The latest article in our OSNews OS contest: Learn about MorphOS, the heir to the Amiga legacy. This article chronicles its bumpy history, its still-compelling features, and the current state of MorphOS development.
What is MorphOS?
I think this will be the most asked question among all readers of this article. It’s likely that you never heard this name – MorphOS – before in your life, but it is extremely likely that you heard another name: Amiga. In this introduction it is enough to say that MorphOS is currently an enhanced clone of the AmigaOS (the Historical Notes section explores the details of this connection).
Although a functional clone of the AmigaOS is a nice experiment, the real potential for MorphOS is found in its ability to provide for more advanced OS features not found in the AmigaOS. This is possible because MorphOS is built around a very flexible, powerful, and compact microkernel called Quark, whose structure is totally unrelated and independent from the Amiga and Linux kernels.
One distinctive feature of MorphOS is that it has a small “footprint”. A complete installation requires less than 15 Megabytes for the whole OS. Even less is needed if one desires to optimize one’s running environment and leave out unused and/or non-essential parts of the OS. Another distinctive feature of MorphOS is its speed. It is not certified as a RTOS, but in use, its responsiveness is very close to Real Time operation.
Hardware platform
MorphOS runs exclusively on PowerPC processors. Two specific hardware platforms are currently supported: the PPC accelerator boards for Amiga computers (developed by Phase5 and known as CyberStorm and Blizzard) and PegasosPPC motherboards (distributed by Genesi and also used in a product called ODW, Open Desktop Workstation). PegasosPPC boards are initialized by the HAL/OF (Hardware Abstraction Layer / Open Firmware), a BIOS-like software created and maintained by Genesi for its PPC products (and available under license for every designer/manufacturer of PPC-based products). Potentially MorphOS can run with minor changes on any PPC board initialized by the HAL/OF: it is known, for instance, that this OS already runs on EFIKA 5K2 boards.
MorphOS is proprietary OS except for some parts that are open source. It is currently available for free only to owners of the above-mentioned Amiga/Pegasos hardware. After on-line registration, owners can connect to an FTP site where it is possible to download an ISO-image for burning a MorphOS boot CD. Also upgrade software is available on the FTP site.
Installation
The installation of most operating systems is usually a long operation, and may sometimes become a real nightmare if you are unlucky or unskilled. A small footprint OS like MorphOS shows its advantages even in the installation phase, both in terms of time and simplicity.
Put your MorphOS boot CD in the drive and select it as a boot device in the HAL/OF. MorphOS starts directly from the CD in a default configuration with minimal hardware requirements. This takes less than a minute. Now you should use the OS partition utility to create at least one boot partition on your hard disk, and the formatting utility to format this partition. Then you can launch an installation script that loads MorphOS therein (the script manages a number of circumstances and special cases, but basically it copies all the system files and directories, with default configuration files, from the CD to the hard disk).
Now, you should eject and remove the MorphOS boot CD from your drive, and reset the Pegasos/ODW (either pressing the reset button or with the key combination CTRL-WIN-WIN). After a few seconds you will return to the HAL/OF screen, where you should set an environment variable that stores what’s the boot partition and the relevant hard disk.
It’s done! (The user must perform slightly more complex actions with old versions of the HAL/OF, but newcomers can only get new versions…)
Total time required for all the previous operations: no more than 5 minutes! But you will have another surprise: let MorphOS start from your hard disk and count the time that is necessary to boot into the plain OS environment. You will find that this occurs in less than five seconds: welcome to the lightning OS!
Characteristic features
The core of MorphOS is compressed and stored inside a boot.img file which must reside on some storage medium accessible by the HAL/OF. This file is loaded by the HAL/OF and starts up the Quark microkernel, as well as a number of other low-level basic components of the OS. The rest of the OS is formed by hard disk based files and runs on top of this software layer.
Amiga was characterized by advanced low-level software features provided by its microkernel, Exec, like pre-emptive multitasking, inter-process communication, etc., that were absent in any popular computer of the late 80s (early Macs and PCs, Atari computers, etc.). Of course all these features are provided in MorphOS by Quark, which is also able to support more modern features like memory protection, virtual memory, and so on. Quark is also able to provide a number of sandboxes where virtualized operating systems can run independently. Currently two sandboxes are implemented: QBox, which now is used for low-level processes only, and ABox, which provides a special API for programs and applications. Indeed this API is fully compatible with AmigaOS 3.1 (the last operating system created and distributed by Commodore for its Amiga computers) and, together with Trance, a JIT emulator for Amiga executables, guarantees a high degree of compatibility with the large set of Amiga legacy applications.
Note that the huge number of excellent games that made the Amiga famous in the late 80’s and early 90’s do not run directly in MorphOS environment. Amiga computers were equipped with custom chips for graphics and audio. Their operation is totally incompatible with a modern system like MorphOS, which is able to manage current 2D/3D GFX boards and on-board or PCI-board audio. If you want to play old games on a Pegasos/ODW, you can, but you need UAE (the Universal Amiga Emulator), which is also available for MorphOS and provides the required compatibility.
The native compatibility of MorphOS with Amiga legacy software, instead, has a different target. Users can run almost all the most recent and advanced Amiga applications, which are able to manage additional GFX and audio boards created for the latest Amiga computers. The relevant software layers, known as CGX (CyberGraphX) and AHI (Audio Hardware Interface), mask and manage the re-targetable hardware and are fully integrated in MorphOS.
