“AROS has gained lots of bugfixes and improvements in the lastest weeks. For istance, Neil Cafferkey has corrected some important bugs is his beloved AROS Installer; Nic Andrews has worked on his RTL8139 network driver; and Robert Norris has fixed file notifications, which previously broke preferences, just to name three.”
AROS, Haiku and Syllable are the three “hyper-alternative” OSes that show promise of being someday usable and useful. AROS is especially cool as it allows for a large subset of “properly written” Amiga apps to be run with native x86 performance with what basically amounts to a simple recompile. If only they would make the effort to “self-host” AROS’s kernel building (which, given than GCC runs on AROS is probably a fairly simple task), people might even begin to take it seriously.
What do you mean? You can run it self hosted, just boot off the CD and off you go.
Self-hosting refers to the capability of a given OS to be complete enough to run a compiler and a toolchain complex and, again, completed enough to compile itself. If the OS is capable of that, it usually means that it’s basically useable and good enough for non-fans, attracting more people to the userbase.
It is considered an extremely important milestone in the development of a pice of software as complex as an OS.
Edited 2007-11-22 04:04
What do you mean? You can run it self hosted, just boot off the CD and off you go
Yes,”if it only worked”. If they want us to test their OS and find bugs, they should make it work on new hardware and not just old hardware. At the moment, users with modern hardware with JMicron on-board and SATA devices are left out.I’ve never been able to boot into AROS natively using my dual core.
If only they would make the effort to “self-host” AROS’s kernel building…
The AROS people want that too. In fact, there is already a $275 bounty waiting for anyone that accomplishes the task of “Creating tools to allow AROS to self-compile.”
http://www.thenostromo.com/teamaros2/index.php?number=14
>people might even begin to take it seriously.
I do not know if what you’re saying would really make THAT much difference. I have watched Aros news, tried a number of builds, and while I am impressed with what these guys have done, I can only come to the conclusion that in most peoples eyes.. they really don’t care about Amiga, AmigaOS or any clone of it any more. Whenever AROS gets a status update on OSNews, there are never many replies, and when AmigaOS stuff came along, people didn’t really show any interest either (apart from alot of ‘yes, another broken promise coming up’ ,or slanderous remark ). What I think is really happening, is that all the old time Amiga fanatics have literally found a new platform, and while they ‘used’ to be passionate about computers, or Amiga, they have now gone past that… People just arn’t passionate about these things any more.. not like the good old Amiga Vrs Atari wars… These things are a bygone era, and the further in to time they slip, the less people seem to even care about posting about them.
Having watched tech and public reactions to tech for many years, IMHO – If an OS is to be cloned – it has to be COMPLETED within a year maximum of it’s death – or else, any passion or flame that OS installed in people, will be pretty much dead with that userbase having become comfortable on something else. I realize that unless the OS is simpler then DOS – and has a large team.. this 1 year is out of the question.
Another example… OS/2 – had a fanatical fanbase ( I know – I was part of it once upon a time
), now, when it’s predecessor gets some news.. not many care.. same scenario applies – and when they held one of their ‘conventions’ this year, I saw some photographs, and all I can say is, sadly.. all those people there looked close to retiring, or if not, already had.. This speaks volumes about how fast Tech has changed, and how society just moves on… it just doesnt care, a dead OS is like an old car.. rusts out, scrap it, forget it and drive that new one home with all those nifty modcons.
So to me, the moral of this story – Resurrect an OS if you so desire – if it fulfills you passion – however, sadly, don’t expect many people to really come on board, no matter how good it becomes.
So, you argue, that these OSes like AROS are really good yet nobody uses them?
Or perhaps you’re drawing massive presumptions and converting ‘promise’ into ‘good OS’.
The reality is that these OSes are *not* usable for the *vast* majority of people without a *lot* of tail chasing. People are interested but not interested in wasting countless hours on beta or even alpha operating systems. There’s enough unfinished software out there absorbing our collective time. The majority of us do not have time to add an OS to that list.
