or subsidized educational license. You cannot, generally speaking, legally buy Windows for the PC you just built for cheaper.

Re:Another weakness

[digitig]

runs for 30 minutes at a time . . . . . . .lack of support for wireless networking

Free crap is still crap.

It's about the same as I'm getting from my latest Ubuntu installation. :(

Re:Another weakness

[dreamchaser]

Yep. It's as I thought. Troll. I never said I need wifi, I said I expected it as a feature of any OS that costs money. I use it on the old G4 out of convenience. Most of my boxen are connected via gig-ethernet. A very subtle troll though, so hats off to you for that.

Your attempt at using windows from bygone years as an example was weak though. This is 2012. Any OS that costs money should have wifi support. If it is beta that's fine. They shouldn't be charging for it then.

Re:Another weakness

[semi-extrinsic]

Python and believe it or not, Fortran (I guess a lot of fluid dynamics types use Fortran still for some reason).

There are three reasons we still use Fortran in the CFD business. First, a lot of good old numerics code is written in Fortran, and interfacing between languages means overhead. (You see, we're the types that define and use onethird=1.0/3.0 if we have to divide by 3 more than 10 times in a tight loop since multiplication is faster than division, or loop over j in the outer and i in the inner loop because that's how arrays are stored...)

Second, for the type of stuff we normally do, Fortran is 10-20% faster than C and orders of magnitude faster than other languages. (C is faster at file I/O.) This is important when you measure runtimes in weeks. (With Python, the simulations I did for my thesis would literally take years.)

Third, there is still significant work by large companies to create even more efficient Fortran compilers (see Intel, PGI, NAG).

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey idiot, the "OEM" license is intended for the PC you just built. As long as you never call them for support, they don't care.

Re:Another weakness

[LocalH]

How is MorphOS providing full Amiga compatibility if not for emulation?

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

This is 2012. Any OS that costs money should have wifi support.

How nice that you think so...

http://drdos.com/products/dr-dos/

http://www.ecomstation.com/ does have limited WiFi support -- there's a number of old 802.11b chipsets supported. So maybe that doesn't count, but I'd hardly call that acceptable in 2012 -- FOR GENERAL-PURPOSE OSES FOR NEW HARDWARE.

Unfortunately for you, your thoughts != reality. Y'know, reality, where real businesses need to (or find it cheaper to) run real legacy apps from pre-WiFi times, in the same non-WiFi use cases for which the apps were originally developed. Where "OS for legacy apps" is a real thing, and has different requirements than for new desktop OSes.

Can you not conceive that the OS market is not one giant mass of identical requirements? If you can, why do you think WiFi should be the one thing that transcends such divisions? And no "because I say so", which is all I've heard from you so far, isn't a good answer.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

Liar.

"Because in any discussion involving Linux/FOSS, Burson Marsteller astroturfers have to plant a horror story about Linux. It's part of their contract.
Check back in on any of the past stories and you'll find the same thing - a barely tangential anecdote about how Linux was unusable for their sockpuppet because of some exaggerated flaw.
Best response is to ignore them, and to carry on using the very fine tools FOSS provides without financing the creeps who're destroying online tech discussion."

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2906441&cid=40272709

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

I have trouble believing anyone is 'happy' using an iBook in this day and age. They were slow as shit even when they came out, and were abandoned by modern software years ago. They shipped with 256MB of RAM, and will only support 1.25GB if the owner bothered to upgrade. (That is, OS X swaps like crazy on a very slow drive.) Plus they had motherboard issues, the usual pre-magsafe power connector problems, and the batteries have all gone to shit by now.

Plus, the G4 chip was pretty pathetic in general, unless you were running Steve Jobs' custom Altavec benchmark. iBooks were badly outclassed by contemporary Pentium M laptops both in speed and battery life.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

Like you wouldn't believe. And smelly too. And balding.

I'd still hit it.

Re:Another weakness

[hairyfeet]

Actually its been ages since I've seen a PPC desktop (other than the old B&W G3 in my closest I'm thinking of building an AMD into because i can't think of anything else to do with it) but I still see quite a few of those old Macbooks around, they were hellishly popular and since they can be found cheap quite a few people have one.

So I'd say not having Wireless on the G4 macbooks? yeah that could be a serious problem. Of course all the G4 Macbooks i've seen have been running the last version of OSX released for G4s (Jaguar? Panther? hell if I can remember) so maybe that's not their target audience anyway. Frankly other than niche appeal I don't really see why you'd want a PPC desktop, the X86 chips now are so insanely overpowered they'd slaughter those things while using less power to boot. hell that's why I'm probably gonna trash the B&W and put an AMD board in it, really can't find a use for a PPC at the shop but I hate to throw away such a beautiful case. No matter what you thought of Apple then they did make some damned pretty hardware, real art.

Re:Another weakness

[Lumpy]

Yup, that Free copy of Windows 7 on my last laptop was quite crap. Fixed it with a BSD install.

Re:Another weakness

[Angostura]

My wife's pretty happy with her iBook running 10.5 and an old version of Office v.X - she doesn't use it regularly, but gives her what she needs when she's off at a conference or whatever.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

An operating system that only runs on ancient hardware to run software for a defunct operating system for even older hardware.

These gentlemen have my respect, their geekdom is deep and broad, but I would poke my eyes out before I spent time and money on something even more arcane, and less useful, than a free Linux that will run everything I need.
 

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

ABI translation.

Re:Another weakness

[digitig]

Sorry to upset your cosy "FOSS is perfect so all criticism must be a lie" world, but it's true. When I boot it runs fine, but gradually slows down and hangs after about 20 minutes. It's still live -- if I move the mouse then the cursor will jump every couple of minutes -- but it's unusable. The REISUB trick sometimes works, but that's still a reboot. I've tried disabling Unity and switching to classic Gnome with no effects in the hope it was a video driver problem, but to no effect, so I'm still investigating. (The WiFi issue is just that it's a WinModem than I can't get working under Linux, but I've not put in much effort because the router is about a foot away so it's easier to use an Ethernet connection.)

Re:Another weakness

[PopeRatzo]

This is important when you measure runtimes in weeks.

That makes sense. When she goes out of town for a conference, she leaves me to occasionally look in on her simulations which are running for weeks and weeks on these HP workstations back in her "sewing room". Come to think of it, I've never seen her do any sewing in that room, so I'm not sure why we call it the sewing room. She also has me water the plants, which measure their runtime in months, if not years..

Re:Another weakness

[tepples]

So in other words, in your opinion, nobody ought to need both compatibility with Amiga applications and wireless networking.

Re:Another weakness

[jedidiah]

Yeah. It's an OS for 2012 meant to run on hardware from the dark ages. Chances are that this ancient hardware is already doing quite well without modern wifi support.

There's some hardware that require 3rd party payware device drivers on the latest Mac. So the claim that an "OS for today" needs to have every random device accounted for is not that realistic really.

Re:Another weakness

[NemosomeN]

If the best response is to ignore them, why are you replying? Seems that if it were the best response, you would have taken that path.

Re:Another weakness

[NemosomeN]

90% of people don't use WIFI? Are you fucking stupid?

Re:Another weakness

[datavirtue]

Same here, but in my case it was the tip of the iceberg. Ubuntu went from wow to shit in a few years.

Re:Another weakness

[LWATCDR]

One wonders why you don't buy her a new MacBook Pro 15" I7. The increase in speed would be HUGE.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

um.. does most of the hardware even have wireless adapters available?

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems that if it were the best response, you would have taken that path.

I'm the AC who posted above. I'm not the AC who posted the original comment I quoted, and I don't agree with the original AC that passivity is the best response.

I think it's important to draw attention to the activities of reputation management teams in Slashdot and other tech sites. Digitig's posting above is typical of the negative astroturf that's all too prevalent everywhere.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

god you're whipped.. don't let her jerk you around with that old laptop.. if she wants you to maintain it, tell her you're getting her a new one.. otherwise, she's on her own.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what happens when you attempt to use tools beyond your grasp. Stick to pen and paper.

Re:Another weakness

[Karma's A Bitch]

I don't know the hardware, but the thought that immediately comes to mind is that 90% of the hardware that the target audience will use does not support wifi -- machines with 128MB of RAM and the like.

Re:Another weakness

[PopeRatzo]

god you're whipped.. don't let her jerk you around with that old laptop.. if she wants you to maintain it, tell her you're getting her a new one.. otherwise, she's on her own.

