In a classic case of “two more weeks”, the MorphOS team has actually finally really I’m-not-kidding-you released MorphOS 2.0. This release was long-awaited, and comes packed with so many new features they might as well have called it MorphOS 3.0. “The MorphOS development is proud to announce the public release of the much anticipated version 2.0 of MorphOS. For an overview of the included new features and updates, please read our release notes. A description of the hardware requirements and installation procedures can be found here.”
The list of new features is actually quite mind-blowing. The most important ones are the following:
- Ambient was extended massively and is well on its journey to become the ultimate desktop
- NetStack, the new integrated TCP/IP stack
- Poseidon USB stack, now at version 4
- MUI 4.0 with new UI classes
- Many brand new tools and utilities
MorphOS lacked a native tcp/ip stack before, so the addition of NetStack is a major, major stride forwards for the Amiga-inspired operating system. There is more though, such as AltiVec support, hardware accelerated graphics, and support for the Efika platform. In addition, it has also received a new mulitmedia framework titled Reggea. “A new, modular, streaming multimedia framework. It is going to replace existing datatypes system. Many Reggae classes are accelerated with AltiVec.”
This is just a very narrow selection, as the list is seemingly endless – and to top it all off, they state, dryly, “please note that this is just an overview and does not mention or explain every new feature.”
MorphOS 2.0 supports the Pegasos I and II, as well as the Efika platform. A time-limited, yet full-featured demo is available for free download, but the non-time limited version costs 150 EUR, but an introductory price of 111.11 EUR goes until 15 July.
I will be honest with you: MorphOS intrigues me beyond imagination. It is one of those operating systems that keeps eluding me – I just can’t seem to get my hands on it, to test it out and review it for you guys. I hope this changes now that MorphOS 2.0 is out and about, and rest assured, OSNews will do everything within its power to get a review out to to you guys as soon as possible.
Hey guys, I still have that Pegasos G3 machine from 2003 that I reviewed for OSNews back then: http://www.osnews.com/story/3589/Pegasos:_An_Interesting_&_Sexy_New…
I haven’t turned that machine ON since then. I wonder, does this new MorphOS version works on that old Pegasos PPC G3 machine? Anything special I need to do to install it?
Hi,
No, nothing special apart from selecting the right boot image (see below)
MorphOS 2.0 Readme:
– Turn on your Pegasos 1/2
– Press escape on the keyboard until you reach the Open Firmware prompt
– Insert the CD
– At the Open Firmware prompt, type:
(Pegasos 2) boot cd boot.img
(Pegasos 1) boot /ide/cd bootpeg1.img
– MorphOS will now start booting. Once it is done booting, follow the on screen instructions.
full version here:
http://bigfoot.morphos-team.net/test/MorphOS.readme
YES it will work – since the Pegasos is the main target hardware for this new edition of MorphOS. So you got exactly the right thing at home 🙂
here is some installation guide:
http://bigfoot.morphos-team.net/test/MorphOS.readme
hope to read some review soon…
Thanks for the info.
I just saw that it costs $150. I am not sure I will be purchasing it I am afraid. Not for a machine that I won’t be using. Although, I don’t mind writing a review if the company that sells it sends me a free key. This way everyone wins.
You can still test it eugenia, the download available on the official website is a full featured but time limited version (30minutes per boot)
Which clearly doesn’t cut it for a proper review, given the fact that you can’t really test how it performs when exposed to long periods of work
you got a point 🙂
I’m a bit suprised that a) OSNews editors appearently do not communicate on forehand on such a topic (I’d expect Thom to know about this 2003 review?), that b) they need to communicate to each other via the comment section (I’d expect Eugenia to contact Thom directly) and c) that OSNews (being heavily sponsored and all) cannot provide editors with so little as $150 for doing a review.
JAL
Eugenia has stated many times that she doesn’t give a rat’s behind about this stuff anymore, and more specifically that she finds her Pegasos a useless brick. Her interest here is a surprise to me too, but a good one too.
And you are all-knowing and all-powerfull enough to know that didn’t happen? Because in fact, it did. We discussed this stiff yesterday evening.
