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icbrkr
Particles! BBS

Posted Sat Jul 29, 2017 5:46 pm

... and my new Amiga x5000 shows up.

Long time coming, and there's a whole story behind it too. But unless it's a box of bricks, I have a tracking number and the whole deal.

Got a nice spot here on the desk for it... a DVI switch box ready too.

Not sure what I'm going to to do with it, but it's fun to be excited over new hardware.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sat Jul 29, 2017 11:49 pm

I've been captivated hearing about this saga on Particles BBS, IceB. I can't believe how unprofessional the whole ordeal has been. But I am so-so-so excited to see what it all looks like when it finally arrives!

Glad it is finally on its way. Can't believe it has be so ... what's the word? Weird. For such a top-shelf spend to take this long I really don't get it.

Happy to hear it is finally on a truck and about to be placed on your doorstep! The days of buying a brand new Amiga and driving it home are obviously WAY over, man. What a hit. You shouldn't have had to stress like that.

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TenLeftFingers

Posted Sun Jul 30, 2017 3:41 am

Let us know how it goes :) I saw one at the Amiga Ireland event in Jarualy. It's a wonderful machine. I might get an A1222 if I can do a portion of my work on it. I'm told Google Docs work fine on it as well as Libre Office being in the works. So that's a practical use for me.

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icbrkr
Particles! BBS

Posted Mon Jul 31, 2017 2:48 pm

It has been a bit of a cluster.

I'm hoping most stuff that I want to work 'just works' so I can use this as a sort of main machine.

I know it won't be, but it'll be fun to try.

Tomorrow.. it'll be here tomorrow.

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TenLeftFingers

Posted Tue Aug 01, 2017 2:58 am

Hopefully the machine itself will make it worth it. I listen to AmiCast a lot and the host Krzysztof Radzikowski has a lot of opinions on OS4. He literally 'wrote the book' too. In a nutshell he's very happy with it but wants to see the browser improve. He's not using it daily because of it's limitations.

For me, Google Docs and Libre Office would make the machine useable on a daily basis - more or less. The former is present and the latter is on the way.

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LambdaCalculus
New Jersey, USA

Posted Tue Aug 01, 2017 6:21 am

I wish I had the kind of cash needed to throw around to get an Amiga X5000 for myself. AmigaOS 4 has me intrigued and I would love to explore it and see how it stacks up to MorphOS and AROS.

Alas, an X5000 is way out of my price range! The Mac Mini G4 I got was a paltry $65, which isn't bad for a MorphOS box. I guess I could buy AmigaOS 4.1 for Classic Amiga and try getting it running with AmiKit and FlowerPot. Even in an emulated environment, I would get to play with the OS and get a good feel for it.

Also side note: I should try compiling Libre Office on either AROS or MorphOS. Having a complete office suite for both OSes would be massively beneficial and make them more useful as daily drivers.

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TenLeftFingers

Posted Tue Aug 01, 2017 7:07 am

LambdaCalculus wrote:I wish I had the kind of cash needed to throw around to get an Amiga X5000 for myself.
I'm might aim for the A1222 for similar reasons.
Also side note: I should try compiling Libre Office on either AROS or MorphOS. Having a complete office suite for both OSes would be massively beneficial and make them more useful as daily drivers.
Libre Office for AROS would be a huge boon for the AROS project and the community. I imagine it would be no small task. If you build with debug symbols included I could test binaries.

Edit: here's a thread on getting started with AROS development.

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icbrkr
Particles! BBS

Posted Thu Aug 03, 2017 5:10 pm

Well it's here!

And it made it okay!

Well that's the good parts... it's been interesting so far, and I'm keeping a list of things that drive me nuts about it. I don't have it right next to me, but I'll go over it here in a second.

It's well made, looks great. There is no mistaking that it's an Amiga OS. And that's both good and bad.

I fired it up.. and a few minutes later it crashed. I tried some apps. They crashed. Everytime I tried to do something on the network, it crashed.

So I fired up Tunenet (streaming audio). Sound went out after 20 seconds. Rebooted, same thing happened. Annoyed, I went and searched the forums and while there was problems with the sound on some sound cards, this wasn't one.