Like the AmigaOS, MorphOS makes two very compact, efficient, and fully integrated interfaces available (Command Line Interface and Graphic User Interface) for shells and applications. Although this “built-in” CLI/GUI system can easily get the job done, many prefer significantly more advanced features and “eye-candy” in the GUI. To address this, MorphOS has adopted the more object-oriented software GUI layer called Magic User Interface. MUI not only provides the programmer with more sophisticated GUI interactions and layouts, but also allows users to more fully customize these GUIs to their individual tastes. Actually MUI is one of the most distinctive components of MorphOS, both in terms of features and aesthetics.
MorphOS shell is a Unix-like shell provided with all the features you expect from such a component: AmigaDOS commands (most of which are Unix-like), local and global variables, command substitution, command redirection, named and unnamed pipes, history, programmable menus, multiple shells in a window, ANSI compatibility, color selection, and so on. Of course the set of commands includes all the necessary commands for scripting. In conclusion: Command Line Interface users will not be disappointed…
Ambient is the MUI based, fully asynchronous, multi-threaded, default native desktop of MorphOS. Although open sourced, in practice Ambient is an exclusive component of MorphOS, because it is so strictly related to MUI and the OS that its porting to any other environment would be very difficult. Ambient provides program icon management, directory navigation, program launching, file handling, and everything needed for managing the system. Ambient is highly adaptable to the user’s taste: file management can be done in classic (spatial) mode or browser mode, using icon view or list view. Filetype recognition is done by means of direct file probing and/or mimetypes, and users have full control and editing capabilities on mimetypes for a fine-tuning of the related actions. Ambient allows the user to easily perform any type of activity with the built-in tools: file search utility, text viewer, picture viewer, sound player, system monitor, disk formatting utility, management of commodity utilities, and much more. From Ambient menus, users can control all the settings in their MorphOS environment, including MUI settings and the desktop itself.
Let me mention in passing that users are not necessarily forced to use Ambient. Other common desktop environments of the Amiga world can be run at the same time, or even as complete substitutes for Ambient, e.g. Directory Opus (also available for PC users as a substitute for Windows Explorer), Scalos, and even the classic Amiga Workbench (but this is reserved for crazy users which like some hacking).
The previous components of the OS are those that the user always sees and manipulates: their visual impact and easy handling have a high influence on user appreciation. Ambient users, for instance, can select distinct skins, changing on the fly the general aspect of all the windows, widgets, and other graphic elements of the desktop (some distinct skins are shown in the pictures). On the other hand, other system software runs invisibly and silently, but is equally important, because without it the computer will be unusable. A few examples are filesystems, USB management, printer drivers, advanced scripting systems, etc.. Of course all these components are present in MorphOS, but only short descriptions are given here, mostly concerning special features that adds to those that users automatically expect from this hidden software.
Filesystems for hard disks are very important components that must take care of precious data. MorphOS provides an implementation of FFS, the standard Fast File System of the Amiga, that is present mostly for compatibility reasons. SFS (Smart File System) is a much faster and more reliable filesystem, that keeps track of the last transactions before they are applied. In other words, it is a journaling-like filesystem that guarantees the integrity of the data even in the case of computer crashes during write operations. SFS has been adopted by MorphOS as its default filesystem, but MorphOS also supports other filesystems including the impressive PFS (Professional File System) available commercially for Amiga computers, and even the ubiquitous FAT (File Allocation Table) of MSDOS environments. Salvage utilities are available both for PFS and SFS, and handle operations like retrieving deleted data, file system structure repair, and even reorganization to decrease fragmentation.
The USB stack of MorphOS is called Poseidon, and is probably the most efficient USB stack in existence on any computer platform. The best description of its features is certainly given by its author (Chris Hodges) that I report in the following lines:
“Poseidon is a software solution that unleashes the possibilities of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) and the devices with USB interface, ranging from mice, keyboards, tablets, joysticks, printers, scanners, webcams, digicams, flash card readers, zip drives, floppy disk drives, harddisks, memory sticks, ethernet adapters, scanners and audio adapters to less common things like power supplies, GPS location devices or fingerprint readers. Poseidon has a modular design that fits into the AmigaOS/MorphOS environment very neatly. It is no port of an existing system (like the Linux USB stack), but has been created with the unique features of AmigaOS/MorphOS in mind, that make these operating systems so efficient.”
Let me add that Poseidon always tries to do its job in a completely automatic way, but in case the user needs customization for a specific USB device, Poseidon reveals incredible configuration capabilities that allow the user to solve almost any problem.
The printing system adopted by MorphOS is TurboPrint, a licensed commercial software package also distributed in the Linux world. It allows full control of the printer and its colors (if any), and of course runs transparently for any application. TurboPrint requires an update if the user needs printer drivers for recent printers, but the upgrading package is also convenient for the presence of some useful printing utilities that are absent in MorphOS.
The advanced scripting system that characterized AmigaOS since version 2.0 is ARexx, an implementation of REXX, an interpreted, structured, high-level programming language introduced by IBM. On the Amiga almost every important application has an ARexx port that allows its (possibly full) control by means of ARexx scripts, or even by means of ARexx commands coming from other programs. This gives rise to very interesting possibilities for the users, that were fully explored during years of use in the Amiga environment. MorphOS has a native implementation of this language (except for a library that is still being coded, and currently must be extracted from AmigaOS).
