It's/not/ ok to download binary bits and run them. You should be bloody careful, whether you're manually FTPing the files and running them, or automatically downloading+running. It's VERY SILLY to just randomly run binaries from any source, on the internet or otherwise. If you're a home user without much to lose, then you might well run something, but in a corporate or military environment, you should be more careful. The safest thing is to compile everything from source, but even then, you have to be careful your compiler is not inserting backdoors.
When I attempted to run a binary infected with the chernobyl virus (off the hard disk of a guy whose bios got fried), wine trapped the illegal memory accesses and dumped me in the debugger. It was very interesting to see it "on ice"
The other problem is that some manufacturers, here in europe at least, will mark a printer as "windows" if it only includes a parallel port, and "windows+mac" if it includes a parallel and serial interface. Some of the printers marked "windows only" actually work fine on linux. For example, the Epson Stylus Color 640 does not differ much from the old 600, except that it leaves out some of the more obscure ESC/P2 commands, but it is badged "windows only"...It worked fine on my amiga, let alone linux...
This is different to the "WinPrinter" models you describe, which are marked, often with identical logos, as "windows only". This can get very irritating, as I'm sure you can imagine - but we can blame it all on microsoft - they push the "windows printer" mark, presumably to encourage lock-in....
One thing people do forget when talking about the original amigas - the cpu didn't do a lot of the work on the system, the PAD (custom chips called Paula, Agnus, Denise) did.
You had:
paula doing sound,
the blitter doing all the fancy hi-speed (at the time) graphics movement (which AFAIK would have to be done on the CPU on the Palm),
The copper (a really cool (at the time) amiga display-synchronised graphics co-processor with 3-instructions (move to, wait for, skip if)) handling the bitmap display. It was the copper that enabled the amiga to do the fancy screen-dragging tricks enlightenment now does in software ( Rasterman was once an amiga hacker, AFAIK) Again this frees up the cpu.
The floppy disk io was also done by the custom chips.
The amiga had 256KByte to 2Mbyte of "chip" memory, depending on the model. "chip" mem was shared between the custom chips and the cpu. There was also "fast" memory, which was for the cpu only.
Since the "chip" memory was shared between the CPU and the custom chips, and the copper and blitter could trigger cpu interrupts, and the copper could be set to program the blitter, and all three could work on the same area of memory, including eachother's program code, you could do some _very_ weird stuff with the amiga display. That's why all those old Amiga (Euro)Demos tended to be so cool compared to the PC and ST crowd of the time.
Let's hear it for the Aquatic ape theory !!! Humans have a pronounced diving reflex, streamlined shape,water-wasteful waste disposal, a tendency to pig out on shellfish, quite good 3D spatial awareness, etc. etc. We're much better adapted for shoreline life than for the savannah. (and cetaceans seem to have a soft spot for us... maybe they remember something...:-) )
It seems to me we're actually specialised to be nonspecialists - we function adequately on land, in shallow water, and in the trees..
Or someone could add the CAOS specced libraries into the AmigaOS (CAOS was the DOS specification that was originally intended to be used on the Amiga, but wasn't finished in time) instead of AmigaDOS (based on TriPOS) into the amigaos. This would yield a high speed, small memory footprint OS that would possibly work well for palmtops / embedded devices. (It'd be better than PalmOS, and (initially) slightly worse than EPOC32...)
You're probably right about talking to the PDA. It's bad enough seeing people with hands-free mobile phone sets, walking down the street apparently talking to themselves, without people yelling "sheet!" and "word!" and "mail!" at random...:-)
As for processor power, it's always nicer to have more rather than less. Apps like voice recog. do require power, as do things like Encore (A work-in-progress Psion doom port...)
wince is one of microsoft's less bad products, but it is still sucky compared to epoc's design. To call wince "good" is a little over the top, when it's still very inefficient and bloated compared to epoc.
I would never say I was a propenent of harwired OSes - I'd much rather my PDA's OS was on flash ram, so I could upgrade it/replace it with something else. (n.b. this is _not_ possible with my psion, AFAIK)
For a given processor power, I'd prefer epoc to wince - but most wince PDAs have faster CPUs than epoc ones, mainly to compensate for wince's overhead, but some include a margin over and above. The psion series 7, however, pretty much puts paid to that, given it runs at 133 MHz.
I haven't seen wince voice recognition, myself. How powerful is it - is it like the level I'm suggesting, where you say "word" and the wordprocessor opens, or what? (i.e. voice/recognition/, not voice recording...)