I went to bed to work on it the next day.

The next day, I put on my Amiga hat and asked.. how would I fix this on my 4000T? I moved the card up one PCI slot. Everything started working without a problem. Sound started working, all good. I started feeling much better about my purchase.

The fact that it looks like the AmigaOS is both good and bad like I said before. So much of 4.1 is a collection of freeware and shareware kludges/utils/whatever that were made over the years for 3.9 that have moved to the 4.1 platform. It's good they included them, but bad that they had to.

The RunInUAE works flawlessly. I laughed as I double-clicked an ADF file and it took off loading the game, complete with disk drive sounds over the speakers.

Where the Amiga Dock was a nice to have on 3.9, it's a necessity on 4.1 . I have all my apps there, and there's a new thing called 'dockies' that allows a constantly updating icon to be on the dock. So I have a docky that shows my CPU usage, a docky that shows my RAM usage, etc. It's pretty neat.

The prefs have been overhauled, but everything is exactly where you remember them.

I set about to pretend this was my main machine so I will do the things that I would normally do. I fired up the included OWB browser, which is something you should use to download another browser (kinda like IE). I downloaded Odyssey which works pretty well, but's outdated. Gmail doesn't work. I can use FB, but it crashes. And when I say crash, just like always, there's no memory protection so it just sits there 'hung'. I can use FB in mobile mode and it works fine. I connected via telnet from my own page, and it worked long enough to post 3 or 4 messages on the board and then crashed. Not having a web browser that works properly in 2017 is unacceptable.

I installed WookieChat for my IRC program, which worked perfectly. I used the built in TuneNet for MP3s and radio stations.

Speaking of built in, I'm liking the update feature. Like Windows Update, there's an Amiga Update which updates your apps and third party apps which worked perfectly.

I created an account on the AmiStore and bought zTools. This worked well too.

So.. what drives me nuts? Here's some things:

- We went over the web browser issue. This needs to be fixed.. now.
- No WiFi. It's 2017. Again, another thing that should be fixed immediately.
- When I first fired it up, I hooked it up to my standard 23" LCD monitor. However, the maximum the Radeon 7700 driver would see by default is a 1280x1024 monitor. Who in 2017 has a 1280x1024 monitor as the main monitor for a $2k machine? Luckily I remembed how to edit a monitor file to add more modes but someone new would be lost.
- No memory protection.
- My whole PCI soundcard issue. I shouldn't have to move stuff around on the PCI bus until it works.
- A fun one.. don't leave
a DVD in the drive, the system won't boot. And it won't tell you why. It just sits there at the boot screen doing nothing.

Don't get me wrong thinking I'm saying this thing is junk, it's not. I'm having fun using it. I am just a bit astonished that the most basic of things haven't been corrected in the 17 years since 3.9 came out.

I'll update more later :)

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Thu Aug 03, 2017 10:20 pm

Dude - thanks so much for all of the insights! This is the most honest and comprehensive test drive I've seen.

That sounds like a really interesting machine.

The way you've described it though - and I don't mean this as a dig - but it reminds me a bit of Mac OS 8 during the Beige era (say, late 90s pre-OS 9). Great little OS, easy to use and intuitive, crappy internet with no WiFi (it came around in 2001 or 2002 IIRC - for me, anyway) and apps that could crash the machine from time to time. And I mean total lockups that you had to reboot to fix. Premiere did this for me a lot. Raise your hand if you still have a paperclip or two around to eject a CD?

I can't help but wonder if slapping 4.1 on a G4 PPC would have gained you a similar experience? Or is that not possible and what MorphOS is for?

If all of the hardware bullshit was fixed, but the Web Browser issue still existed, would that make a difference for you? The software side, I think, is the toughest part about 4.1 in general. Well, and that memory thing. That's pretty bad.

I wonder if your real world experiences could be shared with Trevor somehow? He'd probably really value your feedback. Were you going to post this on the Facebook Amiga group, too? Or keep it more localized, so to speak.

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TenLeftFingers

Posted Fri Aug 04, 2017 6:45 am

Very interesting and helpful. Thanks for posting and Id love to hear more of your experiences over time.





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