Submitted by Late June this year, the MorphOS team released the long-awaited MorphOS 2.0 release. It delivered a lot of needed new features, such as 3D support and a network stack. Despite the long list of new features, criticism was abound, mostly due to the high price (EUR 150), and the fact that it only ran on Pegasos and Efika hardware. Today, the MorphOS team released the first update to 2.0, aptly named MorphOS 2.1. Apart from that, there’s news on the Mac Mini port of MorphOS.
The release notes for MorphOS 2.1 are quite extensive, but the most important changes are a sound driver for Efika boards, a 2D driver for the XGI Volari V3XT graphics card, and a virtual CybergraphX monitor, so you can use MorphOS through VNCServer without a video card.
Related to this is news from MorphOS core team member Piru, who has given out some details about the Mac Mini port of MorphOS. It now runs on all revisions of the Mac Mini, as long as it has a Radeon video card. He also uploaded a nice screenshot to prove their hard work. Sadly, he couldn’t give a release date estimate.
Umf…
I tried the Morphos 2.0 CD 1.5 months ago, and it wouldn’t work properly on my Pegasos (with ATI Radeon card, 128 MB RAM — machine sent by the original company directly, i didn’t put it together myself). It would load fine, but JUST at the time that it would switch to high-res for the graphical installation screens, the CRT monitor would go out of sync. It’s a 1280×1024 85Hz monitor (capable of 1600×1200 at 60 Hz too), and never had such problems with it with any other OS. But Morphos 2.0 just didn’t work, and I am not sure if this bug is actually fixed on 2.1 before I invest more time download it and try it.
Just pack your PegII and ship it to Thom already. Give it to someone who cares and can actually install MOS.
I’d love to have it, but uhm, shipping a large computer to The Netherlands is rather expensive both on the sending (shipping costs) as well as the receiving (import taxes) end.
Too bad.
The latest idea is to give it to the local Computer History Museum here in the Silicon Valley. I guess it will have to be Morphos 1.0. It’s not my fault if the Morphos guys can’t get their monitor detection right.
Edited 2008-09-07 15:02 UTC
Would you donate the machine to a developer if shipping was paid? That would be best for the community.
If CHM won’t accept it, then yes.
is more or less finished, why are they just sitting on it like this? Also, if they have something that runs on a Mac Mini G4, I wonder how hard it would be to scale up to either an iMac G4 or a PowerMac G4…
Updeated 2.1 over 2.0 on my efika. Seems to be going ok. I dont plan on registering it tho, way too much money.
I did have mondo trouble getting it to go at 1680×1050 as it did not like my montiros DDC and had to boot up with the bootmenu option. working good now.
really feeling the screen redraws with the radeon 9250 128mb 64bit card tho at that res.
its interesting but not worth the price.
what’s the “bootmenu option”?
New feature of MorphOS 2.x. By pressing F1 or LMB during startup, you’ll get into Amiga-like boot menu, where you can change some basic settings.
its something like bm or bootmenu they added it in 2.0
so you can bootlike
boot hd:0 boot.img rd rds 0 bm
I have an old eMac I can get my hands on as my brother-in-law doesn’t use it anymore. (He finds Vista “Better coz it plays games”!)
I dunno the spec of it, just that it was the last G4 eMac that Apple produced.
Any good for MorphOS?
It seems it could be!
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/emac/stats/emac_1.42.html
If MorphOS could be made to work on Apple Hardware (not just the G4 iMac), I have 3 B&W G3 computers that would love to run a modern OS. I have several Beige G3’s that would love it also.
It’s easy on eBay to get G3 and G4 upgrades for those computers if horsepower is a problem. I just haven’t bothered since 10.5 and above won’t work on them, and it’s only a matter of time before PPC 10.4.11 is no longer a supported platform for apps.
But, this old Apple hardware is at least as good as an Efika board, and the older Pegasos boards.
I hope someone ports MorphOS to them. I’d buy at least one copy to try it out.
I’d be willing to commit to buying a copy in advance if it would convince someone to port it.
Yeah, I agree with that. I’ve got an iMac G3 DV+ with 1GB of ram I normally run Ubuntu on, but I’d switch to MorphOS in a second if it ran on it.
What do you mean it won’t run on them? Which CPU’s are you looking at?
10.5 runs as long as the G4 is 866 MHz and above.
There is also a trick that will help.
Take a drive and put into a Mac (or run it from a FW port) that is within specs. Install 10.5 on the drive, and then put that drive into the slower machine.
Works every time! Just make sure it isn’t too slow, or you will be disappointed.
No G3’s though.