ipfwadm has been abandoned for ipchains in the 2.2.x/2.3.x kernel revisions. If you're thinking of using ipfwadm, you should seriously think about compiling a new kernel.
(It's a point of information, not my attempt to make anyone look or feel bad.)
I've recently set up IPMasquerade on my home box (kernel 2.2.10, i486) DCC, FTP and the like all work fine, once you get the appropriate modules loaded and functioning.
One thing to be careful of is to make sure you load the modules to keep an eye on the proper ports. I had everything but DCC running, and was scratching my head for a while, until I realized that the ip_masq_irc module which deals with such things was looking at the default (6666?) port, and not any of the others (6667, 7000) that are frequently used.
Seriously. If you need help with IP Masquerading, check out http://ipmasq.cjb.net... the IP Masquerade Resources Page. Complete with mini-HOWTOs and links to useful documents like TrinityOS for ensuring your system is remotely secure.
Good luck. It's a little bit of work, but once you wrap your mind around it, it's a piece of cake.
My last posting was in response to something utterly ridiculous, and now that post is gone... and mine appears in the main "root" thread... completely without any context.
I'm assuming it's because the stupid commentary I was replying to was moderated below my threshold, but it looks damned strange.
It's hardly a stretch of resources, or a "spreading too thin" to add Amiga support to their lineup. With Amiga using a Linux Kernel, all they'd have to do is dump their Linux product over to the boys at Amiga and let them do a simple port. Problem solved.
Just another well timed tidbit of information to keep up the hype in the hearts and minds of Amiga enthusiasts. But I think it does shed some light into the timing of the though process that lead Amiga to dump QNX for Linux. There's no way something like this will have just come up in the last few days. Deals like this one with Corel and who knows how many others must have been instrumental in convincing Amiga to jump ship from QNX.
Of course, it could also be a bone thrown to the Amiga community after QNX and phase5 announced their own development partnership which sounds like a great big "fuck you" to Amiga Inc.. There are interesting times ahead.
Now, did anyone else notice how amiga.com makes a big deal of the whole Corel "arrangement," yet Corel's site doesn't say squat? Amusing.
Please remember that most people that still advocate the Amiga aren't the brightest bulbs in the box. A lot of them are a bit bitter because they can't get any *nix working (despite there being great debian and redhat m68k ports which run on the Ami). A lot of them don't really understand what a kernal IS and what it does, and thus nothing they say should be taken without a hefty pinch of salt.
Now, that's inflammatory and deliberately provocative if nothing else. While there are most certainly a lot of misguided souls rampaging through the Usenet, it's not confined to the Amiga newsgroups to be sure. A few ridiculous comments made by certain users shouldn't reflect on the whole. Good thing, too, or else I'd be inclined to deduce that Slashdot commentary-writers are overly reactionary, closed minded, and quick to generalize and lay blame.
I know better than that.
As for Amiga users not really understanding what a kernel is or what it does, this is the case for a number of users who have never felt inclined to dig into the guts of their machine. The Amiga equivalent of the typical Windows user. Scary, but they're out there. But in my own experience, the vast majority of Amiga users do in fact understand what the hell is going on, and many of them run/use numerous machines on all sorts of platforms... and do so very well. Oddly enough, these are the same users who have vowed to avoid c.s.a.* like the plague because of the open invitation to stupidly mouthing off that Usenet has become.
Comments by users about Linux bloat (I laughed out loud when I read that), and lethal instability, should be attributed to the individuals making them, and in a perfect world -- completely ignored as undereducated prattle.
I'm off to go test the other bulbs in the box now...
What happened to not posting Amiga news until a product started to ship, Wakko?:^)
Okay, that was a cheap shot...
