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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 It's the independent PPC OS designed for outdated Apple systems like G4 PowerBooks (5,6; 5,7; 5,8; or 5,9) and eMacs (1.25 GHz/1.42 GHz) and PPC Mac Minis, and some G4 PowerMac models (depends on graphics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."
... might be the price. Good luck, I guess.
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
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.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
... it's not as good as Linux and you have to pay for it?
I wonder how the PPC port of Haiku is doing?
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.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
for the existance of this thing.
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?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Miss Amiga? Try DragonFly!
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.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
free without caveat
only being able to use the free version for 30 minutes at a time is a pretty fucking large caveat.
It is Amiga compatible for those who don't know.
One Token Ring to Rule them All, One Search Engine to Find Them, One WAN to bring them in, and TCP/IP Bind them...
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.
But, does it come with a good text editor?
Also has a PPC edition, as does NetBSD.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Good-bye
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?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
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
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.
The ______ Agenda
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.
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.
I didn't know Linux can run Amiga software.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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
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?
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.
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Seriously, it should support Wifi in this day in age and there should be an obvious "buy" link on the about page.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Against the grain
I just installed it and it looks awesome on my old Mac. Nice work.
Yeah, that will attract people. That's a non-starter.
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
http://binarydoodles.ilcannocchiale.it/2012/05/20/technologies_aros_rant_are_we.html (more AROS related but same context)