"Maintain it"? Except for switching the occasional battery, there has been just about no maintenance required. I just want to see her get something newer and faster and better. She's one of them frugal wives, which has mostly been a good thing, except when I wanted to buy that silver-plated handmade chromatic harmonica.

She bought the Macbook Pro/Powerbook with money she got when she got her first decent tenure-track faculty appointment. She bought that >$5000 laptop with the money, and to show you how long ago it was, she also bought a 21" LCD monitor which was nearly $700.

god you're whipped..

after more than 20 years of marriage, "whipped" sounds kind of OK, actually. Maybe a ball gag and a butt plug too.

Re:Another weakness

[jythie]

Pity I do not have mod points.

Sadly, a lot of people believe that is something does not meet their needs then it is bad for everyone. I always take it as a bit of ego.. they are so representative of 'real' users that if they don't like it, then no one should.

Re:Another weakness

[PopeRatzo]

One wonders why you don't buy her a new MacBook Pro 15" I7. The increase in speed would be HUGE.

This may sound crazy in the 21st century, but we long ago agree to discuss any >$1000 purchase. She's always saying, "Why should I spend the money if my Mac works still"? (in her Eastern European accent).

We do have a special anniversary present exception to the "spending over $1000" rule, so maybe I'll get her the big Macbook Pro then.

Marriage, man. As the philosopher said, it's one long negotiation.

Re:Another weakness

[jythie]

Ah FORTRAN.. the cockroach of computer languages... runs anywhere.. just can't be killed off.... and great for calculating radiation.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, every Powerbook G4 had internal wifi. (Although it was optional on the very earliest models)

Re:Another weakness

[LordLimecat]

TBQH sounds like a hardware issue, or else a bad misconfiguration / botched upgrade. You checked dmesg or any of the logs? You tried a clean reinstall?

Re:Another weakness

[Hatta]

They probably would have made more money if they put it on kickstarter.

Re:Another weakness

[Osgeld]

its not astroturf, its people getting snarky at the increasingly shittier versions of linux, myself included. Glad you love it so much, not that any of us cares cause your a pussy who wont sign in, but for many of us its sad and apparent that the absolute best desktop linux has been was Ubuntu 8.

Re:Another weakness

[Osgeld]

hell it was an option for the G3 models, apple was the first to really hype up wifi in its "Airport" branding of things

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say COBOL is a better analogy. FORTRAN keeps evolving and has legitimate reasons for being a language of choice.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

Theres a solution. Windows or Linux with UAE. The amiga apps will be faster no less.

Re:Another weakness

[iamacat]

Man your compiler sucks if it can't figure onethird thing out on it's own.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

people getting snarky at the increasingly shittier versions of linux, myself included.

I checked back on your past posting and found a barely tangential anecdote about how Linux was unusable for you, because of what sounds like hardware issues. Digitig's posting is near identical in style and message, as were, and will be, all the other near-identical threads early in every discussion involving FOSS.

The foundation of science is to create a hypothesis, make a prediction, then perform experiments to verify the hypothesis.

I challenge all readers to perform this experiment: Read every FOSS discussion and both note, and comment on, every example of the "barely tangential anecdote" phenomenon. Go ahead, practice some science!

Re:Another weakness

[no1nose]

A very valid point. Does IBM AIX support wifi?

Re:Another weakness

[tqk]

When she goes out of town for a conference, she leaves me to occasionally look in on her simulations which are running for weeks and weeks on these HP workstations back in her "sewing room".

In a former life, I was running simulations that ran for months at a time. Then, the first Athlon based machines showed up. Those things blew through those jobs in days. After a bit, I just stopped queuing jobs on the site's "big iron" clustered machines, because I could get the job done on the Athlons before they really even got started on the cluster.

That might be the way to get her to retire that old box you complain about, and those HP workstations. With a more powerful box in her hands, she could run those simulations on her own portable. Think of what you'd save on your power bill if those HPs could be shutdown.

If she won't go for it, maybe those HPs should be network accessible so she can ssh into them to check her own jobs.

Re:Another weakness

[aliquis]

Do you know what the price was of the AmigaOne with AmigaOS 4?

What they will ask for the unreleased Amiga X1000?

Re:Another weakness

[aliquis]

Yeah but this isn't OS X or Windows.

If you want to get a "somewhat modern Amiga" being able to buy Windows for say 99 dollar doesn't help much does it?

Fuck your business model. The OS has been made for over 10 years. The developers try to earn something from it. Why should they give it away? That's a poor business model if anything.

Go buy your more capable hardware and run Windows on it instead. This product isn't for you. Thanks for the info. They know that.

As for the lack of wireless support, the changelog for 3.0 cites one of the biggest new features as "PowerBook support for 1.67GHz models"... So a laptop with built in wifi, but you can't use wireless on it?

Yes. Probably. Because Linux has never booted a system before and lacked some functionality? Or the BSDs? Or Solaris on x86? Or an OS X hack?

This product isn't for you. Get over it. Go buy Windows. It's cheaper.

Re:Another weakness

[aliquis]

Yeah you go develop and AmigaOS like OS which run Amiga software and sell it for less.

Thanks for your (future) work.

Why do all the clueless people get moderated upwards? Ohnoz, software isn't gratis. Yay that's very insightful of you!

Re:Another weakness

[aliquis]

That Debian is Linux/GNU and not AmigaOS(-like + compatible)? Quite obvious right?

Who cares what the obsolete hardware is worth? What does that have to do with the OS? Run OS X on the mac and it would be gratis but the reason you'd run MorphOS on the Mac Mini is that the Mac Mini is cheaper than a specially made PPC machine for MorphOS would be and quite easy to find.

Re:Another weakness

[aliquis]

Bla bla there's so many clueless morons here on Slashdot.

Like if Linux had awesome wireless support a couple of years ago?

It's never been a problem there? And how big isn't Linux compared to MorphOS? How many more developers? How much more support from large companies?

And even then isn't much of the reason wireless work in Linux nowadays thanks to OpenBSD?

How many of the 2+ moderated users in this Slashdot post could code an AmigaOS-like PPC operating system with AmigaOS 3.x 68k JIT emulation and working wireless stack and graphics acceleration and support as many platforms?

0?

And how many of those zero persons would do it for free just because some clueless idiots thinks that's what they should do?

Still 0?

Re:Another weakness

[aliquis]

No. YOU aren't. Because this isn't for you.

The reason is that you'll get an AmigaOS experience instead of a Linux/GNU one.

Money? Yeah. 49 euro is the big issue with coding a wireless stack.

Also it's not like they are going to get rich by selling it at 50-100+ euro either.

Are you doing years of voluntarily work for free? No? So please shut up.

(Mods: Yeah like I've ever cared about troll posts. My karma is and will always be excellent regardless. I'm just telling the truth. There's too many idiots here which doesn't know shit about the subject thinking whatever crap they can leak out through their fingers are important.)

Re:Another weakness

[aztracker1]

I would argue that wifi support isn't necessarily "every random device" being accounted for... I think that an expectation today, is that any desktop/consumer OS have at least wireless support of some devices/chipsets. I was actually surprised by the lack of support for it... I know more than a handful of people since the G3 era that used wifi on those devices.

Re:Another weakness

[aliquis]

If you run MorphOS on the BlizzardPPC you'll also got access to the real Amiga since that's what the BlizzardPPC is sitting in =P

Re:Another weakness

[aliquis]

But you won't be able to code any "native" Amiga applications that way. Also it's the same old classic experience.

Re:Another weakness

[YttriumOxide]

Hold on... your wife is geeky; has an eastern European accent; and multiple HP workstations in her "sewing room" amongst other computers?

Ummm... want to swap? My German wife has both installers and application shortcuts cluttering her whole desktop.

(safe to post under my own username: She doesn't read slashdot (and doesn't speak English that well)... but just in case "I'm only joking Schatz, I love you!")

Re:Another weakness

[tqk]

Ah FORTRAN.. the cockroach of computer languages...

We've been allowed to call it "Fortran" for quite a few years now, and cockroaches are a very successful species.

Besides, with all the time and effort invested in Fortran development, there's a vast installed codebase of tested code out there, possibly even rivalling or bettering things like CPAN for perl.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, I bet the jumpy pointer is a dying mouse sending spurious signals or stuffed USB controller being dropped back to the slow driver.

Re:Another weakness

[Johann Lau]

"I totally could do that, I just don't wanna." .. ?