As for that article, the Amiga isn't just going to become another WebTV information appliance. That's an easy assumption to make based on articles like the one you read, but that is all Gateway has talked about since they got their hands on Amiga... multimedia/TV/convergence nonsense. While Amiga Inc's design plans include information appliances such as the ones mentioned in the article, there are even more impressive plans in the works for more traditional applications of new technology in personal computers, network workstations, video production/multimedia powerhouses, and embedded systems in appliances, cars, etc.
(please, no more jokes about getting Guru Meditation failures when trying to make toast or hit the brakes)
Either Amiga wants to try to infiltrate the entire computer market en-masse, or invade as many niches as possible so they have somewhere to hide should another Commodore-esque apocalypse come about.:^)
Amiga Inc. has made it clear that there's no point reinventing the wheel. Back when the original Amigas were released, anyone could put together reasonable AV chips. But now, there are companies whose entire existence is devoted to the production of high performance chipsets. Even Amiga can't be so egomaniacal to believe they could out-do companies like Creative Labs and 3DFX. Likely their new hardware architecture will be modular enough to accept these third-party chipsets, as well as permitting a higher degree of upgradeability than the Classic Amiga "We Solder All The Chips You'll Ever Need Directly To The Motherboard" mentality.
The Amiga is more than just a bunch of custom chips. Their OS was waaaaay ahead of its time... so much so that junkies such as myself still swear by it. It's got a much more straightforward filesystem than the somewhat dated offering of *N*X. etc. etc etc. I'm not writing this to pat Amiga on the back (instant flamebait?) but to point out that there's more to Amiga's charm than just the hardware.
I can assure you that the only thing they care about is the $. Gateway's stated reasons for buying Amiga were to increase their intellectual property portfolio (ie they wanted Amiga's patents). There were indications that Gateway was unaware of a the active Amiga community until after the purchase.
Yes, this has been more than slightly obvious to anyone who has been following Amiga's multiple acquisitions/bankruptcies since the Commdore days. Gateway executive types have always stated publically their amazement at the magnitude of the Amiga userbase... particularily in the absence of a company. The general jist seemed to be that Gateway was originally geared to grab Amiga's chipset and such for their Destination PC-TV multimedia computers.
But that's history.
Jim Collas has done everything short of slapping Ted Waitt in front of the cameras. He has said over and over again that he can't understand why Gateway was spending so much time spinning their wheels with the Amiga project. Now he's off and running trying to get the job done, and I don't think he's doing too brutal a job (the current QNX/Linux debacle aside, of course). There appears to be more in his agenda than satisfying Gateway's need to make a quick buck on the back of the Amiga.
A lot has happened since February when Collas took the throne. More than I've seen in Amiga development in a long time. The fact that changes apepar to be taking place... even in the environment of vague press releases and apparent secrecy... leads me to believe that something is actually getting done.
ANYTHING GETTING DONE IS A NICE CHANGE.:^)
Will their direction be a technological epiphany? Even my overbearing Amiga advocacy shudders at the thought of making such predictions. I want them to deliver, dammit.
Chances are nobody is going to state ANYTHING clearly until Jimmy-Boy at AI releases his highly touted "Technology Brief" which, according to the hype, will cause Amiga users like myself to perform our own kind of release in our briefs...
There's no way to determine if Amiga will run Linux apps out of the box until then. However, I think using the Linux kernel makes for easy porting of apps between Linux and whatever-the-hell-the-Amiga-becomes. Hell... the current Amiga line has emulation libraries (ixemul) which allow for X-apps to be ported to WorkBench (there are a pile of well known Ghostscript-using PDF utilities which do this quite well).
Unfortunately, as with the rest of Amiga development, the phrase "wait and see" rears it's ugly head.
Definitely flame bait. It's well known just what a profound attachment Amiga users have to their machines... advocacy to a fault in many cases, to be sure. It's stuff like this that leads to "my platform is better than your platform" silliness. I still hold out hope for Amiga, but I don't let it run my existence.:^)
As for actual products being shipped, well, there have been many instances where I've had to wade through plenty of digital speculation on all sorts of fronts without seeing actual product shipping. While seeing the name "Amiga" turns a lot of people off immediately, I think it's important to the Linux community to see just where the kernel is going, and what other systems might be taking advantage of this OS's advantages.