MorphOS integration
There are a number of applications that, today, people expect to be standard components of an OS, like an installation utility for software packages, a text editor, a TCP/IP stack, a mailer, and a browser. After having used MorphOS for a while, you will note the absence of these programs in its current distribution (1.4.5). However, a few searches on the net will show you that no MorphOS user complains for the absense of these programs. This apparent contradiction is actually a legacy effect of the tormented Amiga history, and does not affect MorphOS in any way. Let me dedicate some words to this subject, just to show you the correct perspective before you start to think, erroneously, that MorphOS is an incomplete OS.
In its current form, MorphOS is perfectly suited for its current user community, i.e. a group of hardcore Amiga users. Such persons, in the fast rise of the Wintel era, faced the problem of integrating an OS that was no longer upgraded. Indeed, in the 90’s, after Commodore’s demise, the owners of the brand froze the development of AmigaOS. This OS survived thanks to the impulse provided by many independent developers who slowly added almost any type of missing features. Most of this software is available at the huge repository of free and shareware Amiga software, Aminet, that currently contains 76,000 software packages. So the main rule of thumb for Amiga users is: if something is missing, download it from Aminet. And, of course, this rule extends to all MorphOS newcomers.
MorphOS has no installation utility for current and legacy applications.
Go to Aminet and download the Installer 43.3. Of course this is a standalone file that you can simply put manually into a strategic directory of your hard disk.
MorphOS has no text editor for modifying startup scripts and plain texts.
There are plenty of text editors on Aminet. You can go there, and search and download what you need. In particular you will also find some editors already ported and compiled in native PPC code for MorphOS.
MorphOS has no TCP/IP stack.
Well, go to Aminet and download MOSNet, which is a TCP/IP stack compiled in native PPC code, and created specifically for MorphOS.
MorphOS has no mailer.
All mailers for the Amiga are open source. You can download YAM or SimpleMail from SourceForge or their homepages. There are nightly builds created in native PPC code for MorphOS, too.
MorphOS has no browser.
The source code of AWeb, formerly a commercial browser, was donated by the author to the Amiga community at the beginning of the millennium. All the upgrades for this browser created by the current development team are available at the AWeb homepage, even in a native MorphOS version.
(Please note that all the previous applications are open source software – except the Installer 43.3 that is freely distributable -. Their use does not prejudice in any way the owner rights of MorphOS and the software packages written/distributed by independent developers and/or software houses for commercial purposes.)
MorphOS has a very minimal documentation.
Due to the API compatibility, the AmigaOS 3.1 documentation covers 75% of all the possible issues. However, MorphOS is not a simple clone of AmigaOS: it already embodies a large number of enhancements, most of which are not immediately visible to the unaware user. Here the community has again given its help with the creation of Le livre du Pegasos (The Pegasos Book), that collects in a single book a huge set of very useful and important information concerning hardware, software, and configuration issues that it is important to know when using the Pegasos/MorphOS pair.
In conclusion, the main point that you should understand is that the community that currently uses MorphOS is only the launching platform of this OS. The forecast future community should be larger and not necessarily Amiga-related; and future versions of MorphOS may be commercial. In such a case, of course, the MorphOS Development Team will take into account any change of the targeted user base. New distributions will either contain proprietary versions of the missing software (for instance, it is already known that an integrated TCP/IP stack already exists), or will explicitly point the inexperienced non-Amiga user towards external components.
MorphOS development
In the first phase of its history, MorphOS was a dream that slowly came true by means of a number of very talented young programmers. Then, when the hardware development by bPlan (that is now the hardware branch of Genesi) became closer and closer to finalization, and MorphOS was the unique OS able to use this hardware, the development was well supported and accelerated. In the last two years, MorphOS development slowed down again because Genesi concentrated most of its activities on the design of new hardware, on further development of very basic software like the HAL/OF, and on other operating systems like the various Linux distributions, which of course have a larger base of potential users.
Today, the current development of MorphOS goes on slowly but constantly with a number of simultaneous activities.
(1) The core internals of the boot.img are handled exclusively by the MorphOS Development Team. When improvements in this area have been tested enough by the team members and ready for user trials, a CD ISO image is released which also includes a complete MorphOS installation and establishes a baseline for a release.
Little is known about current improvements, but it is publicly known that the members of the MorphOS Development Team already use a new boot.img file where many components were strongly enhanced. For instance, Altivec (the floating point and integer SIMD – Single Instruction, Multiple Data – instruction set implemented in high-end PowerPC processors) is fully supported in all the components of the system software where it can be used for major speed gains.
(2) Other parts of MorphOS which reside outside the boot.img are updated and released in binary form that registered users can download and manually install. These releases are handled on an “as needed” basis to accommodate new features, or correct problems, or even offer a glimpse of what is to come (alpha and beta software).
For instance, this concerns version 4 of MUI, version 6 of AHI, version 3.3 of Poseidon, improved CGX 3D drivers, debugged versions of some high-level libraries, and so on.
(3) Development for MorphOS in the open source/third party arena is not only active but well appreciated and heavily discussed/debated. One special case is the Ambient desktop, which has become an open source effort where some MorphOS team members are actively involved.
Ambient evolves quickly and very visibly to the users, who can download and install nightly builds of this component of MorphOS.
(4) In an interesting move to focus third party developers’ attention, users have gotten together to provide a “bounty” system where users (and coders) can submit ideas for development and contribute money for their realization.