Although, AFAIK, epoc is not open-source, it is designed to be cross-platform, like the linux kernel - i.e. psion can recompile epoc for different cpus and system architectures. There are currently the ARM 7100 and WINS (x86, running under windows) ports, but they are porting to some motorola arch. (not sure if it is 680x0).
Epoc C++ programs are supposed to be source compatible across epoc supported architectures.
AFAIK, The psion EPOC32 SDK, is now free to download, £10 on CD... Hardly exorbitant, althought a 100MB+ download ( for C++, java and OPL SDKS) can be painful.
The only problem is it is tied into MS Visual C -d'oh ! I emailed psion about this, and got told that they had no plans to port their SDK to linux in the immediate future - but their SDK includes a complete EPOC implementation "WINS" that runs as a process under Win32. A similar "LINS" system would certainly be possible, but non-trivial for them to port, which is probably their main worry, apart from the fact that linux may become an epoc competitor.
However, the standard compiler for EPOC in the SDK is gcc, and their SDK includes other custom command line tools which run under MSDOS, but which look like they'd be a recompile-job for linux. The emulator is not absolutely necessary for development, so I suggested an initial release of their command line tools compiled for linux, which would be just about enough to ease epoc development on linux. You could, I suppose, get by (ish) with wine and dosemu, but I'd prefer to have native tools,
Perhaps if more people/ people who carry more industry clout than me (:-) seeing as I'm just a masters student in manchester...) were to get on to them, they'd change their mind. It seems silly to tie in epoc development to an MS product... check out www.epocworld.com for dev. info
Voice imput would be cool. There's was a package called voiceshell on the amiga that used to run acceptably, with a 255-word vocab (one or more of which could be "load new vocab bank" - thus making the vocab practically infinite, but segmented...) on my (overclocked to!) 42MHz 68030 amiga, back in the good old days, so I suspect it would be possible on a 36MHz ARM...
There are several versions of tetris for free download on psion-related websites. Most are "freeware", some "shareware"
I can't comment on the java vm on the Psion 5mx, but I've successfully run the java vncviewer on my psion - it's slow (though I did manage to use netscape on it over a (null-modem) ppp link), so I'm looking into a port to native code...
I'm pretty sure it's the IR led, but I guess I could be wrong. - I've played with lots of different remotes, and a few other IR devices. I can see psion series 5mx IR leds, and mobile phone IR leds.
Note that I only see it faintly, and only when it's dark. - unlike the clearly visible flare you get when you shine the same IR led into an unfiltered CCD.
I think that it's more likely that the LEDs emit small amounts of higher-frequency light, that I see, rather than my having an extra-low frequency response. But I wouldn't mind checking.
Quick slashdot survey : how many of you can see the red light on most TV remotes when you look at them in the dark? I can, as can several other people I know, but other people claim not to see them (whether they're not looking hard enough, or if there is a real difference in frequency response, I don't know)
Also, I remember someone on slashdot saying that human blue receptors are sensitive far into the ultra-violet, it's just our lenses are uv-opaque, so they proposed uv-torches (i.e. "black-light" lamps, as used in discos) and artificial lenses for spies...
Yes, but that depends on how much control you have over the POP3 servers - they're for university students, and the admins aren't amenable to persuasion.
Um... Fetchmail is usually used in conjunction with sendmail and procmail to do fancy things with you incoming mail from multiple remote e-mail accounts. It is not a sendmail replacement.
I personally use fetchmail - it checks for e-mails on several different POP3 servers every 10 minutes or so, and merges them into my system's sendmail stream, then sendmail calls procmail to filter/distribute them to various mail folders and netscape.
This is very, very useful if you have several e-mail accounts and medium to high volumes of e-mail that you want to pre-sort (and spam filter) before reading - and fetchmail is very easy to use.
Some nerds use amigas. Amiga stuff matters to them. See slashdot title.
Yes, an awful lot of amiga-specifice software on the aminet is GPL or BSD-style licensed. There's a wealth of code that could "add to linux's perfection"...
A disproportionately large number of current European Linux developers started out on the amiga, and the amiga architecture always had a lot more in common with a unix than with ms-dos/windows, thus getting people off to a quick start on "real" systems.
I hava a 50MHz (ca. 100MIPS) 68060 amiga (that can run linux) that is a serviceable box for my family's internet access needs. My last amiga, before I went and got a 400MHz PC running linux (I'll hopefully swich to an alpha or PPC again when I get the money...).