*sigh*
Of course, you can always just customize your Slashdot to remove all of these Amiga posts, if they annoy you so much (good job, Rob&Crew).
I've taken to saving my HTML formatted text to an editor running external to my browser. Then, I can preview all I want, and paste my old HTML formatted text back into the text widget.
Otherwise, all my nice italics and boldface tags take a walk... never mind the fact that it eats all my anchors...
There are many Amiga retailers out there that still do a pretty good business in Amigas sales and service. If you want to get your hands on an Amiga (probably cheap too), it would be worth your while to give one of them a shout.
Take a look at the online database at National Amiga in Canada. Gives you a flavour for what's still out there.
The Amiga2000 was released in the 80s. I shudder when I hear any Y2K-like references to the Amiga worded that way, as it reminds me of the Amiga2000 that is currently rotting away under my desk (upon which my Amiga4000 sits).
They're using Intel CPUs just to get their OS off the ground. Developing on Intel x86 architechture is extremely cost efficient, with the general computer market being just saturated with x86 stuff at ridiculously competitive prices.
Final release of this "Next Generation" Amiga will not be x86 based. Amiga Inc. has stated this categorically. Whether x86 versions will come by later, or if the x86 betas are just cleaned up and released down the road, remains to be seen. But AmigaNG isn't gonna be no IntelBox.
"So, you'll almost certainly be able to throw out AmigaOS and run your favorite Linux distribution on a new Amiga, but running AmigaOS natively on an x86 CPU will probably never happen...unless they release the source."
The AmigaOE is being initially released for beta testing for the x86 architechture, relying on off-the-shelf components. Amiga Inc. has also stated repeatedly that they want a system with a great deal of portability between various architectures so they can move with the market insofar as better and faster chips are concerned... as well as giving them a hell of a lot of room to move when implementing their broad licensing and embedded systems strategies.
In other words, I think a large degree of portability is inevitable.
Redhat is definitely getting bigger and bigger. I just installed RH6.0 on a dual-celeron 366 machine, and the damned thing takes for freakin-EVER to boot, even after I recently did a reinstall (for a number of strange and convoluted reasons) and seriousy gutted the number of startup applications.
Man, I really need to crush this kernel.:^)
Then again, I shouldn't complain. I very intentionally chose RedHat as my first home Linux distro... because it has all the high level bells and whistles I need right out of the box... which gives me more time to go digging leisurely through the guts of my box in the interim without sacrificing functionality.
If I wanted real efficiency, I would have used [...]. (OS/distro deleted on advice of legal counsel and the fire department)
That's just it, though. Amiga won't just be creating a commercial Linux box with a lot of Amiga gloss on top. Much of the old Amiga's software functionality already has a vaguely UNIX-like flavour, but it is by no means Linux. Similiarily with the new OS. They've said time and time again that their operating system will incorporate a Linux kernel... but it WILL NOT BE LINUX. There is much that Amiga is planning at the levels far and above the kernel which will build upon what Linux has become.
Personally, I'm hoping they really trash the Linux filesystem. I much prefer the way the Amiga does device mounts and assigns. I use both system, side by side, but I was (and am) an Amiga user first. Perhaps I'm just biased...
Just don't dismiss this as "Yet Another Linux Machine." Leave that for the people at Corel.:^)
Every year there's a rumor about a new amiga coming out. "It will be a PPC"! "It's gonna be RISC!" "It's linux-based!" "No, it's qnx" "It's amigaOS 3.0".."a great new company bought the amiga technology!"..and nothing ever comes out at the end.