Sir, it seems you are confusing MorphOS and your own mother! I must protest.

Re:Another weakness

[Deb-fanboy]

pay more for the OS than the obsolete computer is worth.

what's wrong with running debian on these things?

I have an old GP4 station running debian.

Only used for some text input, word processing and reading the odd pdf.

works very well on debian

Re:Another weakness

[arkane1234]

Think about when PPC was out. Okay, we won't wait for you to think about it, wifi was not readily used with the hardware. (or even ON the machines)

You can stop trying to think now.

Re:Another weakness

[semi-extrinsic]

There are compilers that do this, e.g. Intel Fortran, but for some reason you lose precision when you activate that feature. Lost precision can mean wrong results in this case.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

Now those are extremely bad examples for optimization... Loop reordering and constant replacement are things the compiler worries about. Although I still do the loop reordering out of habit.
Real optimizations (and Fortran specialties) are things like the foreach loop (:= independent loop runs = may be vectorized/parallelized by the compiler without further programmer input), pure/elemental functions (functions without side effects which may be used in a forall), extreme masking capabilities (conditional execution built into loop controls - much faster than if-statements), a metric fuckton of built-in, *fast* array and vector operators (sumval, dot_product, maxval, minval, minloc, maxloc, etc.), etc. etc.
Add to that extensive type declaration capabilities, extremely thorough type checking (via modules/interfaces), and pass-by-reference as default, and you have a language that makes it far, far easier to write correct *and* fast numerical code than C/C++.

Just don't try to do extensive string manipulation...

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

Bug report or GTFO.

Re:Another weakness

[Bert64]

Yeah but this isn't OS X or Windows.

No, it's a more expensive product so you'd expect to get what you paid for... Windows and OSX are fairly polished products that will install easily on supported hardware, will support the full functionality of that hardware and have a good selection of third party software available.

What you actually get with morphos is a system that is only partially functional on most of the hardware it supports and has a pretty poor selection of available applications.

Fuck your business model. The OS has been made for over 10 years. The developers try to earn something from it. Why should they give it away? That's a poor business model if anything.

You don't earn money from a niche os, you develop it as a hobby or not at all. Sure you might get a small core of people who pay for it, just like theres a small core of people who regularly donate to projects like AROS, Syllable, *BSD etc... But by having a high barrier to entry you severely discourage potential hobbyists from taking up the platform. So with new users few and far between, and old users gradually dropping off, the platform dies.

Put simply, a niche platform targeted at hobbyists is not commercially viable. Niche platforms are only viable when you occupy a niche that is essential to some businesses, and can force them to pay top price. I doubt there are any business users out there who depend on morphos.

If you want to get a "somewhat modern Amiga" being able to buy Windows for say 99 dollar doesn't help much does it?

A $99 copy of windows on virtually any hardware made in the last 10 years (that people are throwing out and can be obtained for close to free) will run WinUAE just fine.

Or you could run AROS...
It runs on considerably more powerful hardware than morphos, some of which is actually modern and available to buy new right now.
Like morphos, it is lacking in some areas... But considering it costs you nothing, this is forgiveable (and you are invited to help fix the areas that are lacking)... If you ultimately find that it doesn't suit your needs then you can simply delete it, nothing lost.

Yes. Probably. Because Linux has never booted a system before and lacked some functionality? Or the BSDs? Or Solaris on x86? Or an OS X hack?

Noone is asking 111 euros for a semi functional version of linux or bsd... And if they did, noone would pay.
An OSX hack is just that, a hack, its not running on officially supported hardware so you're on your own.

If you're going to charge money for something, you have to offer something worthwhile that's not available more cheaply elsewhere. As i understand it, the key selling point of amigaos like systems is speed, but what good is a fast os running on antiquated hardware? You might as well use modern hardware with slower software to achieve the same end result.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

The Update with Wifi support will be free of charge for registered users.

Re:Another weakness

[TheRaven64]

I've seen similar behaviour with the device I own running Ubuntu, but more pronounced because it only has an 800MHz ARM CPU. The issue appears to be that udevd eats an increasing amount of CPU time until it becomes completely unusable. If you kill udevd, it becomes useable again. Well, aside from the 'let's copy random elements from OS X without understanding why they were there and therefore get a similar look without any of the UI benefits' Unity interface...

Re:Another weakness

[LocalH]

So MorphOS can run classic 68k software on your PPC hardware without emulation? Because I know it can run 68k Amiga apps.

Re:Another weakness

[LocalH]

That's the only way it can be done without emulation, and interestingly they don't actually list Amiga with Blizzard/Cyberstorm PPC accelerator as supported hardware. Referring to version 3.x here, did they drop such support or merely stop publicizing it?

Re:Another weakness

[TheRaven64]

My old G4 PowerBook supported WiFi, and so did the five or six revisions of the hardware before it...

Re:Another weakness

[PopeRatzo]

Hold on... your wife is geeky; has an eastern European accent; and multiple HP workstations in her "sewing room" amongst other computers?

The funny part is she's not really that geeky. She's got all the computers and stuff, but she's a mathematician, so she knows how to write programs to do fluid dynamics simulations but calls me to come install Adobe Reader. Or maybe she's just giving me some little menial task to make me feel a little bit useful.

And get this (I swear it's true) when I met her, she was a stewardess for a European airline, back when stewardesses had to be hot.

I am an unexceptional person. But I hit all five numbers and the powerball when it comes to finding a wife. It is by far the luckiest break I ever got in life.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

good for you.

ubuntu sucked shit from day one.

ubuntu became linux for the sheepled masses.

now it's unbecoming that.

ubuntu will die.

the sheepled masses will go away and play with themselves,

and nothing of value will have been lost.

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

.. and folks, this is the difference between old Slashdot and new Slashdot. Lumpy didn't camp out on a predominantly Windows-using forum and bitch every time even the most tangential mention of operating systems was made.

Re:Another weakness

[cHiphead]

Do you have any forum posts on Ubuntu's forums that you can point us to so we can maybe provide some more help/insights into your issues?

Re:Another weakness

[Anonymous Coward]

you're*.

Only an astroturfer would mess that up. What's the matter, need help navigating to a dictionary under Ubuntu?

Re:Another weakness

[aliquis]

I think it may have been 1.x only days. Like 1.5 or something such. I've never used it.

Though I do actually got the first version of the Pegasos with G3 / IBM 750 PPC chip (and a Voodoo 3 or whatever which should work with it.)

Re:Another weakness

[Lord Apathy]

The funny part is she's not really that geeky. She's got all the computers and stuff, but she's a mathematician, so she knows how to write programs to do fluid dynamics simulations but calls me to come install Adobe Reader. Or maybe she's just giving me some little menial task to make me feel a little bit useful.

Lets not beat around the bush here dude. She is throwing you a bone to make you feel useful. I've met women like you are describing. They are smart, scary smart. You got lucky man, hang on to this one.

Re:Another weakness

[Lord Apathy]

I will echo the question again, "why?" If I ever feel the need to run old Amiga software I simply boot up one of a number of emulators and run it. To this date though I really still see no need to do much of that ether. I can't think of any Amiga software that I can't find a application on windows, linux, or even my phone that does the job better.

Re:Another weakness

[digitig]

I was posting about sound problems I had before I upgraded, but the upgrade is new (last week, and I had the grandchildren over for the weekend) so I've not had time to post yet. I will.

Re:Another weakness

[digitig]

If I kill udevd, won't I have problems mounting devices? As I mentioned earlier I solved the Unity problems by logging on into classic Gnome.

Re:Another weakness

[TheRaven64]

I think something notices it's not running and restarts it. The second time, it seems not to be in the pathological state it enters on boot.

Re:Another weakness

[digitig]

The number of instances of udevd running seems to vary. I tried killing it (at a time when there was only one instance) and Linux ran for a few hours before grinding to a halt, so it looks as if the problem could be in that area but not exactly that.

Re:Another weakness

[LWATCDR]

I am married also. Just seems to me that if your wife is running programs that takes days to finish that a faster computer would be a very practical purchase for her. Maybe a Hackintosh mini tower running an I7 would be a better choice if she does not need the portability. Unless she is just running those programs for "fun" which is possible but seems a bit odd to me.

Re:Another weakness

[davydagger]

free as in freedom not free as in beer. Its not how much you PAY for it, its the fact its closed source.

me personally, not but I don't know where i'd be if it wasn't for the people at debian doing years of voluntary work for free.

