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 It's the independent PPC OS designed for outdated Apple systems like G4 PowerBooks (5,6; 5,7; 5,8; or 5,9) and eMacs (1.25 GHz/1.42 GHz) and PPC Mac Minis, and some G4 PowerMac models (depends on graphics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

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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]

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

[Lumpy]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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]

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

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.

Miss Amiga? Try DragonFly!

[Anonymous Coward]

Miss Amiga? Try DragonFly!

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.

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.

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?

FreeBSD

[nurb432]

Also has a PPC edition, as does NetBSD.

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

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.