Submitted by Bright days ahead for the Amiga world. AROS is doing well, AmigaOS4 is getting one heck of a machine in the AmigaOne X1000, and MorphOS continues its development at a brisk pace. Version 2.6 of MorphOS, currently in development, will add support for (G4, I’m assuming) PowerMacs, which, alongside support for the Mac Mini and eMac, gives MorphOS a solid base of used hardware to run on.
At the PowerDev conference, lots of new development in the MorphOS world were demonstrated, chief of which is the improved hardware support. The PowerMac (I’m assuming the G4 versions) will join the Mac Mini and eMac as supported PowerPC Macs MorphOS can run on, and support for the PowerBook is underway too.
That wasn’t all, though. “A sneak preview of the new Ambient panel system was shown which has some quite unique features. These new panels will replace the old once in later Ambient versions,” Geit.de writes, “The new MorphOS scanner application and driver system Scandal was demoed to the audience by using an Epson scanner. It’s a quite nice piece of software and even the transparency unit worked.”
MorphOS can now also work with 3D displays. Avatar was played in 3D on a 3D monitor, but in all honesty, I find this 3D fad like looking at a glorified shoebox diorama – it’s not true 3D, it’s just a bunch of layers. Since my total lack of interest in this subject, it could very well be that this 3D thing is very easy to add to an operating system.
There’s no word on when MorphOS 2.6 will arrive, but when it does, I’ll be very, very happy. I have a dual 400Mhz PowerMac G4 with a Radeon 8500 waiting specifically for MorphOS.
After a week for my registration key. But I must admit, this OS is faster than greased lightening.
…and sadly for Commodore USA, Lindsey Lohan is back in rehab for failing drug tests! Things are looking up.
Hah!
I wish I could mod you up.
Twice would be cooler.
Alas, I already posted.
Alternative OS’s are cool, but, really. Upcoming support for a 10 year old system?
I know PPC is important to the Amiga crowd because it has long been an upgrade path for 68k Amiga machines, but it also was for Apple machines, and now, x86 is the upgrade path for PPC.
I know supporting PPC is important for supporting existing software, but it isn’t something that’ll drive development of new software, and I think that is more important.
If only x86 wasn’t the only way to go for decent desktops, the PC world would be much more exciting. Maybe I’m too pragmatic for my own enjoyment…
??? What does x86 have to do with PPC ???
It’s a completely different architecture and actually older than PPC. What do you mean?
Do you mean that one should “upgrade” to x86 because it is cheap? Why not ARM or MIPS or whatever? In what way is x86 an “upgrade” to PPC?
More better ommpf!
He is drawing parallels to Apple’s move from PowerPC to x86 considering Apple was the largest PowerPC desktop/laptop producer up until recently. That there is a movement away from PowerPC outside of niche areas and it would be best for the said operating system vendor to do likewise.
That is my assumption anyway.
Well, luckily A-eon managed to score a pretty decent PowerPC processor to work with for the X1000, and while it surely won’t rekindle the PowerPC flame, it’s still good to see people willing to bet on something else than x86.
Sure, it might not make sense, but then, neither does growing a beard. Still, I did it anyway.
That is a pretty nice system, and worth getting excited about.
Old G4 systems, not so much. A modern PC could probably emulate it well enough.
But then Apple moved from x86 to ARM. And if Apple did it, everybody should do it. After all, Apple is always right and those who do not follow Apple are behind the curve.
So the next upgrade is x86 and then ARM, right?
Why not jump straight to ARM then?
Sorry but that all makes no sense to me. The “Apple did it” argument is void. MorphOS is a niche OS. Those who run it are mainly Amiga enthusiasts. Does it make sense to develop applications for MorphOS on x86? I’m not sure.
Edited 2010-09-30 11:43 UTC
There is AROS…
But all of these are just many sides of one community. Unless we’re paying Amiga users, I don’t think we have the right to be telling them what hardware and software to use.
A 400 MHz G4 Mac is going to boot quicker with MorphOS than a brand new top-end Mac.
Heck, OWB 1.7 supports HTML5 video/audio, meaning that MorphOS is more capable on the Internet out of the box than Windows 7 out of the box (IE8).