I run linux mint, which is made from ubuntu, which is made from debian, which does most of the heavy lifting of making an operating system out of bits and pieces. Its been running since 1994. Yes, I do donate to their foundation, so far more than I would pay for morphOS, and gladly donate 50-100 a year, every year.

Re:Another weakness

[aliquis]

I don't know what the fuck you are talking about and I can't be bothered with it.

GP:
"so we are going to pay money for a proprietary system"
"you might as well go with an open system"
"and you'll get the same results, with less money effort."

whatever free could mean anything in that context.

They seem to use that word a lot.

[mwvdlee]

free without caveat, and runs for 30 minutes at a time

Either "free without caveat" or "runs for 30 minutes at a time" does not mean what I think it means.

Re:They seem to use that word a lot.

[Anonymous Coward]

It runs for 30 minutes at full speed. However, once that magical time limit is set, they then set the maximum CPU utilization to below 100% (but I can't remember what the lower level is off the top of my head).

Re:They seem to use that word a lot.

[Anonymous Coward]

free without caveat, and runs for 30 minutes at a time

Either "free without caveat" or "runs for 30 minutes at a time" does not mean what I think it means.

Let me translate that for you: its like windows but free

Re:They seem to use that word a lot.

[david.given]

The website lies by omission: the only reference I can find to the fact that it's a commercial product is one mention of a 'free trial version'. Very sleazy.

AFAICT this is just an AmigaOS clone, anyway. Is it just a rebranded AROS?

Re:They seem to use that word a lot.

[araneus]

It is not a rebranded AROS. It looks like it is using some bits from AROS but is really an Amiga operating system for PowerPC.

Re:They seem to use that word a lot.

[aliquis]

No. It was the equivalent of AmigaOS 4 before there was any AmigaOS 4 (and even before an AmigaOS 4 decision I think.)

Back in the days when the original Amiga got PPC accelerators there was two different environment which let you code PPC programs for them. MorphOS arrived as an alternative OS to run on those PPC machines which could also run Amiga software and later it got its own hardware in the form of Pegasos.

Imho MorphOS was a better OS then AmigaOS 4 and the Pegasos was much cheaper than the crap AmigaOne and all shit the "Amiga" companies released (the damn AmigaOne ran Linux for long because AmigaOS 4 took a lot of time to get finished.)

Those shitty companies destroyed things even more because without any AmigaOne and AmigaOS 4 Pegasos and MorphOS could had become more. Now the user base was split among both solutions which of course doesn't help.

bplan/Genesi > anything nowadays "Amiga."

I may have got some of the details wrong but in fact I think it's like this if you want some more history:

Back in the days the real Amigas got accelerator cards branded "Blizzard" made by a company called Phase 5. Later they also made the BlizzardPPC with a PPC kernel running together with AmigaOS called PowerUp. A company called Haage & Partner which I think made the StormC compiler made an alternative kernel called WarpOS.

People and experience from Phase5 went into a new company called bplan which later made the Pegasos which Genesi used as a hardware platform for the OS MorphOS.

Meanwhile Haage & Partner got responsible for further developing AmigaOS at some time and I guess that's the foundation for all this mess.

MorphOS has been a much more functional OS than AROS for 10+ years or so.

Re:They seem to use that word a lot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not exactly. However parts of AROS are used in MorphOS. From the AROS website:

"What is the relation between AROS and Haage & Partner?

Haage & Partner used parts of AROS in AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9, for example the Colorwheel and Gradientslider gadgets and the SetENV command. This means that in a way, AROS has become part of the official AmigaOS. This does not imply that there is any formal relation between AROS and Haage & Partner. AROS is an open source project, and anyone can use our code in their own projects provided they follow the license.

What is the relation between AROS and MorphOS?

The relationship between AROS and MorphOS is basically the same as between AROS and Haage & Partner. MorphOS uses parts of AROS to speed up their development effort; under the terms of our license. As with Haage & Partner, this is good for both the teams, since the MorphOS team gets a boost to their development from AROS and AROS gets good improvements to our source code from the MorphOS team. There is no formal relation between AROS and MorphOS; this is simply how open source development works."

So what you're saying is...

[Gordonjcp]

... it's not as good as Linux and you have to pay for it?

I wonder how the PPC port of Haiku is doing?

Re:So what you're saying is...

[Anonymous Coward]

... it's not as good as Linux and you have to pay for it?

Who do they think they are? Microsoft?

Re:So what you're saying is...

[rubycodez]

It's still in development (but then, it is still ongoing and not dead).

BSD and Linux run fine on PPC macs.

Re:So what you're saying is...

[unixisc]

Think he might have been talking about non-Unix OSs.

Re:So what you're saying is...

[Patch86]

Doesn't Debian run fine on PPC systems? And isn't Yellow Dog Linux still a thing?

Basically- what on earth is the point of this MorphOS?

Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[David Gerard]

The Debian and Ubuntu PowerPC ports are alive and well. Main lack for modern use is Flash. But I long dual-booted Ubuntu PPC on a G3/G4. A more reliable DVD burner than Mac OS X 10.4, and wider hardware support.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[Anonymous Coward]

Main lack for modern use is Flash.

I don't understand that statement.

Sounds like a feature to me.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[hobarrera]

How is the lack of flash something bad? Now that youtube supports HTML5, there's no need for flash, unless your job demands it.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[garcia]

The lack of Flash is why my PPC Mac Mini is still running some ungodly useless version of OS X. I mean the machine runs and it does shit just fine but I'd really like to have more use for the machine than simply being a paperweight.

At first I was excited to read this, thinking I could use it again, but then I realized I already have a Roku for my media and I really have no use for the old Mac Mini anyway. Then I saw the price and said, "oh right I don't care at all."

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[Swave An deBwoner]

It looks like Fedora 17 is available for this processor series also:

http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/17/ppc/

http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/17/ppc64/

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure HTML5 is dog slow on a PPC mac no matter what OS is installed.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[davydagger]

but there is gnash, which works supprisingly well. does morphOS have an official gnash port, or will it need to be ported. Hrmm, doing free work for a propreiatary operating system. when you use the terms "obscure, obsolete, or arcane hardware", and "support modern relatively mainstream software", debian comes to mind. If your using something else, you should at least compare it to debian,

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[David Gerard]

My 5yo daughter has an ancient Mac G4, with Apple Cinema Display (with the funky plug that doesn't fit any known standard, so I can't just reuse the display on a sensible computer), as her very own. She watches television and plays Flash games on it. Mac OS X 10.4, Firefox 3.something, Flash some obsolete version. It's only Flash - the one thing she really uses it for - that keeps me from Ubuntuing it. Failing that, the current upgrade plan is to pay £25 for a 19" LCD and get someone's discarded P4 and she could have a box that runs at twice the speed.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[David Gerard]

It's my 5yo daughter's computer. Flash is pretty much what she uses it for (BBC CBeebies television and games, YouTube, assorted Flash games) and Gnash isn't yet up to the demanding needs of a five year old.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that youtube supports HTML5, there's no need for flash

RIght, because Flash was invented specifically for YouTube and has never been used by any other website ever. It especially hasn't ever been used for non-video things, like games, vector animation, etc.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, the funky plug is power+dvi in the same jack, and adapters exist. Reuse! :D

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[Nimey]

Also there is still Yellow Dog Linux, which has always been exclusively for PowerPC systems.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[David Gerard]

Adapters exist to attach normal monitors to a Mac, but not to attach these monitors to a normal PC - the "adapter" has to power the monitor as well, so cost more than a new monitor would.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[Anonymous Coward]

The ADC displays require an active adapter which costs about $100. Probably not worth it for something that old.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[Anonymous Coward]

There's swfdec based flash plugin. It plays youtube, but you can forget any modern stuff. HTML5 is much better anyway.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[mister_playboy]

YDL hasn't had a end-user type release since mid-2009. I'm not sure if it's still supported with updates.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[CronoCloud]

gnash is simply not a good replacement. Had a YDL install on my PS3, so tried out Gnash and swfdec. They're not up to par. For youtube it was either "youtube without flash" using embedded Xine/VLC/mplayer or youtube-dl. At that time there wasn't an HTML5 capable browser available, still might not be.

Re:Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well

[CronoCloud]

Still at 6.1? I used to run YDL on my PS3, but haven't since 2010, so I don't know about updates, other than any available at the PS3bodega repo.

I really don't get a reason

[Anonymous Coward]

for the existance of this thing.