So don’t be dispirited. I guarrantee you that when Syllable, Haiku, and AROS come of age, they will regain the cult followings and more. They are just not of age yet, so don’t assume that they never will have users, because you are frankly wrong.
AROS has been lacking developers (and therefore users) for quite some time, I think the reason for this is not so much because former Amiga users have lost whatever amount of passion they had for the Amiga but more because a near identical clone of AmigaOS running on top of x86 hardware is just not enough for those that have been touched by the experience that the Amiga provided. While AROS may be a good reimplementation of the AmigaOS API, the x86 hardware lets it down. I’m not saying that any new or improved AmigaOS should run on the original hardware, but x86 just doesn’t do it for us Amiga users.
See, the thing about the Amiga, the thing that made the Amiga such a brilliant computer was actually many things, I’ll give a few examples:
Adding new hardware to the Amiga just worked. Plug the hardware in, maybe you’d have to copy some files into one of the OS directories and away you go. It just worked, no messing and it was always simple to install. As far as I’m aware no other consumer computer system in world has ever got this to work *correctly*. It was called autoconfig. In the IBM PC world it’s called plug n play, and it doesn’t work properly.
AmigaOS was *small*. You could look at every file that made up the os (with the exception of the libraries on the one or two 512K ROMs) and know what every file was for. You might be able to do this with UNIX or a UNIX-like system, but even then you’re still talking a few thousand files, at least. Oh and the entire AmigaOS (not including the stuff on the roms) would fit on about three PC floppy disks).
Repairing a broken AmigaOS installation was really easy. Doesn’t matter even if it was a device driver, the recovery procedure was almost always the same: reboot, insert orignal workbench disk and copy damaged/missing files across, reboot again and voila you got a working system.
Unlike the IBM-PC market (aka Wintel) companies that created hardware and software for the Amiga actually cared about the platform and continued to do so long after the demise of Commodore. You think if Microsoft announced that they were going to drop support for all versions of Windows and replace them with Singularity or something that software/hardware vendors would continue to support Windows?
Software that ran on the Amiga was small. Let me introduce you to MUI (Magic User Interface), a GUI toolkit that took somewhere around a meg of diskspace and provided all the common GUI widgets and was almost fully user configurable. It’s still going today I believe on MorphOS.
The Amiga hardware was *very* well designed, so well designed that it was possible during the mid-late ninties to add a PPC accellerator card which provided the user with a way run to 68k software side by side with PPC software. This was years after commodore too and probably wasn’t even envisioned by the team of people that designed the Amiga. (I could be wrong but I think this was also probably the first successful consumer implementation of a multi processor computer).
These are just a few of the things that made the Amiga what it was, great hardware, great software, and a great community. Not all of these things can be had with just new hardware/software because the Amiga was not just a computer, it was a *fun* experience, it was sex, or extreme sports, or taking your M3 for a spin on the Nurburgring. Where the experience provided by other computer systems is more like getting up in the morning after a few to many bevvies the night before and finding you only got brown bread to eat and bovril to drink. At least that’s the way it’s always seemed to me and probably other Amiga users too.
As for your point about people losing passion for the Amiga, we’ve still got the passion burning inside us, and it will continue to do so until a new computer system comes along that manages to do or have all the things that made the Amiga a fun experience. We’re all still here, were just keeping quiet and using computer systems that provide us with the least amount of discomfort until the above actually happens.
Did I inject enough passion into that? ’cause If I didn’t I’ve got *plenty* more.
Edited 2007-11-22 05:22
I’m not saying that any new or improved AmigaOS should run on the original hardware, but x86 just doesn’t do it for us Amiga users.
So you’d rather have an underpowered and overpriced (and generally unavailable) processor and chipset, rather than something that is available now, for dirt cheap, and performs a lot better?
No wonder the Amiga is pretty much dead.
I should have worded that sentence differently
. What I meant was that the x86 platform doesn’t provide the right environment in which a new or improved AmigaOS could thrive.