On the www.
Edited 2010-09-30 12:37 UTC
I’ve never understood the obsession with boot times. Granted, excessive boot times are a pain, but I only boot my computer once in a while. Usually, my system goes into standby when I’m away, and it comes out really quickly.
You should switch it off when you are away. It is burning power even in standby mode.
It’s burning power when booting. Lots of hard disk activity, fans at full speed, lots of CD drive access, all while I’m spending my time waiting for a desktop to appear.
Fast boot times lessens this, but low power states use a a small amount of power.
I wonder what the power difference is, between 3 minutes of boot/shutdown activity (total) versus an hour of standby?
That’s a very interesting question.
On the other hand, you should first get your orders of magnitude right : currently, it becomes fairly common to see alternative OSs gettiing in an usable state in around 30-45s on most hardware.
Then there’s also the problem of considering the full product cycle : hardware which runs permanently wears out more quickly. And recycling the old computer and making the new one cost a lot of power.
This of course considering an idealistic usage pattern where the user does not replace the whole computer when the HDD wears out.
It all depends on what you consider a usable state.
Bare desktop with a browser icon being clickable isn’t usable in the same way as a desktop with plenty of services loading that allow me to actually use my desktop in an efficient manner.
Of course, that takes 3-5 minutes or more just to boot on my aging system. That’s why I tend to leave it in standby.
For me, usable state = responsive desktop. Launching the applications which I use is a matter of seconds from that state.
About your old system, you should try to copy and replace the HDD. It’s by far the main cold boot performance bottleneck, and although things improve very slowly in the HDD speed area, they do improve (especially on laptops).
Edited 2010-09-30 17:01 UTC
Well, I did just buy a new disk a week ago, using it as an external for now.
Just waiting for some free time.
Installing OS + software is such a pain in the ass.
If you want to make it faster, you can just clone the old disk. It won’t fix some issues, but you’ll get a much-welcome hardware performance boost already.
About 24kwh or so.
Switching off the computer is definitely more power efficient. By Far.
In order to measure power consumption, you multiply the power (in kw) of your device by time (in h).
My girl friend is and energy geek. She measures everything. I’ve been forced to measure how much power does my PC consumes.
Well, it does consumes less at boot that in normal usage actually. I’ve found that doing some light work (text editor and stuff) is about 24kwh (without screen). About the same at boot. In stand by mode: 24kwh! No difference! Now what is interesting is when your computer is doing some 3D work. Consumption jumps to 80kwh. That’s right, 3 times that of light work. Just activating compiz instead of metacity and my computer burns the power of 3 computers. The graphics card (old Nvidia geForce 7300 in my case) burns 2 times more power than the rest of the computer when computing 3D effects.
So yes, switching off the computer is definitely better because the hard drive does not increase consumption significantly.
Edited 2010-10-01 05:47 UTC
Sorry to tell you that, but your physics is not quite right.
Wattage (in W) measures the flux of power, how much you consume per second. It’s a characteristic of your computer.
The total amout of energy consumed during a certain time (in J or Wh), on the other hand, is not. It depends on how large the time interval considered is. Making the computer run for a long time will make it consume more energy, no matter how power-efficient it is, at it eats up energy permanently.
So in order to get scientifically neutral results, we have to know the amount of time involved in each measurement.
Sorry, I confused kw with watts. My computer actually consumes 24w, not 24kw.
When I say 24wh, I mean that if the computer ran for 1 hour at that level of wattage, it would consume 24wh. So it actually consumes 24w.
The amount of time does not matter. I’ve made several measurements and the result is repeatable. My computer consumes 24w when not doing heavy graphics work. It is the same when in stand by mode or when booting. Leaving it in stand by mode for one hour is 24wh. Booting for 3 minutes is 24wh*3/3600 = 0.02wh.
So leaving the computer in standby mode for one hour is 24wh and booting the computer is 0.02wh. If I have compiz running, the result is between 75w and 95w.