No real point

[nurb432]

If you are running old hardware like this, its most likely because you either cant afford to upgrade, so having to buy this is a show stopper, or you need specific support for something, which you would lose even if it was free.

If you just like old stuff, ( many do ) there are free alternatives still, so again, why would i pay?

And what sort of desktop environment in 2012 doesn't support wireless in some manner? wtf?

Miss Amiga? Try DragonFly!

[Anonymous Coward]

Miss Amiga? Try DragonFly!

Re:Miss Amiga? Try DragonFly!

[Lisias]

Why "-1 troll"?

Dragonfly BSD really appears to be a viable alternative to MorphOS.

Knowing nothing about both cases, I would moderate parent as "+1 Informative". Not liking the information does not justifies "trolling" it. :-(

Re:Miss Amiga? Try DragonFly!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this modded down. DragonFly BSD is developed by prominent Amiga sceners. MorphOS is just commercial garbage.

What is the market for this?

[Jeremi]

It seems to be aimed at Amiga enthusiasts/nostalgists who no longer have any actual Amiga hardware, but do happen to have some old PowerPC Mac hardware around, and want to run their old Amiga software on that rather than under UAE, and are willing to shell out a fair amount of cash to do so.

Seems likely to be a rather small market.

Re:What is the market for this?

[Auroch]

It seems to be aimed at Amiga enthusiasts/nostalgists who no longer have any actual Amiga hardware, but do happen to have some old PowerPC Mac hardware around, and want to run their old Amiga software on that rather than under UAE, and are willing to shell out a fair amount of cash to do so.

Seems likely to be a rather small market.

Take a look at their support page. If you don't like the way something is done, they are very clear that YOU (the user) are WRONG. It's obviously run by a bunch of engineers ... so take that into account when using MorphOS.

Tip: If you want "support" for an OS that is made primarily by engineers ... just use linux. It'll cost less, there are more people using it, and you're much less likely to run across a stuck-up engineer that can't let go of "his baby" when looking for help.

Re:What is the market for this?

[Trepidity]

It started in the late 1990s as part of a project to make an Amiga-compatible and possibly Amiga-flavored operating system available on newer hardware, with some companies expressing an interest in putting out some kind of dedicated MorphOS-based box. Some overlap in ideas with the BeBox, which also hoped to target an audience that wanted something other than a PC or Mac, around the same time.

This retargeting towards people who want to repurpose their old PPC hardware seems like a bit of a last gasp.

Re:What is the market for this?

[King_TJ]

Your post was modded "Funny" but I think you're probably exactly right!

If you're like any of the typical long-time Mac users I know who keep vintage hardware around? You're still happily running old versions of MacOS on it! I don't see why you'd really go looking for another commercial OS alternative for such a system, unless it promised to give you something new you couldn't do otherwise.

In this case, you'd actually lose major functionality like wireless card support by switching to it. The *only* really valid reason I can see for MorphOS is the Amiga compatibility. That's pretty cool, but like you say, very much a niche. (I do know a few former Amiga users who'd still like to be able to run some of the old software they used to use ... but I doubt any of them would pay much for the ability. It'd be cheaper to just find a whole Amiga on eBay or something, wouldn't it?)

I would say..

[gallondr00nk]

free without caveat

only being able to use the free version for 30 minutes at a time is a pretty fucking large caveat.

Why not just put it in the body...

[anlprb]

It is Amiga compatible for those who don't know.

Re:Why not just put it in the body...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is Amiga compatible for those who don't know.

Will it run 68000 executables?

Re:Why not just put it in the body...

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole blurb, including the "ultimate nagware" tagline seems designed to dissuade anyone from taking a look at what this thing is. Which is basically a fork of AmigaOS, and contrary to what is insinuated has merits and some concepts the "modern" OSes can only dream of (such as UI responsiveness being a fundamental design feature that already worked on a 7 MHz '16 bit' CPU of three decades ago).

A lot of people (unconsciously or not) still feel threatened by the Amiga. It's interesting to see how the revisionism of history and denial of the Amiga's existence and what it represented evolves, if it were only not for these pesky hobbyists who are still hacking at it. After all, you cannot learn from history if it's not even there to learn from...

Re:Why not just put it in the body...

[Anonymous Coward]

Through a fairly poor emulation layer. UAE is faster and generally more compatible.

Re:Why not just put it in the body...

[MrHanky]

A lot of people (unconsciously or not) still feel threatened by the Amiga. It's interesting to see how the revisionism of history and denial of the Amiga's existence and what it represented evolves, if it were only not for these pesky hobbyists who are still hacking at it. After all, you cannot learn from history if it's not even there to learn from...

No, not denial of the Amiga's existence. People just want to forget about the annoying cult that made Apple evangelists seem like resonable people in comparison.

Re:Why not just put it in the body...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it does. It's much faster than UAE, too. It can reach 70% of the native CPU performance while running the 68000 code (this was tested with 68k dnetc vs PowerPC dnetc). So in effect it's like running your code on a 1GHz 68060...

Re:Why not just put it in the body...

[Anonymous Coward]

Give it up. I used an Amiga 4000 well past when it was obsolete and loved it. But I won't for a second pretend that today we haven't surpassed AmigaOS in every possible way. UI responsiveness on my $1300 macbook air is light years superior to the old 4000. I expect this, I'm happy with this. Suggesting those who were never Commodore fanboys are somehow threatened by it is lunatic.

Re:Why not just put it in the body...

[YttriumOxide]

Give it up. I used an Amiga 4000 well past when it was obsolete and loved it. But I won't for a second pretend that today we haven't surpassed AmigaOS in every possible way. UI responsiveness on my $1300 macbook air is light years superior to the old 4000. I expect this, I'm happy with this. Suggesting those who were never Commodore fanboys are somehow threatened by it is lunatic.

As someone with a great fondness for memories of the classic Amiga and even purchased an AmigaOne when they first came out (now considering the X1000, but not sure yet); I have to agree with you on all points but one. We haven't surpassed AmigaOS in EVERY possible way, just almost every possible way.

The one feature that always stands out to me is the AmigaOS datatypes system. I really miss having the ability to download a simple "hey this is how PNG images are handled" file, and then being able to open and save PNGs from basically any image manipulation program and of course view them in the default Multiview application.

While the concept vaguely exists in several other systems these days, it's nowhere near as standardised or pervasive as the Amiga datatypes system was, and therefore of significantly less use.

Yes, I'm well aware that datatypes was of course not perfect - the implementation left a LOT to be desired when it came to more modern concepts like handling video streams and so on; but it's the "idea" that I miss more than the actual implementation details.

Apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

As if the price and the missing wireless aren't enough, it also seems to me it uses its own custom API. If this thing does not support a common API (like POSIX) how will you ever get a serious number of apps running on it? Again, something a free Linux distro can do better.

Re:Apps?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I didn't know Linux can run Amiga software.

Facepalm

[jones_supa]

Again one of those websites which are sprinkled with links having only the text "here" or "this page". Go there, see here, this, that, everywhere. You don't as quickly see where the links are pointing, and it kind of feels like pushing the reader around. Just for a comparison...

For installation instructions, please go here. The free trial version is available for download on this page.

To get started, please view the installation instructions. The free trial version is available for download.

So much nicer to read.

Re:Facepalm

[pegasustonans]

Again one of those websites which are sprinkled with links having only the text "here" or "this page". Go there, see here, this, that, everywhere. You don't as quickly see where the links are pointing, and it kind of feels like pushing the reader around. Just for a comparison...

Website wording aside...

Why not just go here?

Re:Facepalm

[Wattos]

Again one of those websites which are sprinkled with links having only the text "here" or "this page". Go there, see here, this, that, everywhere. You don't as quickly see where the links are pointing, and it kind of feels like pushing the reader around. Just for a comparison...

For installation instructions, please go here. The free trial version is available for download on this page.

To get started, please view the installation instructions. The free trial version is available for download.

So much nicer to read.

Totally agree. Also makes the site more accessible as visually impaired users may iterate over hyperlinks only.

Re:Facepalm

[Anonymous Coward]

And better SEO too

For eMacs

[jcfandino]

But, does it come with a good text editor?

Re:For eMacs

[MichaelSmith]

Not even emacs comes with a good text editor.

Re:For eMacs

[arkane1234]

Other than textedit...
Define "good".

Re:For eMacs

[MichaelSmith]

nedit

What better/free alternative is there ?