Several noticeable projects have emerged from this “bounty” system, including SFSDoctor and MOSNet (both mentioned in the previous sections), and MorphUp (a sophisticated package manager for automatic installation and upgrade of applications). The bounty system is being used even to speed up the development of parts of the OS that have a particular value for users. This requires the collaboration of members of the MorphOS Development Team, like in the case of the last missing native ARexx library (rexxsyslib.library).
What is the final goal of this somewhat anarchic development process? We know its probable name: MorphOS 1.5, and know that its scope is ambitious. This version of the OS should ultimately remove most needs for external program support, and will qualify MorphOS for its debut outside the Amiga community. Unfortunately nothing is known about its release date, though it does not seem to be very close. In a recent private communication, Frank Mariak, one of the leaders of the MorphOS Development Team, wrote me that MorphOS 1.5 is still a thing to come because “its feature set is not finally defined”.
Platform expansion
One of the most important positive effects of the compatibility of MorphOS with Amiga programs is the fact that MorphOS users can still run almost all the commercial software they purchased for their Amiga, with great advantage in power and speed. The MorphOS/Pegasos computer platform does not start from scratch! Although the official death of Commodore is dated April 29, 1994, though many applications for the Amiga were developed for years and years after that date. And a number of important programs are still actively developed today, like, for instance, the extremely sophisticated Desktop Publishing program PageStream (which currently is available at the same time for Amiga, Linux, MacOS, and Windows platforms, as well as in native PPC code for MorphOS), the advanced editor GoldEd (that now is the core of Cubic IDE, an Integrated Development Environment that covers all the major programming languages and SDKs available for AmigaOS/MorphOS), the state-of-the-art presentation program Hollywood (that inherits the illustrious legacy of Scala, preserving full compatibility with that program, and adding all the features allowed by modern graphics systems), and so on.
Anyway, when a computer platform has a small user base, like MorphOS, the development of new software becomes difficult. The production of commercial software declines because of decreased likelihood of finding a sufficiently large number of purchasers. The production of open source and shareware software also declines because it does not find a sufficiently large base of coders: everyone is already concentrated on a number of projects and has no time for others. In such a case there is a solution that sometimes can drastically reduce the development time of an application: porting software from other platforms.
When AmigaOS was designed, a number of structures and features were inspired by Unix, and of course this reflects in the ABox API of MorphOS. So the porting of small commands, utilities, programs, and games from Unix, and now from Linux, to MorphOS is sometimes not difficult. Two specific system libraries (ixemul.library and ixnet.library) make a number of porting efforts easier that require special Linux-like routines. Even large and complex applications like MPlayer, MEncoder, MLDonkey, E-UAE, MAME, and Blender have been ported to MorphOS.
The main obstacles for code porting are the absence of the fork() function in AmigaOS and the ABox of MorphOS, the fact that AmigaOS/MorphOS are not fully POSIX-compliant, and the extreme difficulty of GUI porting. Linux GUIs are based on windowing systems which are usually parts of larger desktop environments, and are not integrated in the OS. Besides a very early port of X-Windows, no Linux windowing system has ever been ported to AmigaOS/MorphOS. There is no real advantage in doing such a port, because the effort would be very hard, and the smallest windowing system for Linux is at least five times larger than MorphOS as a whole. Easy GUI porting would require the complete loss of the small footprint character of MorphOS, and would transform it into a useless new Linux-like OS.
So, unlike other platforms, AmigaOS/MorphOS never had a port of very large and important applications like Mozilla and OpenOffice. The absence of programs like these, that are fundamental for normal users who want to interface their computers with the whole cyberworld without compatibility problems, is the biggest obstacle for a larger adoption of MorphOS in the desktop computer market.
Once people recognized the uselessness of porting large pieces of Linux distributions to MorphOS, a better idea emerged: the creation of wrappers that relate all the calls to certain basic structures of one system to their equivalents in the other system. The first attempt in this direction involves KHTML, the HTML layout engine created by the KDE project. A giant wrapper that relates KHTML to MUI is in the works (most likely it will be ready within the end of the year). The success of this effort will have a strong influence on the future of the MorphOS/Pegasos platform. MorphOS users will have a state-of-the-art browser (current native browsers are not up-to-date), possible new users will be less reluctant, and the success in this field will encourage similar efforts in other directions (Open Office porting).
Who needs MorphOS?
The previous arguments suggest that the use of MorphOS as a main desktop OS has a number of limitations that currently prevent its adoption for large-scope professional purposes. But MorphOS is already usable for strict-scope professional purposes, and is very well suited for semi-professional and hobbyist purposes. Of course, its current limitations are irrelevant in the embedded market, where only its small footprint and fast responsiveness are the really characterizing features.
Well, although you may judge the following sentence like a paradox, let me say that those that appear as limitations in a professional environment, are actually perceived as advantages by current users. In fact, these advanced users are able to compensate for almost any deficiency of the software available for MorphOS by means of free, shareware, and commercial software that already exists for the Amiga platform or is in the development phase for MorphOS. They already use MorphOS at its best, obtaining a responsiveness unparalleled on every other platform; and their environment is totally immune from any virus, worm, trojan, spyware, adware and similar beasts coming from the net. They can install Linux and MacOSX (using MacOnLinux) on their Pegasos, just to use FireFox and Office when it is necessary; or else can use the RDesktop tool within MorphOS environment and control a remote PC.