The amiga OS is what the BeOS draws most inspiration from, in terms of design - i.e. media friendly, data streaming. The amiga os was a message passing-by-reference ( thus killing any hope of easy memory protection, but that's another story) microkernel-like (not a true microkernel, but the core executive's about 38K), preemptive multi-tasking, pervasively scripted(arexx) object oriented OS, years ahead of its time (at least in the home market).
That said, there's little likelyhood of the current amiga trademark owners using anything much other than the amiga name.
And if you don't like amiga news, its possible to go to your slashdot preferences and drop it...
XFree 4.0 will have the direct rendering infrastructure. This will allow hw-accelerated windowed and full screen OpenGL (Mesa actually, but hey...) for any card with drivers ( TNT, matrox and 3dfx are likely to be in at the start) The GLX code in the new release will also allow network-transparent OpenGL - i.e. you can run hardware-accelerated OpenGL programs/across the network/, running the program on one machine, and using the hw accleration on the computer you're displaying on.
OpenGL is an excellent 2D and 3D graphics api, much better than directx. (yes, though most people hear of opengl for 3D, it's fine at 2D too...)
OpenGL/is/ very fast, very easy to program for, There is also the persistent myth that X is slow. - well, across a network it wouldn't be fast, but X has had shared memory extensions for years for accelerating local clients, and DGA for fullscreen 2D rendering. It's/not/ slow.
q3test for linux is already running great on my voodoo banshee, thanks to Daryll Strauss' efforts (glide.xxedgexx.com) It uses the Mesa OpenGL api running on top of the linux glide port.
check out www,precisioninsight.com and www.xfree86.org
More worrying is sound... perhaps ALSA will result in better sound support. I still miss AHI on the amiga. but then again, the amiga was near-realtime ( by sacrificing such luxuries as memory protection...d'oh!), so latency problems were much smaller.
While GW are thoroughly messing up the amiga, there is some development, (mainly in Germany and the UK) for the "classic" amiga line, companies like haage&partner, phase5, blittersoft. The aminet still gets lots of uploads.
The amiga OS is lacking in some (major) areas, but it is a platform that many European Free Software coders grew up on, and is much more similar to Linux than windows. The GNU GPL is a popular license for amiga software too. It has a good, well-integrated CLI and GUI, and "felt" like a cut-down unix, with some weird stuff thrown in. It, along with linux, and unlike windows and the mac, always encouraged creative hobbyist programming, with AMOS and Blitz for beginners, C and 68k asm for bigger projects.
(BeOS is basically the AmigaOS done right.)
It was very,very easy to program for ( 68k asm is much, much, better than x86 -most 68k macro asm projects look pretty much like C), there are 3 freely available, open source C compilers - egcs, vbcc and DICE. (The entire GNU suite was ported to AmigaDOS), and if you've ever read the amigaOS 3.1 system include files, you'll know what a pleasant architecture to develop for it was. Aahhh, taglists... messages... exec list nodes... devices...
It was always fun, like linux is, and I for one would like to see some of the slick little features of amiga os make it into linux - maybe not the core os, but the bits people left in the amiga community consider important - i.e. near-realtime multimedia performance, retargetable graphics and sound.
And little things, like the way disks were referred to by/their/ name, not by the drive they were in - So if you're an application developer, you ask the end user to insert "volume named Shovelware1:" rather than "insert Disc 1 into drive e:".
This cuts out having to poll, like in the debian installer, which has a file on it saying, basically, "this is debian disk 1"
It also makes automounting much more sensible. (and yes, I know about vold - but why isn't it used more? - you could have an inserted cdrom appearing in/mnt/cdrom/name_of_cd/, floppy in/mnt/cdrom/name_of_floppy/ which would make working with removable media much less ambiguous...)
Slashdot Mirror
such is the price for a secure system....
Maybe you're an unusually strong source of gamma radiation :-)
It's /not/ ok to download binary bits and run them. You should be bloody careful, whether you're manually FTPing the files and running them, or automatically downloading+running. It's VERY SILLY to just randomly run binaries from any source, on the internet or otherwise. If you're a home user without much to lose, then you might well run something, but in a corporate or military environment, you should be more careful. The safest thing is to compile everything from source, but even then, you have to be careful your compiler is not inserting backdoors.
The most comfortable setup for 3d navigation I've used is the one I use for playing Descent 3.
I have my right hand on a logitech trackball,
and my left hand on a MS sidewinder joystick.