It’s not so much that I want underpowered and overpriced hardware, but more to do with the experience that I mentioned in my previous post. An experience that the x86 platform doesn’t provide.
I think Amiga users have high expectations of what new Amiga hardware would be (or maybe that’s just me) and x86 just doesn’t stand up to those expectations.
Edited 2007-11-22 07:57
It’s not so much that I want underpowered and overpriced hardware, but more to do with the experience that I mentioned in my previous post.
The plug and play bit? Err,that’s hardly a hardware feature – it’s a software issue. Plug and play’s success depends solely on the availability of drivers; if the operating system does not have the drivers installed before you insert your hardware, plug and play doesn’t work.
In other words, Windows, Linux, and Max OS X probably have plug and play support a million times that of Amiga, for the simple fact that each of these (esp. Linux) have much wider default hardware support.
All the things that you mention in your post can easily be achieved with standard, off-the-shelf components – just look at the Intel Macs.
An experience that the x86 platform doesn’t provide.
I’ve been hearing this stuff for ages now, yet nobody ever gave me a compelling reason why this obsession with clearly inferior hardware should hold the Amiga OS hostage.
“An experience that the x86 platform doesn’t provide.”
I’ve been hearing this stuff for ages now, yet nobody ever gave me a compelling reason why this obsession with clearly inferior hardware should hold the Amiga OS hostage.
Perhaps it is that you’re to young to understand Thom
. I have never owned an Amiga or Atari myself, my first computer was a PC XT. However, the “clearly inferior hardware” was in its days clearly vastly superior: superior sound, superior gfx, superior CPU (well, not compared to the Atari ST which had the same 68K, but compared to the PC XT and AT). I think that the memory of having a superior machine is what the true Amiga fan still holds on to. Of course, that is nigh to impossible to achieve these days: the processor, sound chip and gfx card market isn’t the wild west it was back then, there’s only a few big players, and no start-up company can ever make something superior to what Intel/AMD and ATI(AMD)/nVidia are making (and as for sound, that’s totally uninteresting nowadays as even AC97 provides enough for almost everyone). As a hobby OS developer, I don’t like the x86 platform either, it’s so uninteresting, everyone owns it, you cannot really make a difference. The ‘feel’ of running your OS on a different platform is just so different of having it run in Bochs or Qemu. It’s the kind of magic we had in the “old days” (and perhaps I’m even too young, as I never owned a Z80, Atari 2600 or C64). But that will never return. When the PC was still progressing (in the 2nd half of the 90s), in the PC demo scene we always looked with pity to those C64 fans still holding on to that lousy machine. Today, I know exactly what they were (and still are) clinging on to.
JAL
I think Thom is referring to PowerPC vs x86 rather than classic Amiga hardware. There’s a small hardcore of Amiga users who don’t understand that x86, even x86-64, isn’t the same architecture it was 10 years ago.
As for popularity, there are thousands of potential people registered on Amigaworld, Amiga.org, Amigans.net and others (including MorphZone for MorphOS users and AROS-Exec) Interest in AROS has definitely grown in those places, but some still can’t see beyond the official brand.
There are many more who’ve left the community even in the last couple of years due to frustration with closed-source OSes and unavailable hardware. Sadly the word to developers thinking of leaving is never “contribute to AROS”, it’s “just wait a few more months for hardware” This terrible advice has been repeated year after year.
The important thing is to get AROS to a level where it’s compelling for the AmigaOS and MorphOS crowd. This means offering most of what OS 4 and MorphOS offer.
A few bounties have been assigned which will go a long way to it, should they be successful. One is the UAE Integration bounty to run old Amiga programs. The ability to run old Amiga apps defines an Amiga-like OS for some.
The other bounty is building a WebKit-based browser, and there’s also an email client being worked on. Without these things there’s not much for most to do in AROS except look at the scenery. With Amiga apps, web and email, we’re in a completely different situation and we’re best off looking at the interest then.