Other potential users of MorphOS may be people that want to be “free” from the oppression of a monolithic authoritarian environment like Windows, and/or do not want to be “menaced” by the unfathomable depths of Unix-like systems, that are fully manageable only by Linux geeks. And of course MorphOS is the best choice for nostalgic Amiga users who want the speed of the real new thing instead of the slower synthetic environment provided by UAE. This list of people does not exhaust all potential users of MorphOS. If this OS will be used on PowerPC boards for the embedded market, another group of special users will join the others: the developers of embedded applications. They will need a comfortable desktop environment for their work, and will also discover the usefulness of the dialogue with a community where 30% of the members are skilled programmers ready to help whenever they are asked for.
The evolution of the system should remove current limitations and provide for a larger base of users: less biased people who will be able to open new horizons and enlarge the current niche.
Conclusions
This article has tried to show that MorphOS is a vital work in slow but constant progress. The small footprint and speed make MorphOS a viable candidate for a desktop OS, but these features really shine if one considers the embedded market, where the absence of hard disks, the need for small amounts of RAM, and the use of low-end processors are very common requirements. Try to imagine the possibilities offered by a very fast operating system entirely stored on a small flashrom…
MorphOS expects people who recognize and try to use its special features and interesting potentialities. This may be the trigger that will start a new, fast, well-supported development phase. Among the readers of this article, there could be new users attracted by the efficiency, flexibility, or esoteric aspect of MorphOS. And maybe this article will be read even by VIPs who could see an occasion for the profit of their companies, and will help to construct a brilliant future for this OS.
Useful Links
MorphOS community sites:
The center around which everything turns is MorphZone; other important sites are:
Pegasos.org; Obligement; #amigazeux; Amiga Impact.
News sites and Forums:
MorphOS-News; Amiga-News; ANN; Amiga.org; Moo bunny.
MorphOS development sites:
MorphOS-Team; Ambient Desktop; MorphOS Developer Connection.
Hardware related sites:
Genesi; PegasosPPC; MorphOSPPC; Freescale MobileGT Platform.
Software related sites:
Aminet; MorphOS-news; MorphZone.
Amiga history:
Amiga history guide; The history of the Pegasos.
Manuals (PDF format):
Le livre du Pegasos; and its translations: The Pegasos Book, etc..
Reviews and FAQs:
DoctorMorbius_FP Homepage.
Ultra-condensed classic Amiga history:
Probably you know that Amiga was considered an extraordinary game machine that gained a large user base in the late 80’s and early 90’s. But if you think it was only a game console masked as a computer, you are completely in error. It had 4096 colours when PC screens were black and green, it had sound and voice when PC’s were dumb, it had preemptive multitasking when PCs ran one program at a time. So Amiga also collected a community of advanced users, who adopted it for professional uses. After the demise of Commodore in 1994, the Amiga people slowly dispersed. Gamers migrated towards PCs and super-consoles; and most software houses and professional programmers converted their programs and migrated towards PC and Mac platforms. However many hardcore people did not migrate. Some software houses and hardware producers, a few professional programmers, together with many non-professional programmers, hobbyists, amateurs, and advanced users unified themselves into an extremely argumentative (thus vital!) community strongly glued together via the Internet.
Ultra-condensed Pegasos/MorphOS history:
For a number of years the Amiga trademark passed from hand to hand without any real evolution, mostly used just as a brand for advertising. In the meanwhile, some extraordinary members of the Amiga community slowly emerged and were able to create something that no other nostalgic community of retro PC amateurs has ever been able to do. They created from scratch a new PowerPC-based hardware platform and a new operating system that were able to collect the Amiga legacy and revive the residual community of hardcore users. The hardware wizards are the guys of bPlan/Genesi, while the software wizards that started everything (Ralph Schmidt, creator of Quark, and Frank Mariak, creator of CGX) are the leaders of the MorphOS Development Team.
Ultra-condensed AmigaOne/AmigaOS4 history:
Another PowerPC-based community emerged in the new century. The penultimate owners of the Amiga trademark, mostly interested to use the brand in another market, outsourced the hardware/software design/production of desktop computers and AmigaOS. This originated the AmigaOne/AmigaOS4 PowerPC platform. While AmigaOS4 is still in development, the hardware is now missing because it originated from a developer board that is no longer produced. That half of the Amiga community is now stuck in the difficult search for new hardware, complicated by a penalizing licensing scheme.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Gunne Steen and Stefan Blixth for providing almost all the pictures, and Ed Vishoot and Frank Mariak for careful reading of the manuscript and important suggestions for its improvement.
About the author
Fulvio Peruggi, Professor of Physics – Department of Physics, “Federico II” University – Naples, Italy.
Mr. Peruggi has used computers since 1977, when he started his research activity in Theoretical Physics (field: Statistical Mechanics). His life with computers started on an IBM mainframe programmed via punch cards. Then he used PDP and VAX workstations, early Apple and IBM-compatible PCs, Macintosh computers, and so on up to the most modern PCs. At home he worked on an Amiga 2000 since 1988 (with the ABSoft Fortran compiler, AmigaTeX compiler/previewer, and an editor for writing programs and articles), then he used an Amiga 4000 (adding the Maple 5 package for symbolic mathematics), and now has a PegasosII (where AmigaTeX and Maple V still run at very high speed). Having used extensively Unix, VMS, CP\M, MS-DOS, Windows, MacOS, and Linux on the computers available at the university, he still largely prefers MorphOS at home.
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A great read. One of the best articles of the contest. 6 ages of stuff, many sshots, nice job dude!
A VERY nice article. This is how other OSNews.com articole should look like. A+. You got my vote.