[Anonymous Coward]

YellowDog Linux, that's it ?

Owner of a 8 years old, but still in good shape, Aluminium PowerBook 15'', I have been wondering what else I can run on the beast instead of a buggy and quickly deprecating Leopard.

It would be a pity to throw away a good piece of hardware because Java 1.6 and recent OSX API are not supported.

Re:What better/free alternative is there ?

[spire3661]

I feel ya. I have a perfectly fine G4 mac mini sitting in the closet. Im the only one in my family that can actually use it because it is deprecated on the modern web. As a standalone computer, it is perfectly viable.

Re:What better/free alternative is there ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I se a G4 Mac Mini for a file server and web server. They seem to be really reliable, small, quiet machines. They even run Linux just fine. And as long as you aren't trying to use them for daily workstation, they are pretty great!

Re:What better/free alternative is there ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto. A mac mini with dual Firewire disks a RAID-1 running Debian makes a decent mail/file/web server and draws around 25 Watts.

Re:What better/free alternative is there ?

[realityimpaired]

It would be a pity to throw away a good piece of hardware because Java 1.6 and recent OSX API are not supported.

While I understand that the hardware still works, and that it was certainly good equipment when you originally bought it, it is still an 8-year old laptop. It's still functional, it certainly doesn't owe you anything, but you do need to consider what you actually have.

8 years ago would be 2004.... the tech specs are here: http://support.apple.com/kb/SP83

In the 15" model, you have an LCD at 1280x854. At absolute best possible configuration, you have 2GB of memory in it, and a 1.5GHz G4,
rounded out with an 80GB hard drive and a 64MB Radeon 9700M.

While it's certainly usable for light computing uses, we need to keep in mind that the base configuration was 256MB of RAM, upgradeable to 512MB from Apple, which is extremely low by modern standards and may not be enough for a modern browser running some modern websites. We also need to consider that the processor is a single core 32-bit processor, and while it's running a RISC architecture it's still orders of magnitude slower than even the cheapest modern processor you can get today. It's also, by modern standards, an extremely low res screen, which would limit your ability to use it even for text processing.

Ultimately, it's your choice and your money, but I wouldn't consider using that system on a daily basis. When you can buy a cheap laptop for $350, and if you have a problem with Windows you can wipe it and install Linux free of charge (or BSD!), it really doesn't make sense to keep nursing an ancient laptop. Shame though it is to be considering retiring it, it's probably for the best.

Re:What better/free alternative is there ?

[Osgeld]

Debian still supports PPC, I have 6.0.5 on a powermac 9600, xfce, iceweasle, chromium, libre office the whole 9 ... yea its slow on my 300mhz cpu, but its perfectly useable and your G4 should smoke it

Re:What better/free alternative is there ?

[Osgeld]

yea but whats 350 really getting you, a 1.8Ghz with intel video and 2 gigs of ram, or maybe a 2.2Ghz intel video 2gigs of ram in a shitty case from acer ... or you can plop about 75 bucks in this thing for a ram upgrade and be pretty much in the same boat?

Re:What better/free alternative is there ?

[Anonymous Coward]

toss Debian on it!

Re:What better/free alternative is there ?

[realityimpaired]

Except you're not in the same boat at that point... you're still working with a lower-res screen that's 8 years old (dead pixels/backlight fade), a battery that's 8 years old (which may or may not still work), and a much smaller/slower hard drive (that's still 8 years old and could be near the failing point), not to mention that the processor is still only a single core 32-bit architecture that's, again, 8 years old.

I'm not going to get into the whole 64-bit/32-bit argument. It's not really germane to the point. But I am going to point out that Moore's Law is still in effect, and that a modern 1.2GHz dual core Celeron is a *significant* leap over an 8-year old single core G4 PPC, and that's without even considering reduced power requirements and heat generation from the smaller fab. In a mobile device, that, alone, should be enough of a selling point.

Source or gtfo

[Anonymous Coward]

Proprietary shit.
Source or gtfo!

FreeBSD

[nurb432]

Also has a PPC edition, as does NetBSD.

Re:FreeBSD

[David Gerard]

Yeah. It's entirely unclear why anyone would bother with this MorphOS thing.

Re:FreeBSD

[realityimpaired]

Amiga support, presumably. Includes a "native" emulator for 68k Amiga hardware, too. Just in case you want to play Fire and Ice on your G4 laptop, I guess.

Re:FreeBSD

[damnbunni]

In my experience as a Certified Amiga Nut, most users of MorphOS are Amiga nuts who are pissed off with Amiga, Inc's mishandling of the IP, or are pissed at Hyperion Entertainment, so they won't use AmigaOS 4.1, or else they really want a PPC Amiga laptop (as opposed to just running WinUAE on a PC laptop, and getting excellent 68040-based Amiga compatibility.)

It's a niche of a niche.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What is the market for this?-Amigaforever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Amigaforever is likewise not free and for a niche market. Not necessarily a bad thing if one believes in the platform.

So...

[Sfing_ter]

MorphOS is a nice-looking, low-resource, and nimble OS that can't match the capabilities of current Windows, Mac, and Linux.

So, it's like OS 9.6?

Open source?

[MichaelSmith]

I would love to kow how much open source code there is in this thing. It could easily be FreeBSD, but the I suppose wifi wold work.

Re:Open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can easily download the ISO file, mount it and look into Docs directory.

Here's what Docs/Licenses.txt says:

This ISO contains software governed by various licenses (where applicable
sources should be available through public websites or by request), some
of those are the following:

      Ambient - GPL
      Apdf - GPL
      Sputnik - various, see Applications/Sputnik/LICENSES
      OWB - various, see Applications/OWB/OWB.readme
      OpenSSH - various, see Applications/RemoteShell/Files/Licenses
      Kryptos - TrueCrypt License Version 2.6, Applications/Kryptos/Licence

      MacFileSystem - GPL

      ahi.device - LGPL

      avcodec.library - LGPL
      avformat.library - LGPL
      freetype.library - FTL
      icon.library - GPL (with exception to allow non-GPL linking)
      iconv.library - LGPL
      ixemul.library - LGPL
      ixnet.library - LGPL
      wbstart.library - GPL (with exception to allow non-GPL linking)
      workbench.library - GPL (with exception to allow non-GPL linking)
      xadmaster.library - LGPL
      xpkmaster.library - GPL

      AddAudioModes - GPL
      XADUnFile - LGPL
      XADUnTar - LGPL
      XADUnDisk - LGPL
      Exe2Arc - LGPL
      XADList - LGPL
      XADLibInfo - LGPL
      XAD2LhA - LGPL

) might not be included in each MorphOS release

      Liberation fonts - GPL + Font exception (see Licenses/LIBERATION)
      Other fonts - Public Domain or embedded license (view with
                                            FTManager)

MysticView and its library dependencies (guigfx/mysticview/render) are
included with the kind permission of Timm S. Mller, and are also
available from his homepage with a BSDish license.

Many components are fully, or partially under the AROS Public License,
these should be identifiable through the notice in their version-info,
some of those are also embedded in the boot.img, and are mentioned here
for convenience:

      dos.library
      gadtools.library
      intuition.library

For further information see 'Docs/Licenses' on the MorphOS CD.

Re:Open source?

[Osgeld]

heh download a fucking 210 meg ISO image to read a 1 page ascii text file, that should tell you the mental state of these people, dance monkeys dance!

What a terrible website

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Thank God I no longer have anything that runs PPC, but being a curious geek I took a look at their website. After some minutes of poking around I wasn't able to find any place that had a price to buy it. I'm certainly not going to buy it as I don't have anything that can use it, but the fact that I couldn't find any place on the website that told how much it cost convinced me that these guys really don't need any money.

Re:What a terrible website

[gl4ss]

111.11euros. their site and pricing structure sucks(price depends what you run it on)

meh

[Osgeld]

I have a old 603e machine, so I am not going to purchase another OS for it, already bought 9.22 and 10.2 and had to use patches and installers to get those working but this thing is not giving me any compelling reason to even think about it.

I click features and get a buglist of crap thats been fixed, those are not features... Whats the system requirements? I know almost all non mainstream OS's, linux included think its passe to list a fucking system requirement like ram of CPU but its usually not buried deeply.

The overview finally lists some features, ground breaking shit like a GUI skin and USB drive support, but what about the programs I already use and want, whats the package manager, how hard is it to get software working, how big are the repositories ... great you have a fucking text editor, should I applaud?