Anyway, whatever the maths. The point is that the computer does not consume significantly less in stand by mode than when doing light work, that it does not consume significantly more when booting and that it does consume more than 3 times that when doing 3D work. So yes, switching off the computer when not using it is by far more efficient and using the nv driver is more efficient than the nvidia one (but then having a powerful graphics card becomes useless)
So my advises are:
* Don’t buy a powerful graphics card when you are not going to use it.
* If you have a powerful graphics card for a purpose (games), don’t use it for the desktop.
* Switch off the computer when not using it.
* Even better, buy a switch for the power plug. The computer consumes energy even when switched off (mine consumes about 5w)!
* Don’t use CRT screen and if you do anyway, use a dark wall paper. That can halve the energy consumption on a CRT screen.
Edited 2010-10-01 07:55 UTC
Many thanks for pleasing the physicist
Indeed, those results are interesting. Aside from proving that standby is a waste of power, it shows how much hybrid graphics, PixelQI screens, and non-accelerated desktops are interesting subjects that should be worked on.
Edited 2010-10-01 08:41 UTC
You are right about PixelQI screens. My old CRT screen (15′) consumes 25w when displaying a desktop with black wallpaper and 50w when displaying white wallpaper. My new LCD screen (19′ – 1440×900) consumes between 24w and 25w. This one actually consumes more when displaying black than white, but that is not that a huge difference, only 1w or so. So the screen consumes just as much as the computer in light usage. This is definitely an area where improvements could be made.
Obviously
To understand this, you only have to consider that all technologies based on LCDs are relentlessly wasting power because they do substractive color synthesis. They make a uniform white backlight, then they filter out colors (wasting the extra energy of the white backlight in the form of heat). It’s a fundamental defect of that color synthesis method.
The currently best lighting technologies in terms of maximal efficience are backlight-free technologies like PixelQI for daytime use and additive synthesis like OLED for other uses. I hope they will end up in most computers someday.
Edited 2010-10-01 10:02 UTC
[/(attempted) humour]
Dimly recalled from Physics class many years ago, or to take a Douglas Adams-type view: why worry when the amount of energy in the universe remains constant? 🙂
Because once we have converted all of the readily-available energy to heat, and once the temperature of the world has become close to uniform, we’ll be basically living naked in a hot desert, strained to death, and wondering what to do now ?
Edited 2010-10-04 17:10 UTC
Short boot times are interesting because cold boot is better than standby for a few reasons :
-No power wasted, except that of the power light. Contrast with keeping RAM (especially) and some other circuitry running for nothing. This issue is voided by hibernation, though, but then boot times become important again.
-Software performance degrades with uptime. There’s always a memory leak somewhere, some applications leave processes in the background wasting CPU time for unknown purposes even after they’re closed, some crashes have long-term consequences… Fetching a fresh OS image from the disk allows one to go back in a clean state where software runs at full speed and maximum reliability.
With hibernation, boot times is scarcely more than loading a ram image off the hard disk. That’s fine for 2GB of ram. I wonder how practical it is for 16GB?
I have to disagree with this statment. This isn’t the days of Windows 98. My system doesn’t degrade as uptime increases, and Windows does a fine damn job of shutting down processes. Also, the software I use is well written, and doesn’t normally doesn’t leak memory. If it does, I restart only the app in question, and sanity is returned.
That was my point, although I expressed it awfully. Going back from hibernation to a working state with several GBs of RAM is already taking times close to that of cold boot, making use of hibernation questionable. With even more RAM, cold boot would become a better option.
An interesting point to make is that if RAM amount grows, power consumption during standby is going to grow too, since RAM manufacturers don’t exactly care about it.
On the other hand, I hope that we’ll soon stop making more and more powerful machines just for running a desktop OS and word and start instead to work on making Windows and Word eat less resource so that they can work on less powerful, and hence less power-hungry machines.
The common usage patterns of a desktop computer could easily be applied to a 1 GHz P4 with 512MB RAM if software was optimized a little bit. With more aggressive optimization, a 300 MHz PII with 128MB RAM could probably work (although I’m not sure of that one, because of new trends like hi-res displays and heavily-compressed data that require some power). GPU acceleration should not be ever needed outside of the gaming and HD video area.