Indeed, this might convince me to buy a pegasos…
Interesting read anyway
Edited 2006-07-17 20:15
It can’t be the heir when the actual AmigaOS isn’t dead. I guess it could be a cousin, though
To me MorphOS, AmigaOS 4 and Haiku all have a simliar feeling and I think they have a somewhat common long-term vision for their OS:es. Unfortunately it seems none of them has a large enough developer community – all are pretty lacking when it comes to modern applications.
It’s a very nice and thorough article (I’m trying very hard not to say “with what?” to one Q/A
) and there are lots of nice screenshots. Very good work. 
Fulvio did a great job with that article. Thanks Fulvio.
Thanks also to Frank, Gunne, Stefan and Ed!
MorphOS is headed to opportunity…
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=PPCG…
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=PPCG…
This board will be sold for $99 through an OEM this year.
R&B 🙂
“This board will be sold for $99 through an OEM this year. “
Not a bad price at all.
Any hints on month/quarter?
I assume that price is for the board alone with no case?
bbrv, a 99$ efika board! very nice. I have a kurobox/hg (ppc nas), this board would make a great experimentaion for me to build a new nas.
I like that they can write a usb stack that “is probably the most efficient USB stack in existence on any computer platform” which is non-trivial in the least, but cant write a tcp/ip stack, something that has been documented up the wazoo for decades…
its also so nice that if you want to be able to go online, well you will just have to go online and download the tcpip stack lol. guess that windows/*nix computer is good for something afterall.
People, if you ever consider writting an article for OSNews, look here. What a fine read. 🙂
Great article. This is the perfect kind of article for OSNews.
Did anyone else notice that MorphOS has great looking icons?
Nice article!
One distinctive feature of MorphOS is that it has a small “footprint”. A complete installation requires less than 5 Megabytes for the whole OS.
Hehe….makes me wonder where on earth other OS-developments are going. Now, of course those other OS’s might have more dingle and dangle, but first you don’t really need them, and second, it is (typically) NOT comparable to the amount of resources used when you compare it to MorphOS, BeOS, etc.
It’s sad that that big amount of resources on a modern system is used for the OS. As a sound technician I need all I can get, and as a desktop-user I’d like to get away with a cheaper machine for writing emails.
Well, the article DOES say that the OS does not include a TCP/IP stack, text editor, or browser.
Though how one is supposed to download a TCP/IP stack from Aminet without already having a TCP/IP, I’m not quite certain.
Right… Of course, the TCP/IP stack should be built in.
But, say, when I load my XFCE desktop, it says that about 130 megs of ram is in use. When I booted my A1200 back in the days, max 512 k was in use for the system, plus some bells & whistles I’d thrown in.
The functionality of my XFCE desktop does not in any way compare to that of the A1200 in terms of how much RAM in use. In fact, I don’t think I missed anything but the weather-plugin, and of course tcp/ip as you mention, but should those take 129,5 megs of ram?
Of course the GNU/Linux system as a whole does lots more things than Amiga or MorphOS, but in the case of just using the thing I cannot see many things wich one should think required 129,5 megs of ram, and wich I didn’t have on the A1200.
It seems to all revolve around the TCP/IP stack; X was written to be network-transparent, so all X programs have to be, too. Plus, the original Amiga system software folks had the luxury of being hardware-dependent, which the designers of UNIX and X could not afford to indulge in.
I’m not making excuses for X and/or UNIX; but I suspect that if the Amiga’s designers had had the same goals for the OS and Workbench that the designers of UNIX, X and GNOME/KDE have (that would including designing Workbench so that there was no default look-and-feel), they would have come up with much more bloated software than they did. But they couldn’t; in fact they were so impressed with the design of the Amiga that, having been contracted to write system software for what essentially was a simple computer-cum-console, they came up with possibly the most advanced 1980s OS *outside* of UNIX/X.
Hi guys
Great article. Very nicely written and fun and informative to read. Some notes:
There is a new version of the Operating System in development that has not been released that covers all the things that were listed that was lacking in Morphos.
Also, there IS a Native TCP/IP stack that is quite nice based on the *nix tcp/ip stack downloadable from http://www.morphzone.org.
There is also a very nice Text Editor, and C++ and other language editor available for free.
Not only this but there is a FREE MorphOS SDK available as well if you register on MDC.
you are aware that the official UNIX does exist and was licenced and ported for the a2500 and that at the time, that was the most advanced UNIX for that CPU.
UNIX could have taken much of what made the amiga os great and licenced these back into UNIX to the benifit of both, and then your average linux might be a far different beast today.
anyone that says that amiga OS would have become far larger if they had this or that goal in mind , dont know the core OS/HW developers storys very well, the answer is your assumption is wrong, they always say even today, that you should always make your project as efficient and compact as your able to do given your breaf, case in point ‘rebol core and view’.
hmm, 130 MB. how many daemons are running?
Is there a site somewhere, with a “complete” history from the beginnings of Amiga to the current projects now? I would be very much interested in reading it!
Of course, here : http://www.amigahistory.co.uk
Thank you.
MOS is an enhanced AmigaOS 3.x.
Considering the fact that the last AmigaOS is AmigaOS 4.0, “enhanced AmigaOS” is not precise enough.
Elwood, it’s now 2006 and we now know a lot that was unclear back in the days where there was so much strife between MorphOS and OS4 supporters. How can you still believe this kind of old myth?