Trackball - pitch and heading
Stick vertical axis forward/back
stick horizontal axis - not used
stick twist - roll
stick hat - slide left/right/up/down
stick trigger - afterburners
I use the trackball buttons and wheel for weapons,
the stick buttons for countermeasures and
inventory.
I just wish the descent 3 linux port was released,
so I wouldn't have to boot into windows anymore.
When I attempted to run a binary infected with the chernobyl virus (off the hard disk of a guy whose bios got fried), wine trapped the illegal memory accesses and dumped me in the debugger. It was very interesting to see it "on ice"
The other problem is that some manufacturers, here in europe at least, will mark a printer as "windows" if it only includes a parallel port, and "windows+mac" if it includes a parallel and serial interface. Some of the printers marked "windows only" actually work fine on linux.
For example, the Epson Stylus Color 640 does not differ much from the old 600, except that it leaves out some of the more obscure ESC/P2 commands, but it is badged "windows only"...It worked fine on my amiga, let alone linux...
This is different to the "WinPrinter" models you describe, which are marked, often with identical logos, as "windows only". This can get very irritating, as I'm sure you can imagine - but we can blame it all on microsoft - they push the "windows printer" mark, presumably to encourage lock-in....
One thing people do forget when talking about the original amigas - the cpu didn't do a lot of the work on the system, the PAD (custom chips called Paula, Agnus, Denise) did.
You had:
paula doing sound,
the blitter doing all the fancy hi-speed (at the time) graphics movement (which AFAIK would have to be done on the CPU on the Palm),
The copper (a really cool (at the time) amiga display-synchronised graphics co-processor with 3-instructions (move to, wait for, skip if)) handling the bitmap display. It was the copper that enabled the amiga to do the fancy screen-dragging tricks enlightenment now does in software ( Rasterman was once an amiga hacker, AFAIK) Again this frees up the cpu.
The floppy disk io was also done by the custom chips.
The amiga had 256KByte to 2Mbyte of "chip" memory, depending on the model. "chip" mem was shared between the custom chips and the cpu. There was also "fast" memory, which was for the cpu only.
Since the "chip" memory was shared between the CPU and the custom chips, and the copper and blitter could trigger cpu interrupts, and the copper could be set to program the blitter, and all three could work on the same area of memory, including eachother's program code, you could do some _very_ weird stuff with the amiga display. That's why all those old Amiga (Euro)Demos tended to be so cool compared to the PC and ST crowd of the time.
doom may not be on the Palm, but it's on the psion (just - no picking up objects, gun graphic, or map... however they're only at v0.2) www.palmtop.nl
Let's hear it for the Aquatic ape theory !!! Humans have a pronounced diving reflex, streamlined shape,water-wasteful waste disposal, a tendency to pig out on shellfish, quite good 3D spatial awareness, etc. etc. We're much better adapted for shoreline life than for the savannah. (and cetaceans seem to have a soft spot for us... maybe they remember something...:-) )
It seems to me we're actually specialised to be nonspecialists - we function adequately on land, in shallow water, and in the trees..
This may be impractical, but it would be cool...
There's still pretty nice stuff in the AmigaOS, which could be, for example, folded into linux.
There's amiga news available on www.cucug.org
Or someone could add the CAOS specced libraries into the AmigaOS (CAOS was the DOS specification that was originally intended to be used on the Amiga, but wasn't finished in time) instead of AmigaDOS (based on TriPOS) into the amigaos. This would yield a high speed, small memory footprint OS that would possibly work well for palmtops / embedded devices. (It'd be better than PalmOS, and (initially) slightly worse than EPOC32...)
You're probably right about talking to the PDA. It's bad enough seeing people with hands-free mobile phone sets, walking down the street apparently talking to themselves, without people yelling "sheet!" and "word!" and "mail!" at random... :-)
As for processor power, it's always nicer to have more rather than less. Apps like voice recog. do require power, as do things like Encore (A work-in-progress Psion doom port...)
wince is one of microsoft's less bad products, but it is still sucky compared to epoc's design. To call wince "good" is a little over the top, when it's still very inefficient and bloated compared to epoc.
/recognition/, not voice recording...)
I would never say I was a propenent of harwired OSes - I'd much rather my PDA's OS was on flash ram, so I could upgrade it/replace it with something else. (n.b. this is _not_ possible with my psion, AFAIK)
For a given processor power, I'd prefer epoc to wince - but most wince PDAs have faster CPUs than epoc ones, mainly to compensate for wince's overhead, but some include a margin over and above. The psion series 7, however, pretty much puts paid to that, given it runs at 133 MHz.