Edited 2007-11-22 11:05
I have to agree with you… 😐
I’ve owned a Commadore C64, Amiga 500 and an Amiga 1200. The Amiga 1200 was vastly superior to the Intel equivalent 486. After that I bought consoles and then put my Amigas in the loft and bought PCs.
For a while PCs were interesting, I ran Windows, BeOS, linux, hackintosh… I couldnt affored a cdrom or hdisk for my Amiga, but my first PC had a 420mb hdisk and dual speed cdrom… about the same time teachers at school were trying to convince me to buy a mac… from that experience alone (the school used ancient macs) I started to hate the damn things…
I laughed at all my Amiga friends, Beneath a steel sky with voice came on 1 cd rather than 12 floppy disks for the text version. To an extent I even laughed at them when my snes version of streetfighter II was so much more colourful than the Amiga…. I also laughed at all the Atari peeps too for their crappy graphics (yet superiour sound) Atari pretty much dried up, Arcimedies did the same… the rest got forgotten about.
Then the Amiga died and I was sad.. my PC hardware was increasingly becoming more generic.. even the xbox had came out using an intel cpu.. more and more hardware was going on board and no longer did my creative cards matter.
So OSX came out… it was oh so pretty but $2.5k for a 450mhz cube when I could buy a PIII 800mhz for so much less? get real!
I laughed at my fellow mac users… well ‘underpowered’ macbooks trying to compete in a windows world. PowerPC? pah – stick it to them!
After that I switched between Intel and AMD… endured when Intel were ramping up the hertz when AMD out performed on far fewer megahertz – I couldnt help but spread the word that megahertz didnt matter anymore! centrino/Coreduo came out and I finally had to surrender, Intel had woke up and learned AMDs secret sauce – cache and architecture (mostly) Intel won fair and square.
I then, still interested in OSX, saw a G4 cube on ebay dead cheap… I bought one and started to realise why PPC was better than x86.. the cube took me back to my Amiga days when I loved fiddling with the inards. I realised the reason why they were better (and more expensive) back then was the cache… my cube has 1mb of o/b cache where the PIII was lucky to have 128kb.
Then Apple changed to intels… and I cried. Not because PPC was then better… but because the architecture I was wanting to move away from was coming back to meet me. My choices were drying up.. the Intel c2d was and still is superior but for how long? Bridge that with what happened to operating systems during that time and you’ll also notice that those choices were drying up too..
The truth is, in my youth I was a bit of a fanboy, spurred by whatever reason to support whatever hardware. But when something better came out I was a big enough boy to admit that and in the future go down that next road.
As hardware has become increasingly comoditized so has my choices. The only other real option is SPARC or POWER6, and not only would I need to mortgage my house to buy a decent one but the benefits for a homeuser would be minimal. I would be crazy nowadays to pay so much over the odds for a 1.5ghz PPC AmigaOne if it ever came out… Although I might consider the idea if it was quadcore, if it really did have an advantage over x86.
So the lesson to this is that I mourned the death of Mac PPC because it was another choice being taken away (I never wanted one because they just couldnt keep up anymore) …. If IBM hadnt concentrated on the console market, and had managed to bring the heat down on their architecture (the main reason macbooks were slower mhz wise) then who knows what we might have had? octo-core PPC with 12mb cache?
IF Amiga had worked out their differences and joined the PPC market would Amiga + apple have been enough to hold their own against Wintel?
I bought a macbook pro c2d last nov… with the least RAM so I could upgrade cheaply at a later date. At the time few laptops had 4mb on 2 cores. Things have changed now but you expect that. I do however realise that my laptop is just an expensive intergrated IBM compatible PC with lots of nice touches (keyboard light, instant standby etc) I’ve learned some lessons since my C64, I’ll list them here at the end.