Nevermind you actually want me to PAY for an OS with little to no software, no wireless, and "can't match the capabilities of current Windows, Mac, and Linux" ... why the fuck not? I downloaded the latest and greatest debian for free and my 1997 300Mhz 256Mb Powermac9600 runs the current capabilities of linux reasonably well

Pessimistic subject much?

[cgenman]

This is the most unnecessarily pessimistic summary that I've ever seen. It should be: "Oh look, this experimental Amiga based OS has just updated! Isn't that kitchy and fun?"

Why focus on the lack of wireless networking, running on Power PC (Which still deserves respect as an amazing processor you witless bastard kids), or having a cost of about 1/20th of a computer? It's a custom kernel underdog operating system written for unique and impressive platform. If that doesn't get your juices rolling, turn in your geek card.

Re:Pessimistic subject much?

[H0p313ss]

This is the most unnecessarily pessimistic summary that I've ever seen. It should be: "Oh look, this experimental Amiga based OS has just updated! Isn't that kitchy and fun?"

Why focus on the lack of wireless networking, running on Power PC (Which still deserves respect as an amazing processor you witless bastard kids), or having a cost of about 1/20th of a computer? It's a custom kernel underdog operating system written for unique and impressive platform. If that doesn't get your juices rolling, turn in your geek card.

20 years ago it was cool. And it was cool for a couple of years, very very cool.

But your average cell phone today is more powerful in every way, hell the iPhone is running a micro-kernel and Android phones are Linux.

Amiga died, mourn it if you like, but please stop trying to drag the rest of geekdom into your sad little world.

Re:Pessimistic subject much?

[Anonymous Coward]

or having a cost of about 1/20th of a computer?

for unique and impressive platform.

They want 110 euro for this OS. The most expensive computer it will run on (a G4 Powerbook) can be had on craigslist for less than this. The processors were amazing, today they are outdated and slow. The G5's are still hanging on, especially the dual core, but the G4 is simply obsolete. Take that from a huge PPC fan, with enough legacy Amiga, Mac and IBM RS6k gear to last a life time. I was very sad the day the PowerPC really met it's competitive end, but such is the way of things. The Nehalem era (core-i7) Intel chips aren't even in the same league.

If MorphOS was a FOSS project, I'd be all over it, committing to it, financially supporting, etc. But they chose to try and make it a commercial product, one with major holes in its support and usability.

Re:Pessimistic subject much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why have a crippled OS featured on slashdot at all.

Also PPC sucks, which is why it is dead.

Re:Pessimistic subject much?

[unixisc]

Which is why it has replaced MIPS as the CPU of choice on Nintendo and Sony, and has replaced the Pentium Coppermine as the CPU of choice on the XBox.

Re:Pessimistic subject much?

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary could also possibly be construed as wry humor? If the poster and Slashdot were pessimistic about MorphOS, the article probably wouldn't have been published.

The (current) absence of wireless support is such a glaring flaw that it's better to get it out on the table upfront rather than waiting for the outrage of surprised users for whom wireless is a necessity.

Re:Pessimistic subject much?

[Anonymous Coward]

But your average cell phone today is more powerful in every way

Not in CPU power. 7447 (G4) is rather powerful CPU per clock.

Does Ubuntu have not-an-emulator for Amiga?

[tepples]

I know Ubuntu has ABI compatibility with X11/Linux applications (because it is an X11/Linux distribution) and Windows applications (sudo apt-get install wine). Perhaps the advantage of MorphOS is ABI compatibility with Amiga applications, running them faster than UAE.

Re:Does Ubuntu have not-an-emulator for Amiga?

[H0p313ss]

I know Ubuntu has ABI compatibility with X11/Linux applications (because it is an X11/Linux distribution) and Windows applications (sudo apt-get install wine). Perhaps the advantage of MorphOS is ABI compatibility with Amiga applications, running them faster than UAE.

I suspect that you'll find a wider customer base for an emulator for Babbage's Difference Engine than for Amiga on Linux, nobody is doing it because nobody gives a flying.

Amiga is dead, they should have called it Zombie OS and code named the release Apocalypse, then at least they'd get some attention.

Why not just put it in the dateline...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pffft! Most of you weren't even born when the Amiga was popular.

Has Amiga origins

[Zubinix]

The summary is a bit dum. Morphos is an attempt to build what should have been the next Amiga OS. Which at the time Commodore went under was migrating the Amiga to PPC.

B&W G3 case

[Immerman]

Oh man, those were wonderful cases weren't they? I still remember the first time I saw one opened at the computer lab - I never much cared for Apple, and didn't really care much for the visual design, but WOW. That fold-out motherboard tray was brilliant! Working in one of those babies was to a standard tower case what a tower was to a desktop. I can only assume that Apple wrapped the design tight with patents, or that every other case manufacturer on the planet is stupid. In a perfect world every tower case on the planet would open like that these days.

Huh, go figure. Apparently case manufacturers the world over *are* idiots. A quick search turns up that ATX fold-out cases, while rare, do in fact exist http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811156078, but I can't find any high-end ones. I'm rather surprised Antec apparently doesn't make one, more than one actually. You don't need a fancy layout for a mid tower, but considering they make water-coolers as well they could actually pull off a really slick B&W-style mini-tower, sans the fruity outer shell.

It's funny, I could have *sworn* I had looked in to building a PC in one of those cases a few years back only to discover that the motherboard was a (roughly) mirror-image of the ATX layout and couldn't be adapted. Now I look at photos again and everything appears compatible. Well, the CPU heat sink/fan combo might collide with the power supply, but if nothing else a closed-system water-cooler could probably squeeze in, though you'd probably want to rig the radiator to the front side of the fold out door somehow to avoid flexing the hoses.

Re:B&W G3 case

[hairyfeet]

Actually you'll probably think its a stupid idea, but I'm seriously thinking about one of the E350 boards like this one or there is this cool site i tripped over ages ago i've been shopping at called Starmicro that sells CPUs REAL cheap and i have a nice little socket AM2 board I got from a customer who had me upgrade hers only to find her CPU was the problem. I'm torn between using that board and one of the higher rated Athlon singles or saying fuck it and using the Pentium D board I also have in the closet since they sell Pentium Ds there for like $12 with $3 to ship so for $15 and a couple of cheap RAM sticks I'd have a nice dual core i could keep or sell.

Looking at the prices I'd probably skip the E350 as you can get a nice Mini-ITX kit with an E350 already in it for like $100 so no point on using one of those when I can just get the kit, but in any case it is such a pretty box I just can't stand the thought of throwing it away. hell its pretty enough that with a decent PCIe card on the board i could see someone using it as an HTPC simply because its pretty enough to have sitting in a living room. And I agree the fold out thing IS cool as hell, in fact the reason i picked it up off the girl on Freecycle (besides the fact she was also giving away a damned nice monitor I could use at the time) was because i wanted to play with PPC and loved the case design.

Sadly the damned thing just won't play nice with my PS/2 KVM, no matter what kind of adapter i use and I'm not giving up my KVM, its like new and has audio ports so i can control 4 systems with audio all of my single LCD so in the closet it sits. I did drag it downstairs to the shop where I had some spare monitors and played with it for a while, even with that being a G3 the Panther OSX installed on it was quite peppy, its just a shame I don't really have a use for it and even with a cheap price on it its never sold as is, so i figure next time i have a break she'll be the case for my next project PC.

Re:B&W G3 case

[Immerman]

Seems rather a shame to me to take such a nice compact motherboard and stick it in a huge honking case, but then I'm a fan of the engineering design, not the visual aesthetics. If you find it decorative, well then I can see how the idea could appeal. You'd certainly have enough unused space to pile in hard drives, popcorn makers, etc. Heads up though, old Macs don't use standard ATX power supplys even when the plug is mechanically compatible. Supposedly it's not too difficult to rewire the motherboard connector to be compatible, but you might kill your motherboard and/or power supply if you tried to use it unmodified. Among other things you're getting power to pins ATX specifies as ground, and that's a recipe for letting the magic smoke out of something if ever there was one.

Heh, just had a flash of low-power gaming box mod - modify that internal space to neatly store a few gamepads so they can be completely "disappeared". A bit bulky to haul to your friend's house to play classic emulated games, and you'd probably want HDMI output for that, but hey, it helps capture that clunky retro feel, right?