I haven't seen wince voice recognition, myself.
How powerful is it - is it like the level I'm suggesting, where you say "word" and the wordprocessor opens, or what? (i.e. voice
Although, AFAIK, epoc is not open-source, it is designed to be cross-platform, like the linux kernel - i.e. psion can recompile epoc for different cpus and system architectures. There are currently the ARM 7100 and WINS (x86, running under windows) ports, but they are porting to some motorola arch. (not sure if it is 680x0).
Epoc C++ programs are supposed to be source compatible across epoc supported architectures.
> 255-word vocab (one or more of which could be "load new vocab bank"- thus making the vocab practically infinite, but segmented...)
255-word vocab (one or more of the words could be "load new vocab bank xyz" - thus making the vocab practically infinite, but segmented...)
It could run ARexx commands, which meant that integration into the Amiga OS was trivial.
So, let the psion voiceshell run OPL/Macro5 stuff...
> Kinda nifty, regardless.
Yeah...
True IR and UV vision would be pretty cool, though...
I just got a Psion 5mx last week
:-) seeing as I'm just a masters student in manchester...) were to get on to them, they'd change their mind. It seems silly to tie in epoc development to an MS product...
AFAIK, The psion EPOC32 SDK, is now free to download, £10 on CD... Hardly exorbitant,
althought a 100MB+ download ( for C++, java and OPL SDKS) can be painful.
The only problem is it is tied into MS Visual C -d'oh ! I emailed psion about this, and got told
that they had no plans to port their SDK to linux in the immediate future - but their SDK includes a complete EPOC implementation "WINS" that runs as a process under Win32. A similar "LINS" system would certainly be possible, but non-trivial for them to port, which is probably their main worry, apart from the fact that linux may become an epoc competitor.
However, the standard compiler for EPOC in the SDK is gcc, and their SDK includes other custom command line tools which run under MSDOS, but which look like they'd be a recompile-job for linux. The emulator is not absolutely necessary for development, so I suggested an initial release of their command line tools compiled for linux, which would be just about enough to ease epoc development on linux.
You could, I suppose, get by (ish) with wine and dosemu, but I'd prefer to have native tools,
Perhaps if more people/ people who carry more industry clout than me (
check out www.epocworld.com for dev. info
Voice imput would be cool. There's was a package called voiceshell on the amiga that used to run acceptably, with a 255-word vocab (one or more of which could be "load new vocab bank" - thus making the vocab practically infinite, but segmented...) on my (overclocked to!) 42MHz 68030 amiga, back in the good old days, so I suspect it would be possible on a 36MHz ARM...
There are several versions of tetris for free download on psion-related websites. Most are "freeware", some "shareware"
I can't comment on the java vm on the Psion 5mx, but I've successfully run the java vncviewer on my psion - it's slow (though I did manage to use netscape on it over a (null-modem) ppp link), so I'm looking into a port to native code...
I'm pretty sure it's the IR led, but I guess I could be wrong. - I've played with lots of different remotes, and a few other IR devices. I can see psion series 5mx IR leds, and mobile phone IR leds.
Note that I only see it faintly, and only when it's dark. - unlike the clearly visible flare you get when you shine the same IR led into an unfiltered CCD.
I think that it's more likely that the LEDs emit small amounts of higher-frequency light, that I see, rather than my having an extra-low frequency response. But I wouldn't mind checking.
Quick slashdot survey : how many of you can see the red light on most TV remotes when you look at them in the dark? I can, as can several other people I know, but other people claim not to see them (whether they're not looking hard enough, or if there is a real difference in frequency response, I don't know)
Also, I remember someone on slashdot saying that human blue receptors are sensitive far into the ultra-violet, it's just our lenses are uv-opaque, so they proposed uv-torches (i.e. "black-light" lamps, as used in discos) and artificial lenses for spies...
Yes, but that depends on how much control you have over the POP3 servers - they're for university students, and the admins aren't amenable to persuasion.
Um... Fetchmail is usually used in conjunction with sendmail and procmail to do fancy things with you incoming mail from multiple remote e-mail accounts. It is not a sendmail replacement.
I personally use fetchmail - it checks for e-mails on several different POP3 servers every 10 minutes or so, and merges them into my system's sendmail stream, then sendmail calls procmail to filter/distribute them to various mail folders and netscape.
This is very, very useful if you have several e-mail accounts and medium to high volumes of e-mail that you want to pre-sort (and spam filter) before reading - and fetchmail is very easy to use.
