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LambdaCalculus
New Jersey, USA

Posted Fri Aug 04, 2017 7:03 am

intric8 wrote: 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?
Unfortunately, there's no easy way at all of getting AmigaOS 4.1 working on a G4 PPC Mac. I know that there's a very unofficial bootloader called "Moana" that would allow AmigaOS 4 booting on a G4 Mac Mini, but due to lack of drivers, it's not much more useful than as a conversation piece, or a means of staring at Workbench but not being able to do squat with it. :?

If Hyperion actually decided to write drivers to support AmigaOS on Mac PPC hardware much like how MorphOS does, it may also increase adoption of AmigaOS somewhat, but at the same time would also undermine the Amiga X line. Yet on the other hand, Amiga X machines are expensive as hell for many, while PPC Macs can be had for practically a song on a site like eBay. It's quite the conundrum here to try and figure the best route to take.

While I find MorphOS to work well enough on my Mac Mini, there are still a couple of bumps in the road even there. Odyssey is a decent enough web browser if you use mobile sites, but as icbrkr mentioned, we need something better than that; a Firefox port would help immensely. A port of LibreOffice for both AmigaOS 4 (and MorphOS and AROS!) would be an immense boost as well.

(Side note icbrkr: Have you tried out NetSurf on AmigaOS?)

Personally, I really do want to see AmigaOS move up the ladder more and gain more modern trimmings. I really want to see it make some kind of headway. The OS market is slowly beginning to diversify once again as people discover alternatives to Windows, and AmigaOS, as well as Amiga-like OSes, deserve a chance in the spotlight as well. But with all of these issues at hand that need fixing, that will be a hell of an uphill battle. And from a philosophical standpoint, this is why I personally feel that AmigaOS needs to be open sourced and badly. Having it opened to the community will allow rapid progress to be made, with many eyes able to catch and fix bugs. It's only the logical choice to go with; AROS is open source and benefits from being such. MorphOS and AmigaOS should follow suit.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Fri Aug 04, 2017 7:07 am

this is why I personally feel that AmigaOS needs to be open sourced and badly. Having it opened to the community will allow rapid progress to be made, with many eyes able to catch and fix bugs.
Couldn't agree more. Let Hyperion et al be the Red Hat for it so they can still make a little money off it. But let the community really own it and drive it. It's so overdue.

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LambdaCalculus
New Jersey, USA

Posted Fri Aug 04, 2017 7:18 am

intric8 wrote:Couldn't agree more. Let Hyperion et al be the Red Hat for it so they can still make a little money off it. But let the community really own it and drive it. It's so overdue.
Absolutely agree. Open source the OS; release API information for newcomers; invite F/OSS projects out there to start porting to AmigaOS.

MorphOS should do the same. Everyday apps I use in Linux (Firefox, LibreOffice, GIMP, VLC, etc) should be brought up to speed and ported over. SDL2 should re-implement support for other OSes. Languages like Python and Ruby have implementations, but add in more languages like Swift, etc.

I seriously also feel that Hyperion and the MorphOS team need to take a good, long, hard look at a project like Haiku and see how they run their boat. Haiku, while not having released an alpha in a long while, keeps releasing nightly builds of their OS, and you can easily grab one, run it, and keep track of changes being made. Haiku has near daily posts about progress being made, a source tracker, and excellent and very comprehensive documentation.

Hell, even ReactOS, a F/OSS re-implementation of Windows, is ramping their game up with nightlies, source tracking, and frequent updates. There's simply no excuse at this point. :)

Even AROS has the right idea, even if their site is a little simpler by comparison!

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icbrkr
Particles! BBS

Posted Fri Aug 04, 2017 9:52 am

intric8 wrote: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.
You can't install 4.1 on a G4PPC unforutnately, and that's exactly why MorphOS exists. They are porting MorphOS to this box too though, and I might create an install for that.