On computers with insanely powerful processors and large amounts of RAM like my new laptop, you don’t notice this phenomenon much if you regularly turn your computer off, but on my old computer (Athlon 2400+, 512MB RAM), you could clearly see the computer slowing down and begin to swap as time passed. I’m not talking about keeping apps open : even when closing apps and opening them back, there was still some RAM missing, so it was the OS and background processes&services which were trashing it.
This computer was not running win9x, it was running XP, so more or less the same Windows NT kernel that we have now. If you know where the amount of actually used (not cached) RAM can be read on Windows 7, I can tell you if there have been improvements on the area or if memory is still slowly trashed.
My conclusion from this is that if we’re going to finally go back to low-performance computers in order to reduce our power consumption and face all performance issues of modern software instead of just running it on faster hardware, we’d better take these problems into consideration.
Edited 2010-09-30 16:31 UTC
MorphOS has no memory protection, memory leaks can cause havoc.
A two or three second boot time is essential.
I don’t disagree with anything you said – apart from the above. Windows 7 does “come” with IE8, but almost as soon as you boot the OS it downloads the Browser ballot (silently) and unless you catch it in time to cancel, it reboots*, installs the update and asks you to choose which browser you want. It will not shut up till you pick one. I chose IE8 because I really, really couldn’t hack it bugging me and I was on a train with no WiFi or internet access.
* I was 90% through writing a document on the way to work at the time and it LOST my document as I had not remembered to turn on autosave for some idiotic reason (or it just wasn’t working in office 2003 under Windows 7.)
EDIT: oh and these days, “out of box” no longer means “on the installation media” because so many OS require an online update soon after initial boot up.
Edited 2010-09-30 18:38 UTC
So the next upgrade is x86 and then ARM, right?
Well, even though some might see as a flamebait I’ll say yes
There’s just so much good in ARM that sooner or later people will start buying ARM desktops for home use. x86 will be around yes, but by then it’ll be for professional use or people with a need for really high performance regardless the power consumption.
Indeed, I’d gladly buy an ARM-based desktop since high performance is not very important for me (I only need it for compiling software
).
On the other hand, I’ve yet to see a standard desktop architecture on ARM, like the IBM PC mess (BIOS, PCI, and friends) on x86. And a desktop-grade OS running properly (= very snappily, not like most desktop OSs on Atom netbooks) on top of it.
Edited 2010-09-30 15:45 UTC
Indeed, I’d gladly buy an ARM-based desktop since high performance is not very important for me (I only need it for compiling software
).
Usual desktop usecases aren’t really that dependant on CPU performance, instead the computer mostly sits idle waiting for input and as such an ARM-powered desktop would be quite perfect; ARM uses really, really little power when idle, and quite little even when working at full speed. And as there already exists multi-core, multi-gigahertz ARM processors they’re plenty good even for gaming. Gaming mostly is limited by disk access and GPU performance anyways.
I just hope someone will bring a good ARM desktop to the regular consumers soon.
And a desktop-grade OS running properly (= very snappily, not like most desktop OSs on Atom netbooks) on top of it.
Yeah. At the moment it seems it’d be Linux, QNX or perhaps Haiku. They all have their own share of rough corners and while I like Linux quite a lot and am a F/OSS proponent I don’t really think Linux would be all that good a choice.
Haiku IMHO seems to have the most potential at becoming the next big OS, but they have so much stuff ahead of them before it’s ready for general populace. Especially proper gaming APIs, support for broader hardware, and acceleration of various tasks are needed before it can even try to become a desktop OS for general populace.
Apple didn’t move from x86 to ARM. Just because they have new products that use ARM doesn’t mean they are moving from x86. For that to be true, either their upcoming desktops would have to be arm (which of course they aren’t) or they would have had to been using x86 in iPhones/iPods prior to ARM (which, of course, they haven’t).
Not at all. Moving from PPC to x86 was a very good move for Apple, and they did so for very good reasons: Performance. The key question is, is the goal of MorphOS to truly revive Amiga as a viable platform, or is it merely to cater to Amiga enthusiasts?
I hope it is the former, because the latter is market that can really only shrink.
Seriously? You’re asking that question?
Wow. Just … wow. Please turn in your geek badge.