I think part of the problem is that Amiga Users, such as myself, have been living in this development vacuum for way too long. Throw the Amiga community even the slightest hint of something new, and they go completely off on it. Some say it's advocacy to a fault, some just point to it as an example of the lunatic platform devotion that Amiga has engendered.
Me? I'm happy to discuss what they're working on... it's nice to see someone is actually attempting to do something. But I won't be completely happy or even concrete in my thinking about Amiga's future path(s) until I start seeing some product. And I dont mean their silly products like offical Amiga boxer shorts and AmiCola. (I'm not kidding, see it here).
Slashdot Mirror
(It's a point of information, not my attempt to make anyone look or feel bad.)
One thing to be careful of is to make sure you load the modules to keep an eye on the proper ports. I had everything but DCC running, and was scratching my head for a while, until I realized that the ip_masq_irc module which deals with such things was looking at the default (6666?) port, and not any of the others (6667, 7000) that are frequently used.
Seriously. If you need help with IP Masquerading, check out http://ipmasq.cjb.net ... the IP Masquerade Resources Page. Complete with mini-HOWTOs and links to useful documents like TrinityOS for ensuring your system is remotely secure.
Good luck. It's a little bit of work, but once you wrap your mind around it, it's a piece of cake.
Back on those days, WordPerfect was WordPerfect, and Corel was Corel. Not one and the same.
Besides, I remember when WP came out for the Amiga. Compared to programs like excellence! that were out at the time, it was laughable.
My last posting was in response to something utterly ridiculous, and now that post is gone... and mine appears in the main "root" thread... completely without any context.
I'm assuming it's because the stupid commentary I was replying to was moderated below my threshold, but it looks damned strange.
Does dangerous things to my already exaggerated patriotic streak.
(... and yes, it was damned hot today ... )
Who do you think you are, Terry c0cksey?
It's hardly a stretch of resources, or a "spreading too thin" to add Amiga support to their lineup. With Amiga using a Linux Kernel, all they'd have to do is dump their Linux product over to the boys at Amiga and let them do a simple port. Problem solved.
Of course, it could also be a bone thrown to the Amiga community after QNX and phase5 announced their own development partnership which sounds like a great big "fuck you" to Amiga Inc.. There are interesting times ahead.
Now, did anyone else notice how amiga.com makes a big deal of the whole Corel "arrangement," yet Corel's site doesn't say squat? Amusing.
Stereotypes are such shit sometimes.
I know better than that.
As for Amiga users not really understanding what a kernel is or what it does, this is the case for a number of users who have never felt inclined to dig into the guts of their machine. The Amiga equivalent of the typical Windows user. Scary, but they're out there. But in my own experience, the vast majority of Amiga users do in fact understand what the hell is going on, and many of them run/use numerous machines on all sorts of platforms... and do so very well. Oddly enough, these are the same users who have vowed to avoid c.s.a.* like the plague because of the open invitation to stupidly mouthing off that Usenet has become.
Comments by users about Linux bloat (I laughed out loud when I read that), and lethal instability, should be attributed to the individuals making them, and in a perfect world -- completely ignored as undereducated prattle.
I'm off to go test the other bulbs in the box now...
Okay, that was a cheap shot...
As for that article, the Amiga isn't just going to become another WebTV information appliance. That's an easy assumption to make based on articles like the one you read, but that is all Gateway has talked about since they got their hands on Amiga ... multimedia/TV/convergence nonsense. While Amiga Inc's design plans include information appliances such as the ones mentioned in the article, there are even more impressive plans in the works for more traditional applications of new technology in personal computers, network workstations, video production/multimedia powerhouses, and embedded systems in appliances, cars, etc.
Either Amiga wants to try to infiltrate the entire computer market en-masse, or invade as many niches as possible so they have somewhere to hide should another Commodore-esque apocalypse come about. :^)
Again, that's history.
