AmiKit 8 has been released, with MUI 4.
It brings the same experience as AmigaOS4 users have been enjoying for some time. Actually, MUI 4 for AmigaOS4 and MUI 4 for AmigaOS3 are built from the same source code, so any similarities between the two builds are 100% intended!
Great news for AmigaOS 3.x users. The previous version of MUI is 17 years old.
MUI not MIUI. The latter is Xiaomi’s mobile UI.
How many people really use this as their daily OS? Outside of developers on the project can it really be more than 100 people? I’m not hating, just seriously curious.
You would be really surprised how many users the Amiga still has, just take a look on Amibay, English Amiga Board, Amiga.org and a search engine to get a general idea. Granted not many will be using it as their only OS but like me will boot it up almost every day and use it for something or the other. To me the Amiga still has now 20 years on, something that modern systems are lacking, it was years ahead of its time.
I like the fact that AmigaOS 3.1’s GUI boots up just about as fast as a 2014 year state of the art Windows PC with SSD, and that on 20 year old hardware.
Some people have more than one daily OS. For example, I use Windows, Linux and AmigaOS pretty much most days. Windows because I have to in work and for my photography, Linux at home because I prefer it for general computer use, and AmigaOS for when I want to use an OS that feels nice to use.
Obviously AmigaOS wouldn’t be my only daily OS because it lacks too many things I need/want these days, but it doesn’t mean I don’t use it whenever I can.
Agree, while my main OS is Haiku-OS with Windows as my secondary OS in daily use the idea that one can only use one OS on a computer really needs to die.
Personally my observation is that it is the people who only use one OS only every time they use a computer that are also the people who get into the most trouble/confusion when they have to do something new on their machines.
People who use multiple OSes learn to be flexible in how to use their OSes/machines and often if the can’t solve a problem one way they realize how many other options there may be out there.
I’m running Amikit on my real A4000D, and it’s quite nice. Though maybe they decided to change it, but I was pretty sure that MUI 3.9 was the new version for OS3.x, and MUI4 was for OS4. The old version of MUI was 3.8, that hadn’t had a new release until recently.
It is quite amazing that after all this time, even the ‘classic’ Amigas get some love.
I think the best thing the OS4 developers could do though is to open it up for more PPC based machines. Amiga is trying to compete too much within itself right now instead of banding together and trying to compete with others. Rather hectic, but I still love mine
Ha, okay, so I see the confusion… Apparently MUI3.9 is an updated 3.x (well duh) and MUI4 was only for OS4, but apparently they ‘backported’ it especially for Amikit8. Which means currently you can’t download MUI4 for m68k. At least I didn’t see it on http://muidev.de, the homepage for the development.
Also as a good laugh, there is an image specifically of the USB stick plugged into a MAC, but then it says in the description, “AmiPUP boots on almost any x86 computer (not including Macs) that can boot from CD or USB.”
Yeah, I noticed that too. It may not run directly on a Mac in the way it will run inside Windows but it will run on VirtualBox, etc
The instructions say it will boot into a live environment – that’s just what it won’t do on the Mac, because of EFI
Edited 2014-12-07 16:19 UTC
MUI4 for AmiKit is and official update and has been exclusively released for AmiKit. The public version for the OS3.x massess will follow later.
AmiKit is available for Mac too. So the image you mention is completely OK, of course. AmiPUP is something else, it’s a Linux host environment which doesn’t BOOT on Mac. That’s it.
It doesn’t boot on some PC’s from USB either unfortunately. On 1 of my motherboards, (Asus P6TSE Intel X58 chipset and core i7 920) it starts to boot and fails with can’t find the sfs file. I presume its down to a lack of drivers in the kernel as the first version did the same. What is weird is that Puppy Linux itself has no problem booting on this setup, and it’s the only distro I’ve come across that won’t.
Makes sense, I just found it funny.
Are there some scripts that could be released if someone wanted to use a different base distribution? Like if I wanted to use Debian Jessie to boot directly into Amikit?
I’m also waiting for MUI4 to trickle down into Amikit for Real, since that’s what I’m currently running on my A4000D.
It would be nice to have it running on a saner base. For some reason the Puppy this is based on has been crippled slightly.
Edit:
Amikit real has been released today, it includes MUI 4 and some other improvements. Have just read the announcement on Amiga.org.
Edited 2014-12-08 17:30 UTC
Does anybody know if MUI 4 works on OCS/ECS Amigas?
(I’m assuming not. Even a decade ago, remaining Amiga developers were hostile to anyone without at least AGA and didn’t even bother to test on ECS.)
At the moment it doesn’t even run on AGA, it is Amikit 8 only, which uses RTG emulation!
There are versions of CGX and P96 that use AGA. They were done because a number of programs were released that only supported CGX or P96. I suppose MUI4 should work with them as well. Just have to wait for someone to try it.