Heavily sponsored?
But yes, if it really comes down to it those 150 EUR won’t be an issue. We just haven’t got that far yet. Genesi has been promising me the review hardware to get a MorphOS review out the door for more than 3 years now, but they never live up to it. Their last promise was “as soon as MorphOS 2.0 is out”, so I contacted them last night.
>I’m a bit suprised that
Honey, you missed lots of episodes.
>a) OSNews editors appearently do not communicate on forehand on such a topic (I’d expect Thom to know about this 2003 review?)
Thom joined OSNews in 2005, two years after I wrote this review.
>, that b) they need to communicate to each other via the comment section (I’d expect Eugenia to contact Thom directly)
We did afterwards. But it’s not a big deal thing to start talking about. I don’t care about this machine. It’s sitting on my office taking space for the last 5 years. In fact, I am not even sure it still works. I have it though, and I am willing to write a review if the company would like one.
> and c) that OSNews (being heavily sponsored and all)
OSNews’ ads are not managed by us editors, but by the owner who pays hefty server fees. If we want to write a review for something, we have to ask for a review unit ourselves. In fact, that’s how it usually works: companies send software/hardware for reviews, journalists don’t buy that stuff.
>cannot provide editors with so little as $150 for doing a review.
If I am going to ask for money from OSNews (I won’t) it would be for buying me gadgets for my new interest, which is videography, not operating systems. I don’t really care about OSes anymore, but I am around, and if I want to help a product, or ditch a product, I might actually sit my ass down and write an article. But that doesn’t mean is what I am interested at these days.
As I told Thom on IM yesterday, if he was in the Bay Area I would give him the Pegasos for free. I know Thom wants to use it and review it much more than I do. It’s just that happens that Thom is in The Netherlands, and shipping it back to Europe would be expensive.
Just curious as to the status of “staff” and of OSNews. Are you staff? Does that mean you are paid for what you do? Does OSNews have a video site?
I am curious only because you stated, “I don’t really care about OSes anymore, but I am around, and if I want to help a product, or ditch a product, I might actually sit my ass down and write an article.”
While I am not staff, I would do the same thing. I had assumed (and it is dangerous for me to do so), that OSNews staff would be interested in OSes…
You are, of course, welcome to or not welcome to write anything. I was just curious
We’re volunteers, and don’t get paid.
…?
>osnews has a video site?
No, I do videography on my own. Although I have shot non-reporting video for two reviews of digicams (non-reporting means, semi-artistic video using digicams). Both can be found here http://vimeo.com/eugenia/videos
At 150 euro’s after the introductory offer ends, not cheap is it?
Did anyone see the poll on morphzone that asked you what you would be willing to pay? IIRC the most popular choice was 50 euro, talk about pricing yourself out of a cornered market!
I am a kind of bit surprised rwgarding this price and expected that for such a high price we would have a real packaging and not only a serial key
btw thx for this great release !
I had the chance to test MorphOS 2.0 before and I was well impressed. Unfortunately some cool features didn’t make it into this release, but as I heard, they will be delivered a bit later on. A real nice update from 1.4.5.
And a kept promise!
I have one of the all-in-one crt imacs with the translucent case. Haven’t used it in quite a while, though it did run debian with kde well enough.
Would this release work on that?
No, version 2.0 works only on Pegasos and EFIKA boards. Previous release – 1.4.5 – works on classic Amigas equipped with PowerPC accelerators.
Also, MOS Team stated that there’s a work-in-progress port for PowerPC Mac Mini.
As with most Amiga related stuff, it runs only on a very small subset of over priced underperforming extremely rare hardware…
It won’t run on PPC macs, which are very common still and cheaply available…
And it won’t run on modern PPC based hardware that’s still being sold, eg games consoles.
I might be willing to buy a cheap PPC mac to try this, or i might consider installing it on a PS3 if i alreay had one for other purposes, but i won’t buy expensive custom hardware and many people feel the same way.
And i’ll be waiting MorphOS for PowerPC Macs anyway. First of all, anyone should be glad to have state of the art OS on bright PowerPC-era Machintosh computers.