1. It doesnt matter how good your hardware is, if its too expensive people wont buy it.
2. It doesnt matter how crap your hardware/software is — if you throw enough money at marketing people will buy it. (Unless rule 1 applies ala PS3)
3. Never trust Microsoft. They’ll like you till they no longer need you then sit on your head.
4. Admit that if Apple were in Microsofts shoes you shouldn’t trust them either.
5. Choice is always good, even if you dont take it.
6. Due to market trends and the cost of researching new technology – and the marginal differences in that new technology .. that we may never go back to the days when multiple architectures fought it out for the top position only to be struck down by another — in my life time.
I have to salute the custom chips in the Amiga, I think Apple is about the only company left that could throw in some real custom chips to make the mac stand out from the crowd… but unless its far superior nobody will care. I guess some people could argue altivec was the custom chips they were looking for.. ( I realise a lot of people moved from Amiga to BeOS or Apple) but where has that went now? Intel MMX, what happened to that?
So, yeah, my story maybe long, boring and biased — but you youngins should keep in mind that back then we had some REALLY nice choices in the days when computing was truly fun.
Everytime an architecture dies, another angel gets its wings
There’s hope. If you liked Commodore, you’ll love LoseThos. It’s a 64-bit PC operating system but radically different from anything else out there, with a few Commodore features.
http://www.losethos.com
uuuuuh….. no. YUCK!
Stop spamming please, it is annoying.
>As hardware has become increasingly comoditized so has my choices. The only other real option is SPARC or POWER6, and not only would I need to mortgage my house to buy a decent one but the benefits for a homeuser would be minimal.
When the Amiga was introduced, technically Intel had the faster CPU. But Amiga had the better architecture, off-setting this advantage. I would not go PowerPC, as support for that has been waning (as I witnessed with the drying up of northbridges for them) but SPARC, you can get some performing systems for less than $1000. While not the Niagra or Rock cores, you can get an UltraSPARC II or III for a decent price, and Fuji’s own SPARC64 series is also reasonable.
But SPARC offers another advantage to someone that really wants to play: Open Standard. You can sign up and roll your own CPU, if you chose to and had the money to spend. Heck, the entry level Niagra core is GPL’d!
Think on that for a moment. Also ponder other CPU options, such as ARM, MIPS or SuperH, all licenseable cores, all with advantages, and while not Mhz monsters, can be used in performance designs if you’re smart about it. Lot of options.
Yum… SPARCmigas… Those probably could have actually happened had Sun gone through with a scheme it had to buy CBM back around ’89 or ’90. At the time the Amiga was the number one environment for computerized video and graphic work (as well as dominating European homes). Sun wanted to get into the “creative” market and put out a few feeler towards Commodore, who firmly rejected the offer and sailed off to its doom… I often wonder if the deal had gone through, would SPARC-powered Amigas have come to dominate the “non-technical” workstation market that way Apple has or if Apple has already built up too much of a lead by the early 90s.
Interesting, was unaware of this move. Yes, it would have been an interesting move. I’m imagining an A3000UX with a SPARC and a Sun label for a moment….
Your view s dangerously wrong. You should be voted down into oblivion. Idea that drivers are a special category of software comes from the wintel world, because of the foocked up architecture and the community. Suppliers should be required to provide appropriate support for their products – but look at the situation now: we buy their stuff then we fyuckin beg them to support their crap.
Now hail to all the power users playing latest games on wintel. Please go away, this is not for you! Wintel platforms are cheap, half-baken crap, nobody could afford them if they were really finished and supported products. I’d rather live ten years behind and pay twice as much for a decent platform than exposing myself to this nightmare. I don’t need a XY GHz processor anyway, I lived with ones on 0.001 GHz and I was fine. But what choice do I have? Luckily, so called power users (gaming, apple, kde…) are driving prices of very interesting gadgets into the bottom, so there is hope…
And Thom, don’t dare to remove this one!
(I could be wrong but I think this was also probably the first successful consumer implementation of a multi processor computer)
The “real” first might have been the MSX TubroR (z80 + R800 running in // ), another dead standard for fanatics
And saying x86 would hold back AROS is just plain stupid, just look at how well does MacOS X run on Intel. The x86 platefrom isn’t bad, it’s even becoming very good with the implementation of EFI.