MOS is *not* just an enhanced AmigaOS 3.x. It is as far beyond OS 3.x is 3.x was beyond old orange and yellow Workbench 1.3. It was totally reimplemented using OS3 as a template, but its features and APIs are very much expanded. Your comment is about as fair as, “Well, OS4 is just OS3.9 on an AmigaONE”, or “Windows XP is just Win98 with skins.”
winxp is more like win2k with skins…
>”Well, OS4 is just OS3.9 on an AmigaONE”, or “Windows XP is just Win98 with skins.”
While I can’t comment on MOS, but I certainly can assure you guys AmigaOS4 is not OS3.x with some gimmicks (skins etc.). I, however, doubt, that MOS delivers anything beyond AmigaOS4, maybe in a different way (if you want to count Ambient and MUI4 + some api extension, and I don’t know what it adds to the (amigaos)kernel below).
AmigaOS4 has changed dramatically (new kernel, new intution, new graphics, usb/tcp/>4GB files, etc) – well, mostly under the hood, though. But the comment “MOS extends AmigaOS” can only be true for it’s base, the AmigaOS33.1.
You are wrong, MorphOS isn’t “enhanced AmigaOS” at all, it’s another OS which was first developed for PPC Amigas which is almost like AmigaOS and owns it.
It would also be the most intresting alternative os if it was open source and had more developers behind it.
It’s cool arguing semantics ain’t it… you happen to know that a stage and time MorphOS WAS to be AmigaOS 4, and there are many things that actually make it an ‘enhaced AmigaOS’, it’s just that you wouldn’t know what they were even if they bite you… 🙄
> you happen to know that a stage and time MorphOS WAS
> to be AmigaOS 4
According to some people involved at the time, MorphOS was only being negotiated to become a stepping stone towards AmigaOS4 at a time when MorphOS was only usable as an Workbench 3.9 (/OS 3.x) host. Such an approach could have saved some time for all the parties in having something available, but the negotiations apparently failed.
Edited 2006-07-19 16:55
That half of the Amiga community is now stuck in the difficult search for new hardware, complicated by a penalizing licensing scheme.
I’m not sure what you mean by “penalizing licensing scheme”. Some people may think it’s planned to be an expensive thing. I disagree that it’s expensive, simply because it seems inpossible to get a license as Amiga Inc. doesn’t seem willing to even discuss it at any price. Many inquiries to the licensing details have been completely ignored by Amiga Inc. which includes both those wanting to license OS4 for Pegasos as well as those wishing to design all new hardware and get OS4 license for that.
This situation isn’t “penalizing”, it’s the equivalent of them flipping us off.
Hehe….makes me wonder where on earth other OS-developments are going. Now, of course those other OS’s might have more dingle and dangle, but first you don’t really need them, and second, it is (typically) NOT comparable to the amount of resources used when you compare it to MorphOS, BeOS, etc.
Well… other OSs have mem protection,… software,… usable browser,…
Even phones have more memory than and are fast enough to run Linux,… so why spending time feeting the OS in 5Mb when you can spend it on more important stuff ?
Even phones have more memory than and are fast enough to run Linux,… so why spending time feeting the OS in 5Mb when you can spend it on more important stuff ?
It´s called “optimizing your code”, sometimes also referred as “good engineering”. You probably is too young for that but I remember the good old days when you had to code a TSR application that shouldn´t take too much of those 600 Kb of Base memory in DOS (630 Kb if you were lucky enough to be using QEMM :-)). You had no choice other than squeezing your code to the max in order to make it snappy enough to run in limited circumstances like hardware was in those days.
I love Linux as much as the next guy, but this is not a reason to not give props where it is due.
hmm, mem protection. i could have sworn that it was said in the article that morphos does have that feature…
Running all of the existing Amiga-ported software requires you to run in the ABox mode of MorphOS. This mode offers very little memory protection because AmigaOS 3.x offered no memory protection whatsoever.
A proposed QBox mode of operation is supposed to be included in the not-yet-released 1.5 version of MorphOS. This mode will break the source code compatibility with AmigaOS and establish MorphOS as an independant entity (or dash it as a non-entity altogether).
It just doesn’t make sense that they don’t include the TCP/IP stack… After all MOSnet (the Morphos IP stack) is open source and freeware… The only reason I could see it not being included would be if the network stack is GPL.
Actually, it felt a little long, but it was still 100% better than most of the stuff that gets posted here.
MorphOS is still a WIP. It still amazes me that a group of people (all of whom have their own lives and jobs) can get together and write an operating system.
@ Fulvio Peruggi
A very nicely written article. 🙂
> MorphOS is found in its ability to provide for more
> advanced OS features not found in the AmigaOS.
I agree with Elwood that it may have been better to state AmigaOS3.x here. AmigaOS4 includes most of MOS’s improvements over OS3.x as well, of course both MorphOS and AmigaOS4 each have their own additional plusses, minusses and differences in implementation.
> While AmigaOS4 is still in development, the hardware
> is now missing because it originated from a
> developer board that is no longer produced. That
> half of the Amiga community is now stuck in the
> difficult search for new hardware, complicated by a
> penalizing licensing scheme.
Amont Informatique has now some new µA1-Cs (Mini-ITX) boards ready to be sent to dealers. News on CPU upgrades is sheduled for this week and companies are working on alternative hardware.
The few AmigaOnes found aren’t new. They’re reconditioned AmigaOnes. They’re being restored to a good condition (also known as refurbished.)
http://www.amont-info.com/spip.php?breve1
Edit: Typo.