Amiga Inc. has made it clear that there's no point reinventing the wheel. Back when the original Amigas were released, anyone could put together reasonable AV chips. But now, there are companies whose entire existence is devoted to the production of high performance chipsets. Even Amiga can't be so egomaniacal to believe they could out-do companies like Creative Labs and 3DFX. Likely their new hardware architecture will be modular enough to accept these third-party chipsets, as well as permitting a higher degree of upgradeability than the Classic Amiga "We Solder All The Chips You'll Ever Need Directly To The Motherboard" mentality.
The Amiga is more than just a bunch of custom chips. Their OS was waaaaay ahead of its time... so much so that junkies such as myself still swear by it. It's got a much more straightforward filesystem than the somewhat dated offering of *N*X. etc. etc etc. I'm not writing this to pat Amiga on the back (instant flamebait?) but to point out that there's more to Amiga's charm than just the hardware.
There's no way to determine if Amiga will run Linux apps out of the box until then. However, I think using the Linux kernel makes for easy porting of apps between Linux and whatever-the-hell-the-Amiga-becomes. Hell... the current Amiga line has emulation libraries (ixemul) which allow for X-apps to be ported to WorkBench (there are a pile of well known Ghostscript-using PDF utilities which do this quite well).
Unfortunately, as with the rest of Amiga development, the phrase "wait and see" rears it's ugly head.
As for actual products being shipped, well, there have been many instances where I've had to wade through plenty of digital speculation on all sorts of fronts without seeing actual product shipping. While seeing the name "Amiga" turns a lot of people off immediately, I think it's important to the Linux community to see just where the kernel is going, and what other systems might be taking advantage of this OS's advantages.
*sigh*
Of course, you can always just customize your Slashdot to remove all of these Amiga posts, if they annoy you so much (good job, Rob&Crew).
I think the "Gary," "Buster," and "Ramsey" chips might take issue with your blanket statement. :^)
Then again, if I ever hear my chips verbally complaining... I'll shut off my Amiga and get myself appropriately committed.
I've taken to saving my HTML formatted text to an editor running external to my browser. Then, I can preview all I want, and paste my old HTML formatted text back into the text widget.
Otherwise, all my nice italics and boldface tags take a walk... never mind the fact that it eats all my anchors...
Take a look at the online database at National Amiga in Canada. Gives you a flavour for what's still out there.
The Amiga2000 was released in the 80s. I shudder when I hear any Y2K-like references to the Amiga worded that way, as it reminds me of the Amiga2000 that is currently rotting away under my desk (upon which my Amiga4000 sits).
Final release of this "Next Generation" Amiga will not be x86 based. Amiga Inc. has stated this categorically. Whether x86 versions will come by later, or if the x86 betas are just cleaned up and released down the road, remains to be seen. But AmigaNG isn't gonna be no IntelBox.
In other words, I think a large degree of portability is inevitable.
Man, I really need to crush this kernel. :^)
Then again, I shouldn't complain. I very intentionally chose RedHat as my first home Linux distro... because it has all the high level bells and whistles I need right out of the box... which gives me more time to go digging leisurely through the guts of my box in the interim without sacrificing functionality.
If I wanted real efficiency, I would have used [...]. (OS/distro deleted on advice of legal counsel and the fire department)
Does that make sense?
Personally, I'm hoping they really trash the Linux filesystem. I much prefer the way the Amiga does device mounts and assigns. I use both system, side by side, but I was (and am) an Amiga user first. Perhaps I'm just biased...
Just don't dismiss this as "Yet Another Linux Machine." Leave that for the people at Corel. :^)
You only have to get hit in the head so many times before you learn to duck. :^)
Me? I'm happy to discuss what they're working on... it's nice to see someone is actually attempting to do something. But I won't be completely happy or even concrete in my thinking about Amiga's future path(s) until I start seeing some product. And I dont mean their silly products like offical Amiga boxer shorts and AmiCola. (I'm not kidding, see it here).
"Death is just the beginning. - Amiga T-shirt.