The real hold back is hardware/software support, but with some hardware manufacturer releasing specs it could become something I guess (AMD/ATI accelerated driver come to mind)
While AROS may be a good reimplementation of the AmigaOS API, the x86 hardware lets it down.
Actually x86 is almost identical to 68k, unlike “foreign” PPC arch. x86 is silent and fast now, unlike PPC.
The Amiga hardware was *very* well designed
New generic PPC hardware is not (except game consoles)
Most things you mentioned are just a software.
Aros @ x86 is much more Amiga-like in comparison with entry-level PPC crap-boards.
Amiga _must_ be high-end, not lagging behind everyone.
Edited 2007-11-22 15:10
The Amiga hardware was *very* well designed
New generic PPC hardware is not (except game consoles)
While I don’t know how well designed Amiga PPC expansion cards were (I didn’t actually own one) I do know that when you put a 210mhz processor next to a 14mhz one, the speed difference is simply amazing.
Amiga _must_ be high-end, not lagging behind everyone.
I agree with you 100%. While I have a dislike for the x86 platform, I never stated that PPC was the platform that would save the Amiga. I believe that if the Amiga is to make a return to the mainstream it will be on new groundbreaking hardware and with an OS to match. I live in hope that this will happen, but I’m not expecting it to happen any time soon.
There were many commercially successful multi-processor computers before people put PPC’s on Amiga computers.
The Apple II had the Z80 Softcard, and that was VERY commercially successful.
The Amiga itself had the 8088 Bridgeboard. And that was somewhat successful.
There was the Transporter Card for the Apple II that ran PC Software as well.
I’m sure others will chime in with lots of other commercially successful multi-processor systems.
Which is not to say that I don’t agree with you that the Amiga platform was a visionary, revolutionary and wonderful piece of hardware.
I’m hoping the Minimig platform is expanded and completed and made commercially available.
That’s nearly an exact description of how hardware detection / driver loading works under BeOS on x86.
I know it’s old and a little too minimal, but tomsrtbt fits on one (overformated) floppy. And don’t forget OctaOS, Menuet32, FreeDOS, or various other OSes in that vein (too many to list).
There is no lack to “new” OSes, but creating one that aims at compatibility is indeed a noble (but difficult) thing, especially when it gets criticized (in general, I mean, not by you) for “not being Linux or Windows” (which are really only good because of years of development and tons of users).
Good luck to ’em, I say. Computers are indeed supposed to be fun (at least, in my eyes). Aiming towards good compatibility of old stuff in a “free” OS? Sounds good, can’t complain! 😉
Edited 2007-11-22 06:02
I’m was an Amiga fanatic until about 8 or 9 years ago. A month or so ago I actually fired up my old A1200 (The A4000 is long dead :[) and played a few games and looked at some awful code I wrote.
It was fun but, as Rugxulo says, a bit too minimal. I’ve played with AROS but didn’t find it that compelling. Much of what was great about the Amiga was the combination of hardware and software. Running it on x86 is kinda like running Linux on a 68K machine – fun for a while but it wears thin (for me at least)
Syllable is a project that interests me a lot more even though it’s still pretty minimal. It lacks a lot of the baggage of a ground up reimplementation of an existing OS and there’s more room to take it in different directions.
Now, instead of making offtopic posts I should go do something useful and write another Syllable app
Believe it or not guys, the field has advanced quite a bit in the past 20 yrs. A platform that has stagnated for well over 10+ yrs, which in the computing field is an eternity, is for all intents and purposes dead.
I guess in the 12-step recovery program dealing with that fact, a few Amiga folk are still in the denial phase.
Although I respect the AROS team, after all the more free code the better. What it is telling is that the project has been going on for pretty much a decade, and it is now becoming barely usable. The lack of developers indicates, that in the Amiga community (or whatever it is left of it) a lot of people are very vocal, but don’t do much. Either due to lack of knowledge or competent technical skills.