How about answering the question instead?
I think his point is that
-PowerPC is dead for desktop use. Apple ditched it when its power management performance became unsatisfactory, and Sony remotely killed OtherOS on the PS3 because they feared some random piracy danger and actually thought that average people would actually go as far as installing linux on their PS3 in order to pirate games (well, it’s Sony after all). The only remaining PowerPC desktops are legacy hardware that you’ll likely be unable to replace once it wears out.
-This makes x86(_64) the only widespread desktop computer architecture, since other architectures (SPARC, ARM…) have not much presence on that market (should I say “yet” about ARM ?)
-Hence people replacing their dead PowerPC hardware will likely buy x86 hardware next, making x86 support more of a priority than legacy G4s
Edited 2010-10-01 14:45 UTC
Thank you, that makes a lot more sense than just “Wow”.
However, would people who buy a brand new x86 PC that comes with a Windows license be more likely to run Windows or MorphOS? Does it make sense for MorphOS to compete with Windows on x86?
Anyway I think Sony cut off OtherOS support because they subsidy the console. They sell it for less than its cost and recoup by selling expensive games.
If you buy the console to install linux, you won’t be buying any game and that costs Sony the price of the subsidy.
Look at that:
http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/11/sony-still-subsidizing…
That happened not long before Sony axed OtherOS. I suppose they didn’t want that to become a trend.
Well, since MorphOS is a niche OS anyway, I think it doesn’t lose much at being a niche OS which runs on modern computers like desktop Linux and BSDs. Amiga fans will follow the Amiga myth no matter where it goes
Apple has shown that making reasonably fast PowerPC emulation can be a good transition solution, so there wouldn’t even be a loss in functionality.
You’re right, that’s a very valid explanation of this move too. And makes me even more clueless than usually facing the logic of modern economics, where you voluntarily lose money hoping that something unrelated will somehow give you your money back AND get angry if that doesn’t happen.
At least, people who fund fundamental research are generally ready to accept the loss of money that may come with it fairly. See the LHC : it’s obviously never going to reimburse the initial investment, it’s just built for the sake of glory and scientific achievement.
Edited 2010-10-01 18:37 UTC
No more likely than someone buying an expensive or old machine to run MorphOS. I think people would at least give it a try if it would run on their laptop/desktop/netbook.
I have an older G4 Powermac I would love to try Morphos out on. Too bad IBM stopped making powerpc laptops in the early 90’s.
I admin two P5 AIX IBM server here at work. They are really powerful for running database and peoplesoft systems, but man they can kick out the heat. They are not so friendly on the power bill either.
There are still some PS3 with pre 3.15 firmware with OtherOS support.
I hope the class action can make Sony revert support back.
The PS3 was a cheap PowerPC computer that do not heat and can keep the power bill low. Now it is merely a console.
There is atleast over 900 Amiga user either red, blue or black out there. Just check this map of where you find Amiga users worldwide:
http://map.minimig.net/
This is usefull to know because often Amigans get big rolling eyes. Often with comments like there is only 3 Amiga users left. But infact that map proves its over 900 of us worldwide and that map have been only active since last Wednesday when I posted on aw.net forum about it.
LOL, I hope you were’t being serious. Otherwise it seems you completely missed the point that in the big scheme of things, when we’re talking about a population of billions, 3 or 900 really are statistically equivalent.
Although it seems that at some point the die hard Amiga community and reality parted ways…
Indeed. There’s probably more than 2000 DOS and windows < 98 machines still running in corporate environments and education/research. Mainly because software for it was expensive and they never found something which was really worth the switch to more recent operating systems, especially Windows NT flavors and their tendency to make everything that uses COM1 crash miserably.
Does that make them non-isolated people as the scale of the computer world ? Them who have a hard time with the simplest usb pen-drive around ?
Edited 2010-10-04 05:48 UTC
RIght.
http://www.webpulp.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/5414660_8716bf615…
Yum yum *w*
Was giving an additional niche market example to show that hundreds/thousands of users are nothing at the scale of the computer world.
Edited 2010-10-04 16:45 UTC
why are these Amiga machines ridiculously expensive? This machine is very weak…
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=…