Edited 2006-07-17 20:38
@ ronaldst
> The few AmigaOnes found aren’t new.
Well, AFAIK these boards haven’t been sold through Amiga dealers before. The mentioned boards were “resting” awaiting the required CPU modules or so I was told.
@ ronaldst
> The few AmigaOnes
I believe this batch to be multiple times larger than what was made available at Pianeta Amiga last year (September 2005). But still only double digit figures like the batch back then though. So I guess they will be sold out again in no time, just like was the case back then… Hopefully some good 3rd party developers get the oppertunity to buy them, in anticipation of alternative options.
BTW, I plan to attend Pianeta Amiga in September for the first time myself this year. Looks like some interesting stuff is… 🙂
As usual you express all the enthusiam animating MorphOS and generally ex-Amiga users.
Tnx. for article!
it´s called “optimizing your code”, sometimes also referred as “good engineering”.
Well, I don’t know if I’m too young. But what I know is that if you want to keep up with the competition you cannot spend time on optmizing your stuff… apart from specific parts that *requires* it.
I would rather say that a boot time of a few seconds is a good way to be *ahead* of your competition.
“Running all of the existing Amiga-ported software requires you to run in the ABox mode of MorphOS.”
There is no ABox or QBox mode: ABox (“AmigaBox”) is one of threads running under Quark microkernel. In theory if ABox thread crash other threads and Quark would be unaffected. ABox is a sandbox.
“This mode will break the source code compatibility with AmigaOS and establish MorphOS as an independant entity (or dash it as a non-entity altogether).”
It doesnt mean it would be impossible to run old programs still since ABox would be still there. However these kinds of things wont be implemented in 1.5 or in the near future.
“heir environment is totally immune from any virus, worm, trojan, spyware, adware and similar beasts coming from the net.”
Well, yes and no, there are no Virus for it, but also there is very little protection from any possible ones, it’s security from obsurity, not a impreganable OS.
Future osnews article writer please take note: This is how a techincal review should be written.
We do not want to read how many clicks it took you to install the OS, and what colour scheme you have applied to your instant messaging client.
http://www.morphos.net/
Was this “issue” ever resolved?
Bit out of touch…
The guy who had the quarrel between him and Genesi is no longer developing for MorphOS.
He was developer of Ambient the graphical GUI of MoprhOS and he relased all his source code under GPL license.
Development of Ambient GUI is now in the hands of other persons.
However, yes this was a big trouble in the past, but seems that Genesi is making steps to resolve pacifically any further remaining quarrel and re-fund entire MorphOS project, including Ambient developers.
This is one of the better articles I’ve read here at OSNews in a long time. 6 pages of great content, nice screenshots, and loads of handy info. Great job Fulvio!
Yes, it’s a nice article, but the technical side leaves a much to be desidered. Like the sentence “It is not certified as a RTOS, but in use, its responsiveness is very close to Real Time operation.”
A realtime OS has specific requirements, it’s not just a very fast OS. In this case, given a computer fast enough, every OS can be “realtime”. But it’s not.
it would be nice if Morphos could be licensed for other PPC platforms like mac…
Csynt wrote:
>it would be nice if Morphos could be licensed for other PPC platforms like mac…
Actually is not possible. However I bet that if Apple could provide detailed informations about their firmware, perhaps one day it will be possible.
But I want to remind you that you could run MorphOS only on recent machines with PPC that are no longer manufactured.
MorphOS has sure enough horsepower and it is so lightweight that sure could re-vitalize recent PPC Macs and let them to be used for years and years, but it could not run on new MacIntels.
This is due to the fact that Macintels does not run PPC code but X86 code and MorphOS is all based on PPC code.
In the meantime you can run Mac OS thru emulation on Pegasos II machines together with Linux distros and MorphOS and multiboot all of these OSes at your wish.
Edited 2006-07-18 22:56
Hey guys did you already get memory protection? I would barely rely on such OS where application may lead to OS unstability…
MorphOS is based on quark Mickrokernel which pilotes sandboxes. Actually two are active: ABox and QBox. ABox sandbox contains the Amiga related API.
Any sandbox is protected from other sandboxes running of their own.
At this stage, if some old applications crash into ABox, it crashes the entire MorphOS, just because the fact that Abox contains all the hardware drivers and device handlers (monitor, graphic card, drives, memory managment).
When all these device handlers will be moved into QBox, then if ABox will crash, it will just only ABox that will need to be restarted like as stopping or quitting and restarting a single program.
From the other side of the Amiga planet, then AmigaOS 4.0 just reached a new stage in its history because it has got its own protected memory system. read more about it here:
http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/index.php?option=content&task…
I just signalled these news to OSNews and hope it could be inserted soon in the main page because such an important notice of a serious upgrade needs a visible space to be published in.
Very well written article and lots of nice screenshots. Two thumbs up!
[quote]
According to some people involved at the time, MorphOS was only being negotiated to become a stepping stone towards AmigaOS4 at a time when MorphOS was only usable as an Workbench 3.9 (/OS 3.x) host. Such an approach could have saved some time for all the parties in having something available, but the negotiations apparently failed.
[/quote]
I’m not sure was MorphOS supposed to be ‘new AmigaOS’ when Kickstart ROM license (or source code?) was negotiated on. During its early days of development MorphOS used existing AmigaOS components and required Kickstart ROM to run. Porting to non-Amiga hardware was impossible without it.