I guess that there has always been a constant with the Amiga (the computing platform in which I cut my teeth): there seems to be plenty amount of zealots who keep on talking from their rear cavities. Everything comes down to qualitative arguments, fairly biased and uneducated to boost. I have never see anyone in the community make an educated quantitative argument about what is so “great” about the Amiga. Maybe 20+ yrs, sure… now it is just a waste of time.
For years people just talk, there seems to be an institive need to have some sort of circle jerk in the Amiga community to remind them how great their 20+ yr architecture is! For a good laugh, you can review some of the old amiga newsgroup archives and see the flamewars of people making the case for which microarchitecture the Amiga should use in order to take over the world. Most of the candidate processors have literally come and gone during the years of “discussion” by the Amigans. In the meanwhile, exactly 0 lines of code and 0 HW development effort has been made to back up all those masturbatory dreams of computing domination.
Heck, in the same time frame Linux and the BSDs have gone from a few lines of code to full fledged distributions of industrial quality in that amount of time. To this day people are still hanging around waiting for an OS revision which was supposed to have been released over 7 yrs ago. And it is very telling that the big project in the community is to be able to port a decent modern web browser to the platform.
So it begs to be taken into consideration, that at some point some members of the Amiga community are all talk and no action, and a lot of that talk is fairly uneducated vapor to begin with. I still get a chuckle when there is still talk about what platform and what requirements are there for the Amiga to be back in the spotlight. That ship sailed looooooooooooooooong ago.
Anyhow, godspeed to the AROS team.
Edited 2007-11-22 21:26
I feel for the developers of AROS — they’re trying to chase a speeding bus by constantly writing new HAL code for the latest and greatest in hardware. They need to settle on a hardware set and complete AROS for the set they decide on, then and only then should they start writing drivers for whatever the flavor of the month is in graphics cards, etc. My AmigaOne finally died again a few months ago and I just cannot justify spending another $500 in shipping it to France in order to get it repaired again, when I can build a completely new X86 system for only around $800 total. I’ve owned an Amiga in one flavor or another since 1986, so I understand what the Amiga OS has going for it — it’s small enough so that someone with my level of expertise can figure out how to program in it, complete with a GUI that makes Windows and Linux applications look highly idiosyncratic, i.e., cryptic to figure out. That being said, I’ve settled on getting my next system up and running under Gentoo Linux, because the forums for Gentoo are extremely helpful in getting new hardware to work with whatever hardware system you happen to be running. I’m with the other guy that mentioned the minimig (basically an Amiga on a single circuit card that could possibly fit inside a joystick!), make the minimig just a little more powerful, and I’ll be happy to buy one (even in kit form!), and put my old workbench ROMs (2.04) back to work! By the way the folks at Trolltech should look into how CanDo! (an Amiga application generation system) actually allowed a programmer to make applications. It makes Qt V4 look positively archaic!
It’s good to see so many post on a minor update of AROS. Let me review several things that are either being missed in the replies or are in active developement.
1. A webkit based browser for AROS is in active developement.
http://cataclysm.cx/
http://thenostromo.com/teamaros2/?number=49
2. AROS x86_64 with limited (AROS can’t handle full memory protection yet) memory protection is in beta with nightly builds in the very near future.
http://msaros.blogspot.com/
http://thenostromo.com/teamaros2/?number=21
With initial AROS x86_64 developement wrapping up, I wouldn’t be too suprised to see ACPI bounty being assigned by the end of this year:
http://thenostromo.com/teamaros2/?number=32
3. AROS PPC is in active developement on EFIKA mobo.
http://thenostromo.com/teamaros2/?number=46
I suspect once AROS PPC for EFIKA has been released, someone will take the SAM440 bounty:
http://thenostromo.com/teamaros2/?number=60
4. EUAE Integration is in active developement by none other then EvilRich himself.
http://thenostromo.com/teamaros2/?number=7
If that’s not enough, two Distros for AROS32 are also in active developement and should both be released within the next month or two.
Dammy
Edited 2007-11-26 15:52