But i think, that need of support for PowerPC Macs in other aspect – in portability, as *Books G3/G4 were only wide spreaded PowerPC-based laptops. Of course that will be and problem too for company, that want to sell its hardware products in much more quantity.
Mac Mini with G4 processor was targeted, cause of small quantity of drivers to write, while PowerBook for example is more hungry.
Proprietary Broadcom chip for Wi-Fi, motion sensor, keyboard backlight, APM (for battery), touchpad, different sound chips and at last buggy Intrepid 1/2 chips.
Anyway 170 euro is not much for full-working release. But for PowerBooks and other not-working or half-working environments it’s better to get something like “Developer KIT” in order to haven’t time limits and get compilers.
Edited 2008-07-01 19:56 UTC
So I have an Efika and must be a little interested in Morph OS to buy one..
Well I purchased my Efika with an XGI card like a few other people.
The XGI card has been a total waste of space, try finding decent PPC drivers for X Windows that can drive it, so I have been mainly running Debian on the Efika and mainly in text mode.
Well it made a half decent syslog server for my ADSL router.
I have PCs lying around turned off that are several times faster and worth (well nothing.) but they would have certainly used more power to run and been louder.
So for the moment of truth I follow the instructions and i get as far as
“Quark Kernel loaded” and no further.
Perhaps MOS2 does not support the graphic card that was by default shipped by GENESI with the Efika. The chip is an SIS chip so I thought it might be on that supported list.
So it goes. Anyway I have ordered a RADEON 9250 of EBAY – after waiting for some months a few more weeks wont really hurt, I am looking forward to seeing Morphos running.
I would be very interested in reading a test. I have no imagination how this operating system looks like, but I’ve read very good things about it.
I don’t own the hardware to test it myself, but I’m following the development in the PowerPC camp very closely and I hope to get one of these very low power devices for a reasonable price soon. (Sam440 is unfortunately very expensive.
)
I just noticed that the Efika–which is the only machine that is not listed as discontinued on Genesi’s site–only goes up to 400MHz, as compared to up to 1GHz with the Pegasos I/II. That’s pretty freaking wimpy. It seems there isn’t any *decent* available hardware being sold for this OS after all.
You’ll be surprised what performance a 400MHz CPU can deliver.
My main desktop is a 450 MHz Celeron (which is a lot less effective than the Efika PowerPC) and there are few things I can’t do, most due to the crappy integrated graphics card.
You won’t use it for compilation, hd playback, video editing or similar tasks, but it is still very usable as long as you use the right applications.
Morph OS is supposed to be very media and resource friendly (similar to BeOS) and even a comparatively “slow” computer will be very usable with such software.
Well, I have used M2 for several hours now. Netstack TCP/IP stack is so user-friendly it’s invisible. I was expecting to have to key in some values somewhere and start a program but all I did was check “DHCP” twice during the main installation (in fact it was prechecked, so I didn’t even have to check it but I did see it) and it found my router and Internet connection. The included Sputnik web-browser is dated 2 June 2008 and seems pretty good. Don’t expect Firefox 3 functionality though. Sputnik is a WebCore port for M2 done by one guy, so you can’t expect Firefox 3 functionality. They did a lot of other stuff and definitely took the OS to the next level, which may not be the level you need if you’re accustomed to thousands of apps to select from and super fast processors and so on. I’ve heard M2 described as a “toy” and that may be selling it a bit short, but I understand what is meant by that. I couldn’t really phase out this MacMini with OSX etc. and start using the Pegasos or Efika with M2 as my main system, but they are good diversions and its fun to see how far you can take them. It took a long time since the last version but once the M2 Team set a schedule they did stick to it and deliver a release that is vastly better than anything they delivered before. Hurrah for OS diversity, and congratulations to the M2 Team!
Edited 2008-07-02 12:22 UTC
I just saw that it costs $150. I am not sure I will be purchasing it I am afraid. Not for a machine that I won’t be using. Although, I don’t mind writing a review if the company that sells it sends me a free key.
Start dreaming right now then