MorphOS-news.de reports: “Emeric SH has pubished a review about his Pegasos with MorphOS. Although it’s written completely in Hungarian it looks really nice. Also included are some screenshots of BirdieShoot and Knights&Merchants.” If the article is translated to english, we will post a link to this story, as an update. Update: English translation here.
MorphOS and Pegasos Review
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I must say, I never expected OSNews to link to any review that was not in English. Personally, I think this is very nice – OSNews is after all an international site and I bet most of the readers are not native English speakers. Anyway, nice work! And the Pegasos-based computers do look sweet – I’m still trying to decide whether to like MorphOS or not. Certainly not what I’d call nice, judging by the screenshots.
One can only hope that BeOS will in the future be revived in a similar way
Speaking of which, what about porting Zeta or OpenBeOS to Pegasos? It’s a pretty open standards board.
of no menu bar.
None of them had a menubar and I am curious about how exactly you ‘do’ things.
On AmigaOS (and MorphOS vaunts itself as an AmigaOS replacement) the menu was accessed by clicking right-button; the title bar then changed to a menu bar.
A later “commodity” called MagicMenu allowed one to change this behavior somewhat (eg the menu could pop-up as a window immediately under the mouse).
So, my guess is that MorphOS does something similar to one (or both) of these behaviors.
I wrote: the title bar then changed to a menu bar.
I should have written: the top title bar then changed to a menu bar. AmigaOS was a little schizophrenic like that: each window could have its own active menu, but the menu was displayed at the top of the screen, a là MacOS (a là Xerox’ Flex?), and not in the Window itself, a là Windows OS. Although, MagicMenu did introduce the new (?) behavior of popping the menu right under the mouse.
At least Finns should be able to understand something 🙂
I really can’t wait for the mac release, shall be pretty fun to play around with it. Screenshots look really nice.
The grammar system is the same, as in the aboundance of cases and the system used to form the cases, but unfortunately the whole vocabulary (with very few exceptions like vesi-viz, kesi-kez, veri-ver) is completely different.
I should know, I speak hungarian but in the 4 years I lived in Finland, it didn’t help one bit. Neither it helped my colleagues, the contractors who came from Hungary.
it’s really just an overview/review, that explains what the Pegasos is, what you can do with it and what Morphos is (and how it works with Pegasos). I don’t think I need to translate this. It’s a nice overview, though, good for peeps that didn’t follow the events in the new Amiga world.
The reviewer seems intent on keeping the Pegasos+Morphos computer, since it does all he needs and he really likes it.
of no menu bar.
None of them had a menubar and I am curious about how exactly you ‘do’ things.
—
See the nice Title Bar on top? There’s a hidden menu there,
different for each active application. You trigger it by
holding the right mouse button. It’s been like that since
1985 on AmigaOS 1.0:) With MagicMenu you can have
transparent menus popping up anywhere, “sticky” menus etc.
I understand the review 😉 Finns understand as much as others.
This review is about mostly MorphOS, software compatibility, and UI.
Are there anybody working on english translation?
I’ve been meaning to write up a review of linux on the pagasos but have been flat out recently (getting married does that to you…)
However, surfice to say I’m really happy with Debian PPC unstable running on my setup. Currently has a nice Western Digital Drive (the one with heaps of Cache) and 256megs ram and a matrox g450 – and is a real usable machine for general purpose usage.
The developers of the Pegaos have recently released some kernel patches specifically for the hardware and they seem to run fine – mainly changes for several of the onboard chips (ethernet, sound etc) Hopefully these patches find their way into the 2.4 tree permantly?
On top of all this I took the hard disk from my OSX based Mac and was able to boot it under Linux with a minimum of fuss…..(www.maconlinux.com) with a little more ram in this machine I’ll be looking to sell my mac as the combination of Linux and OSX is very usable. (OSX needs as much ram as you can feed it)
On top of all this I have to say I’m very happy with the hardware the genesi have provided. I’ve had no unexplained crashes or weirdness associated with the hardware – even after all the troubles associated with the Northbridge the MAI supplied. They have also been very good to the small community of people testing this hardware and software for them – replacing everyones boards when some problems arose.
The machine is also very quiet, being housed in a micro atx case with only a single fan in the power supply makes for a quiet machine. You know you machine is quite when you can hear the (very quite WD drive) ticking away
If any one wants any more information please let me know. Or if you are in New Zealand and are keen to see this machine up close then let me know.