Some nerds use amigas. Amiga stuff matters to them. See slashdot title.
Yes, an awful lot of amiga-specifice software on the aminet is GPL or BSD-style licensed. There's a wealth of code that could "add to linux's perfection"...
A disproportionately large number of current European Linux developers started out on the amiga, and the amiga architecture always had a lot more in common with a unix than with ms-dos/windows, thus getting people off to a quick start on "real" systems.
I hava a 50MHz (ca. 100MIPS) 68060 amiga (that can run linux) that is a serviceable box for my family's internet access needs. My last amiga, before I went and got a 400MHz PC running linux (I'll hopefully swich to an alpha or PPC again when I get the money...).
The amiga OS is what the BeOS draws most inspiration from, in terms of design - i.e. media friendly, data streaming. The amiga os was a message passing-by-reference ( thus killing any hope of easy memory protection, but that's another story) microkernel-like (not a true microkernel, but the core executive's about 38K), preemptive multi-tasking, pervasively scripted(arexx) object oriented OS, years ahead of its time (at least in the home market).
That said, there's little likelyhood of the current amiga trademark owners using anything much other than the amiga name.
And if you don't like amiga news, its possible to go to your slashdot preferences and drop it...
XFree 4.0 will have the direct rendering infrastructure. This will allow hw-accelerated windowed and full screen OpenGL (Mesa actually, but hey...) for any card with drivers ( TNT, matrox and 3dfx are likely to be in at the start) /across the network/, running the program on one machine, and using the hw accleration on the computer you're displaying on.
/is/ very fast, very easy to program for, /not/ slow.
The GLX code in the new release will also allow network-transparent OpenGL - i.e. you can run hardware-accelerated OpenGL programs
OpenGL is an excellent 2D and 3D graphics api, much better than directx. (yes, though most people hear of opengl for 3D, it's fine at 2D too...)
OpenGL
There is also the persistent myth that X is slow.
- well, across a network it wouldn't be fast, but X has had shared memory extensions for years for accelerating local clients, and DGA for fullscreen 2D rendering. It's
q3test for linux is already running great on my voodoo banshee, thanks to Daryll Strauss' efforts (glide.xxedgexx.com) It uses the Mesa OpenGL api running on top of the linux glide port.
check out www,precisioninsight.com and www.xfree86.org
More worrying is sound... perhaps ALSA will result in better sound support. I still miss AHI on the amiga. but then again, the amiga was near-realtime ( by sacrificing such luxuries as memory protection...d'oh!), so latency problems were much smaller.
name_of_floppy makes _even more_ sense :-)
that makes more sense...
While GW are thoroughly messing up the amiga, there is some development, (mainly in Germany and the UK) for the "classic" amiga line, companies like haage&partner, phase5, blittersoft.
/their/ name, not by the drive they were in - So if you're an application developer, you ask the end user to insert "volume named Shovelware1:" rather than "insert Disc 1 into drive e:".
/mnt/cdrom/name_of_cd/, floppy in /mnt/cdrom/name_of_floppy/ which would make working with removable media much less ambiguous...)
The aminet still gets lots of uploads.
The amiga OS is lacking in some (major) areas,
but it is a platform that many European Free Software coders grew up on, and is much more similar to Linux than windows. The GNU GPL is a popular license for amiga software too.
It has a good, well-integrated CLI and GUI, and "felt" like a cut-down unix, with some weird stuff thrown in. It, along with linux, and unlike windows and the mac, always encouraged creative hobbyist programming, with AMOS and Blitz for beginners, C and 68k asm for bigger projects.
(BeOS is basically the AmigaOS done right.)
It was very,very easy to program for ( 68k asm is much, much, better than x86 -most 68k macro asm projects look pretty much like C), there are 3 freely available, open source C compilers - egcs, vbcc and DICE. (The entire GNU suite was ported to AmigaDOS), and if you've ever read the amigaOS 3.1
system include files, you'll know what a pleasant architecture to develop for it was. Aahhh, taglists... messages... exec list nodes... devices...
It was always fun, like linux is, and I for one would like to see some of the slick little features of amiga os make it into linux - maybe not the core os, but the bits people left in the amiga community consider important - i.e. near-realtime multimedia performance, retargetable graphics and sound.
And little things, like the way disks were referred to by
This cuts out having to poll, like in the debian installer, which has a file on it saying, basically, "this is debian disk 1"
It also makes automounting much more sensible. (and yes, I know about vold - but why isn't it used more? - you could have an inserted cdrom appearing in