Happy hacking

Re:B&W G3 case

[hairyfeet]

IIRC someone makes a mechanical adapter for those, kinda like I have some of the really old Compaq clacky keyboards (I just love the old mechanical switch boards, don't you?) that like the clacky adapter is just a switching around to the correct way with a little wiring hardness. But if I can't find that or it costs more than a buck or two i always have a ton of 200w-300w PSUs lying around so just swapping it out won't be a problem.

As for the board....I'm still leaning towards the Athlon AM2 which is a standard mATX. I've always liked AMD and unlike the Pentium D which is AGP the AM2 board is PCIe so I can slap a cheap GPU in it and make it a nice HTPC. I just need to find a cheap AM2 Athlon dual somewhere, that customer I got the board from ended up buying the Athlon Dual i had from my own upgrade to a quad (went from dual to quad to hexa in a year as the prices dropped) because she didn't want to wait on shipping so while I have a few nice Intel CPUs lying in the shop CPU drawer all I have left on the AMD side is a Sempron, yuck.

As for the gaming mod, damned cool idea...if I didn't already have a EEE E350 netbook i use for that. the only ones I LAN with anymore are my two boys who like to occasionally smack me around in TF2. Hopefully Torchlight II will be coming out soon so we'll have something co-op to play, because as much as I still enjoy SP shooters my reflexes simply can't keep up with a 19 and 17 year old.

Anyway thanks for the reminder about the PSU, I figured i'd have to pull it anyway as those older boxes usually were pretty wimpy on the wattage but your post just made up my mind for me, it'll be getting a new 250w to go with whichever board i end up going with. Thanks.

hardware obsolence

[ChunderDownunder]

I assume the OS depends on obtuse ppc assembly or needs to run old ppc binaries. Otherwise, why not recompile for amd64 or arm?

In which case, plans to target current ppc hardware? E.g. Wii and xbox360 are ppc based if you can boot your own OS on them.

No Wireless? No obvious way to buy it? Lame.

[aristotle-dude]

Seriously, it should support Wifi in this day in age and there should be an obvious "buy" link on the about page.

Re:No Wireless? No obvious way to buy it? Lame.

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to try it to buy it. There's a purchase/registration application in the installation. You run it and it phones home, and then MorphOS Team sends an email with Paypal bill to you. You pay up and get a code unique to your system. It sounds a bit strange but it's actually quite user-friendly and probably tends to deter piracy of the OS.

Quark, Abox, L4 and OSFree

[unixisc]

All that is correct. That said, the one thing I find interesting about it is the Quark microkernel, and the fact that this OS is targeted towards non-x86 platforms. The Quark microkernel is a variation of the L4 microkernel, and the Abox that sits on top of it is an AmigaOS sandbox that sits on it. If this works, other subsystems can be tried out on this as well.

An FOSS project similar to this, called osFree is also out there, and it aims at doing the same thing. The sandboxes in osFree are called personalities, and they have goals for a Presentation Manager (i.e. OS/2) personality, a win16 and win32 personality, and hopefully at some point a win64 personality. This sounds similar to IBM's erstwhile Workplace OS that they tried doing for PPC, but abandoned. Except that in that case, the kernel being used was Mach 3.0, which was huge & unwieldy, although w/ today's CPU firepower, it would probably fly. As far as the windows sandboxes go, a major difference b/w them and ReactOS is that they are not aiming for binary compatibility w/ existing Windows drivers.

I don't think these projects have any use as far as x86 PCs or laptops go. However, for old RISC workstations that still works, but no longer has original companies like SGI or DEC supporting it, things like MorphOS and osFree are pretty nifty - since these microkernels (L4 at least) have been ported to various architectures, they too can have something like OS/2 or Windows like OSs on them, and not be limited to just Unixes, such as BSD or Linux.

LOL!!! WHY?

[issicus]

does it even run any software? i cant tell from their website. plus +10 nerd points for making an OS that doesnt do anything useful.

Putting things into perspective

[ninjakoala]

As always anything Amiga-related brings out the preachers saying what others should or should not do - particularly whether things should be allowed to live or not. As most Amiga history is, the story of MorphOS is convoluted. But let's instead look at what it does and what it can offer to those interested.

First of all it's Amiga-compatible. Out of the currently available "next-gen" AmigaOSes, it's probably the most backwards compatible. Now this obviously only matters if you already own Amiga software or like what's on Aminet - which means you're likely an Amiga user already and get what it's all about anyway.

Everyone else might find it interesting because it's lightning fast even on these older machines. I am actually typing this from a 1.25 GHz G4 Mac Mini with 512MB of RAM, and it's every bit as responsive as my i7 Mac Mini server with 16 GB of RAM. In fact it boots and launches the apps I need much faster (if both are turned off - the server usually isn't).

Why you might like it:
What it is great for is general surfing, mail, light productivity and such. To an extent a lot of the same stuff your typical Linux distro is good at. Except faster - even faster than something like Puppy Linux or DSL. It is quite easy to learn your way around like the other Amiga-based systems - far easier than the mainstream operating systems IMHO.

It has a lot of nice apps built-in like CD/DVD authoring, text editor with syntax highlighting, basic music player, picture gallery software, CD-ripping software,FTP/SFTP client, PDF viewer and a Webkit-based browser. It also has some a very lovely SSH client, some very good IRC clients, some nice VNC and RDP clients, lots of emulators, a lot of games and game ports, graphics software like Blender and much more. A lot of the same goes for other Amiga-like flavours and both MorphOS and AmigaOS 4 can run a lot of older Amiga apps out of the box as well. There is also software actively developed by third parties like Hollywood from Airsoft Softwair which I cannot say enough nice things about. Publishing software like Pagestream is also still maintained.

In other words you have a functional and fast computer out of the box and you can explore a lot of software afterwards. OS geeks should have as much fun with this as with Haiku, various BSD and *nix flavours and so on.

Why you might not like it:
Your kids want the latest and greatest Flash games. You want to watch 1080p video (not really an OS limitation but rather hardware). You want to run a server or have a multiuser environment. You absolutely cannot tolerate a crash (while I have yet to see a system crash, there is no memory protection. It IS very stable, though). You're just not curious about other operating systems and like what you have.

Additional:
It should also be noted that WiFi support is on the way, and like previous updates it's likely to be free. Yes, the entry price is somewhat steep, but historically a one-time purchase (license is tied to the machine) gets you all subsequent updates for free. I bought it at 2.5 if I remember correctly and have not paid anything since. That's pretty decent value to me.

Amiga OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Not Apple the Hardware are Macintosh driven PPC Boxes but underlying OS and users are Amigan's

Poor effort slashdot

gimme Gen

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the most unnecessarily pessimistic summary that I've ever seen. It should be: "Oh look, this experimental Amiga based OS has just updated! Isn't that kitchy and fun?"

The freaking iPhone gen and more so the gen that just uses a Computer and doesn't understand how it Works or the speciality of the Hardware

Being a Geek

[Anonymous Coward]

20 years ago it was cool. And it was cool for a couple of years, very very cool.

But your average cell phone today is more powerful in every way, hell the iPhone is running a micro-kernel and Android phones are Linux.

Amiga died, mourn it if you like, but please stop trying to drag the rest of geekdom into your sad little world.

I use Morph OS two different flavours of Linux and the standard Windows flavours (Server and Consumer) and planing to by an AmigaOS machine in future
what is sad about my World in fact you lack of respect highlights you aint a Geek but understand only a take it out of the box and get it Working OS
typical gen of today really

Looks awesome

[araneus]

I just installed it and it looks awesome on my old Mac. Nice work.

30 minutes?

[trigggl]

Yeah, that will attract people. That's a non-starter.

Re:30 minutes?

[Provocateur]

To me, that is actually quite appealing, in a Mission Impossible sort of way. If I can't fix or gimp it in 30 minutes or less, it's actually work. Plus, it would prevent me from tweaking the wallpaper or theme, which is a bad habit of mine lately. At least I could say Shut it down and mean it.

Re:30 minutes?

[trigggl]

To me, that is actually quite appealing, in a Mission Impossible sort of way. If I can't fix or gimp it in 30 minutes or less, it's actually work. Plus, it would prevent me from tweaking the wallpaper or theme, which is a bad habit of mine lately. At least I could say Shut it down and mean it.

You don't want to go anywhere near my IBM Power3 running Gentoo, then.

Can we tinker with the Hobby OS we like?

[saimon69]

http://binarydoodles.ilcannocchiale.it/2012/05/20/technologies_aros_rant_are_we.html (more AROS related but same context)