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

Posted by timothy on from the ultimate-nagware dept.

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 It's the independent PPC OS designed for outdated Apple systems like G4 PowerBooks (5,6; 5,7; 5,8; or 5,9) and eMacs (1.25 GHz/1.42 GHz) and PPC Mac Minis, and some G4 PowerMac models (depends on graphics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."

43 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. Another weakness by twilight30 · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

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    1. Re:Another weakness by O('_')O_Bush · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
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    2. Re:Another weakness by Dexter+Herbivore · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    3. Re:Another weakness by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

      what's wrong with running debian on these things?

    4. Re:Another weakness by Anubis+IV · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Another weakness by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      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.

    6. Re:Another weakness by davydagger · · Score: 2

      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.

    7. Re:Another weakness by Bert64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

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    8. Re:Another weakness by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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    9. Re:Another weakness by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    10. Re:Another weakness by digitig · · Score: 3, Funny

      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. :(

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    11. Re:Another weakness by dreamchaser · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    12. Re:Another weakness by semi-extrinsic · · Score: 4, Informative

      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).

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    13. Re:Another weakness by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    14. Re:Another weakness by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      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.

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    15. Re:Another weakness by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Funny

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

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    16. Re:Another weakness by Angostura · · Score: 2

      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.

    17. Re:Another weakness by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2

      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..

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    18. Re:Another weakness by jedidiah · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
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    19. Re:Another weakness by PopeRatzo · · Score: 3

      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.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    20. Re:Another weakness by PopeRatzo · · Score: 3, Funny

      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.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    21. Re:Another weakness by jythie · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    22. Re:Another weakness by LordLimecat · · Score: 3, Informative

      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?

    23. Re:Another weakness by tqk · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
    24. Re:Another weakness by tqk · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
    25. Re:Another weakness by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2

      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...

      --
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    26. Re:Another weakness by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
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  2. They seem to use that word a lot. by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:They seem to use that word a lot. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      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

  3. Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well by David+Gerard · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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  4. Miss Amiga? Try DragonFly! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Miss Amiga? Try DragonFly!

  5. What is the market for this? by Jeremi · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    --


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  6. I would say.. by gallondr00nk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    free without caveat

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

  7. Why not just put it in the body... by anlprb · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

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  8. Re:So what you're saying is... by rubycodez · · Score: 2

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

    BSD and Linux run fine on PPC macs.

  9. Facepalm by jones_supa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Facepalm by pegasustonans · · Score: 4, Funny

      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?

      --
      And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
  10. FreeBSD by nurb432 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Also has a PPC edition, as does NetBSD.

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    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
    1. Re:FreeBSD by damnbunni · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  11. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 4, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  12. Pessimistic subject much? by cgenman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Pessimistic subject much? by H0p313ss · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
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  13. Putting things into perspective by ninjakoala · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
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