I don't think it would matter which hardware it is anyway - this is inherently a driver/OS issue, not a motherboard issue. But there should be basic, working drivers. The browser issue again isn't hardware, but the fact they've outsourced/bountied for a webbrowser from a developer who got something working for them, got their bounty, and called it a day.

The software in general's not a huge deal. Most people that write for MorphOS also write for OS4 and vice versa. Plus, it's binary compatible with 68K stuff, so anything that doesn't hit the hardware directly on Aminet will work fine. That's a pretty large stash of software.


I'll keep this local.. I mean, I know I'm coming at this from a different angle than most Amiga users - most have been dealing with a lot of these issues for so long they just accept that's part of it. And I accept it too for most things. I don't think they need some a-hole like me making a scene on their pages :)

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icbrkr
Particles! BBS

Posted Fri Aug 04, 2017 9:58 am

LambdaCalculus wrote: If Hyperion actually decided to write drivers to support AmigaOS on Mac PPC hardware much like how MorphOS does, it may also increase adoption of AmigaOS somewhat, but at the same time would also undermine the Amiga X line. Yet on the other hand, Amiga X machines are expensive as hell for many, while PPC Macs can be had for practically a song on a site like eBay. It's quite the conundrum here to try and figure the best route to take.

While I find MorphOS to work well enough on my Mac Mini, there are still a couple of bumps in the road even there. Odyssey is a decent enough web browser if you use mobile sites, but as icbrkr mentioned, we need something better than that; a Firefox port would help immensely. A port of LibreOffice for both AmigaOS 4 (and MorphOS and AROS!) would be an immense boost as well.

(Side note icbrkr: Have you tried out NetSurf on AmigaOS?)

Personally, I really do want to see AmigaOS move up the ladder more and gain more modern trimmings. I really want to see it make some kind of headway. The OS market is slowly beginning to diversify once again as people discover alternatives to Windows, and AmigaOS, as well as Amiga-like OSes, deserve a chance in the spotlight as well. But with all of these issues at hand that need fixing, that will be a hell of an uphill battle. And from a philosophical standpoint, this is why I personally feel that AmigaOS needs to be open sourced and badly. Having it opened to the community will allow rapid progress to be made, with many eyes able to catch and fix bugs. It's only the logical choice to go with; AROS is open source and benefits from being such. MorphOS and AmigaOS should follow suit.
With the Tabor/A1222 motherboard coming out, I think this would be a good intro to the Amiga. $400-500 isn't a lot for a computer to "play" with.

For converting to the Mac, I think this is a bad idea in general. The last PowerPC based system rolled out in what, 2005? We're talking aging hardware and no real upgrade path. The slots are out of date, the standards are out of date, etc. Building a new board is a good idea, but make it cheaper.

This is part of the problem with MorphOS. They still haven't written drivers for a lot of the Macs, and their userbase will eventually shrink because there is no new hardware to run it on.

But the right answer I think is a combo of everything.

AEON needs to build boards.
Hyperion/Morphos/Whatever needs to join forces to fix all the things that are broken.

And to answer your question, yep, I have Netsurf on here and it's pretty fast and works for most things, but unfortunately, not all.

(and this post was posted while typing on my x5000)

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Fri Aug 04, 2017 10:02 am

Hah! Well, you and I work in the tech industry. I know from my own personal work experience that customer/user feedback is massive and treated with the utmost respect. (At least, most of it.) While it's usually people pointing out "what's wrong" and very rarely praise, it really helps us make our product better. It's all in how it's delivered.

It's the silent users that we fear because we never get to have a dialog and they just walk away. Had we known what was in their head, we might have had a chance to fix some things or look at things in a different way. Granted - we're not going to go chase every single complaint but it's good to know what power users think.

Dude. You're a power user if ever there was one.

The stuff you're pointing out on Day One seems pretty huge in my opinion. If anything, I'd just try to ping Trevor. Not like, "Hey dude this sucks" but more, "I think if these 3 things were addressed, your vision for this product might have some legs." That kind of thing.