Cheers
Francois
Elver Loho wrote:
> Speaking of which, what about porting Zeta or OpenBeOS to Pegasos? It’s a pretty open standards board.
Bill Buck (of Genesi) said he’d like to see OpenBeOS, etc. on Pegasos.
— Gary
You do you realize that Hungarian and Finnish, both are unrelated to any other spoken language on earth.
Sounds like Aliens or Free Masons made them up, or maybe it was the great-great-grandaddy of the guy who created Esperanto?
>You do you realize that Hungarian and Finnish, both are >unrelated to any other spoken language on earth.
>Sounds like Aliens or Free Masons made them up, or maybe it >was the great-great-grandaddy of the guy who created >Esperanto?
That’s definitely wrong. Finnish and Hungarian are both members of finno-ugrian languages family. Futher member is Estonian (hi to Elver Loho) and a lot of languages which are spoken by the native population of Siberia.
Greetings from Anton
We are taking this one step at a time and the Pegasos *is* proving to be a reliable platform. The Operating Systems we now have running on the Pegasos are MorphOS, Debian, SuSE, Gentoo, OpenBSD, OSX and MacOS9+ (through Mac-on-Linux). The last distro of Mandrake works too, although we are not sure where this will lead. The OpenFirmware of the Pegasos enables compatibility across a the spectrum of possibilities in the PPC environment.
We have sold out of our most recent production of 400 units. We sold these through dealers (see the “Pegasos Network” at morphos-news linked above), user groups (for example in Australia — http://www.pegasos.com.au/preorder.html), and the Internet at http://www.pegasos-usa.com. That URL is a bit deceptive as 90% of the units sold online will be going to destinations outside the United States (13 in Finland). We have a motivated international following that is looking for something more than an x86 based Linux distro or an “expensive” Mac. The fact that this review was done in Hungarian is actually quite exciting to us. It is in places like Hungary where the technically skilled are looking for something like the Pegasos. We could have easily sold another 400 units. The production was sold out in four and a half days.
MorphOS also runs AmigaOS applications. Amiga adherents still live in the worldwide remnants of the former Commodore Business Machines. In 1993 the soon to fail Commodore generated $1.3 billion of revenue with more than 90% of that revenue coming from sales outside the USA. Incredibly, outposts are still in place and it is these people who where first in line for the Pegasos. They are everywhere. When this next batch is delivered we will even have a Pegasos User Group in the Faroe Islands! Crazy you say?! A hobbyist market of geeks and freaks? We think not. In fact, what we are seeing are talents most North Americans have forgotten. They can code in assembly level languages, they can write their own drivers, they can tune the performance of their machine to do what they want it to do themselves. One by-product of all this enthusiasm — the Demo Scene *is* coming to the Pegasos and MorphOS. Remember, when a demo could be saved on a floppy? 🙂
The domination of Windows and the ?personal computer? itself have pushed the average user away from understanding what is really ?under the hood.? Most computer users have a superficial knowledge of what makes what they do work and the relationship between ?man and machine? ends at the GUI. Eventually to be broadly successful we need to deliver exactly that ?simplicity? to the market, but today, we focus on niches. Our first strike in the market are ?techies,? who know what they are getting into and want something different NOW. They are the artist/creator/engineer types that can write their own programs and still know how to make a computer, a television or a stereo do what they want it to do (at home with a soldiering iron if necessary!). Ultimately, it will be those people that help us carry the message to the masses, because they are helping us create it.
With these enthusiastic and participative users MorphOS marches forward day by day. In the meanwhile, we are thinking that the whole “value” proposition is changing. With the emphasis on the speed of the CPU and the size of the memory, the computer became an end in itself and not a means to an end. G3 or G4? Right now it does not matter. This is still a work in progress. We are focused on what can be done with the Pegasos and how to make it do more, better.
BTW — “Any” OS adherent get the same support from us as our own MorphOS. We have a Debian development team of 18 developers that will all have boards soon.
That is the plan. Please send us an email if you want to assist us. We are offering Pegasos machines to developers who can help us and solid incentives to those that want to formally join the team.
Sincerely,
Raquel and Bill
http://www.pegasosppc.com
Hungarians and Finns have just as much a chance to communicate to each other as germans and french
I have made a rather hasty english translation in the evening (dawn to be precise). Sorry for my limited english knowledge and errors though. The url is:
http://snews.vim.hu/pages/200101/pegasoseng.htm
Dear Emeric,
Thank you very much for the review and the translation.
Kind regards,
Raquel and Bill
Genesi