EDIT: So how does Amigalove.com render on your x5000?

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LambdaCalculus
New Jersey, USA

Posted Fri Aug 04, 2017 10:21 am

icbrkr wrote: With the Tabor/A1222 motherboard coming out, I think this would be a good intro to the Amiga. $400-500 isn't a lot for a computer to "play" with.
No, it's actually quite reasonable. I might consider unloading some old equipment to put a little something towards a Tabor.
For converting to the Mac, I think this is a bad idea in general. The last PowerPC based system rolled out in what, 2005? We're talking aging hardware and no real upgrade path. The slots are out of date, the standards are out of date, etc. Building a new board is a good idea, but make it cheaper.

This is part of the problem with MorphOS. They still haven't written drivers for a lot of the Macs, and their userbase will eventually shrink because there is no new hardware to run it on.
Yeah, the last Power Mac G5 model was Late 2005. While those Macs have some semi-modern connectors like SATA and multiple USB ports, only the Late 2005 G5 sports more modern PCI Express slots. And the punchline? MorphOS doesn't support that model Mac! WOMP WOMP. :roll:

What also hurts potential usable hardware is the complete lack of Nvidia graphics support in MorphOS. Not sure if AmigaOS supports Nvidia, but in either case, I can't run MorphOS on my PowerBook G4 12" because it has an Nvidia chip. Another WOMP WOMP.

Meanwhile, I threw AROS onto a spare Core 2 Duo box I have with an Nvidia GeForce 6200 card installed, and it's quite happy with it. Quake II plays nice with it, at least. :)
But the right answer I think is a combo of everything.

AEON needs to build boards.
Hyperion/Morphos/Whatever needs to join forces to fix all the things that are broken.
A Herculean task they must undertake, my friend! But it's a task that must be done!

MorphOS benefitted from AROS source code. AROS can benefit in turn from code from MorphOS.
AmigaOS can use some of that code to build additional libraries and hardware support.
A-EON needs to have developers help write drivers for their hardware and look to supporting hardware that users may have.

The bloody licensing needs to be reconsidered, and all parties involved need to look towards a plan to open the source to the communities.

But big thanks to you icbrkr for telling us about your experience with the X5000 so far! And I'm actually quite happy we all had a nice, in-depth discussion around this and the community as well!

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icbrkr
Particles! BBS

Posted Sat Aug 05, 2017 4:46 pm

Yeah, open source may be the way to go at some point. You just have to convince the other people.

I did some reading on Hyperion's website, and posted some of my issues, and what I'm starting to gather is that the drivers for this system aren't really "done" yet and more or less, we're beta testing them. You know what, that's okay. I don't mind giving input in making the system better, as long as they're actively working on it and it seems they are.

There's other sound cards available that are supposed to be more stable. I'll check into them because honestly, sound cards are dirt cheap.

I noticed there was a 802.11g driver for a particular type of NIC for OS 4.x. I ordered it to give it a shot.

Will keep everyone updated.

Oh btw Eric.. the page renders fine on the Amiga.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sat Aug 05, 2017 4:52 pm

Oh btw Eric.. the page renders fine on the Amiga.
<3

Hey, glad to hear they're working with you on getting your system sorted out. That's got to make you feel a lot better. Glad you pinged them, too.

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icbrkr
Particles! BBS

Posted Sat Aug 05, 2017 7:47 pm

Just an update...

So.. I will have to take back at least one of my gripes.

While I was downloading stuff from the Amiga App Store (isn't it weird saying that?), it said.. "Hey, your system drive is full!".... I was like.. wait what?

Turns out when it was built, only the defaults were used. That means I was given a 1GB system drive. This is 2017 - that isn't going to cut it. So I backed up the data and am rebuilding this from scratch.

During the rebuild, it asks you straight up what resolution your monitor is going to be. So it appears that defaults were used again, so I got the lowest possible.





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