Morphos Archive

A video of MorphOS 2.0 booting on a Mac Mini (PPC, of course) has appeared, indicating that MorphOS 2.0 might support Apple's Mac Mini. MorphOS developer Harry Sintonen says: "The port is real and 'official'. However, it is unlikely that any Mac version would make it to the first MOS 2.0 batch: Pegasos I, Pegasos II, and Efika come first. This Mac port is not ready either, so hold your horses."

"SceneCON is an annual meeting of underground computer artists who are members of the famous demo scene. With SceneCON, the organizers aim to follow the two decade old tradition of demo scene parties in Hungary. Yet, with a bit of a twist. This years party was held from the 16th until the 17th of June, 2007. Among its highlights was an extensive demonstration of bplan's EFIKA miniature mainboard running various flavours of Linux as well as a work-in-progress version of MorphOS 2.0. Luckily, the presentation was captured on video. The entire presentation has a total length of nearly an hour with MorphOS 2.0 being featured in the last 14 minutes of it."

The Efika book is a free multilanguage ebook dedicated to the Efika mainboard from Genesi. It contains information about the Efika hardware, its setup and its supported operating systems (Linux distributions, MorphOS). The latest version can already be freely downloaded in English, French and Swedish. Some older versions can also be found in Czech, Italian and Russian. It will be available soon in other languages such as Spanish, German, Turkish, Greek, Portuguese and Polish. This book follows his previous work on the Pegasos book.

The Efika motherboard is now available for the promised pricetag of USD 99. On top of that, MorphOS 1.5 2.0 is apparently on its way, and it will support hardware accelerated transparent windows, among other things. Screenshots and pictures can be found at MorphZone. As promised, MorphOS 2.0 will run on the Efika.

Pegasos.org has (one of) the (only) first reviews of the Efika, the system on a chip thing from Genesi (or bPlan? I lost track). "What can I say? It's a great piece of hardware. bPlan lives up to our expectations yet again. They even exceeded them about its media capabilities. For thin client or tiny desktop usage it will work just fine as long as you choose a low footprint window manager. As a network workgroup server I can't see any difficulties with this hardware. Configure it and you're set."

The MorphOS Team is pleased to announce that the next public release of MorphOS will support the EFIKA. MorphOS is a lightweight and flexible operating system and EFIKA is a low-power and silent miniature mainboard based on the Freescale PPC5200.

Genesi has announced its Open Server Workstation: "The Open Server Workstation is a six layer board with two 970MP processors, the CPC945 and Broadcom's HT-1000 and 2000 chips. Excepting those parts, the board and component cost is below USD 200. Here is the Business Plan we wrote for the board."

Axel Knabe will show the EFIKA board running MorphOS 1.5 at the 'Amiga Meeting Nord' in Bad Bramstedt this weekend. Axel will also take preorders for the board which is planned to be available before christmas 2006.

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.

In a comment on the Power.org blog, Pieter Van den Abeele wrote that Genesi will be releasing the Open Server Workstation, which will be based on the PowerPC 970 (G5) chip. The system is scheduled for release this month give or take a few weeks, and will cost $1599. Developers can also register for a free workstation.

Following the MorphZone Bounty Program, Pavel 'Sonic' Fedin has, after a lot of work, released MOSNet 1.0 on Sourceforge together with the MOSNet SDK. This is a big leap for MorphOS users, which previously had to rely on emulated software to get networking up and running.

The MorphOS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of an updated MorphOS version for Amiga computers equipped with PowerUP accelerator cards. Some of the included changes are improved graphics hardware compatability (drivers for the popular Cybervision64, Cybervision 64/3D and Picasso IV cards), a bugfix for machines with more than 128MB of memory installed, an experimental version of a 4IDE driver, and new Hungarian language support. You can read the changelog, and follow the download instructions.

Genesi has launched their EFIKA developer's program. The EFIKA is a "performance evaluation board based around the MPC5200B PowerPC system-on-chip from Freescale Semiconductor" The only thing you need to do, so it seems, is post a possible use for the EFIKA board on a thread on Power.org.

Reggae Release B has been released. "Reggae is a new approach to media streams processing in MorphOS operating system. Now MOS media library has the stabilized API and entered public beta stage. Unlike old datatypes system, Reggae has full support of streaming and is highly modularized. Streaming support means that media stream is not buffered in the memory as the whole. Small portions of data are passed through a chain of connected objects (called a pipeline). This way the library can deal with extremely big media objects (or continuous streams) keeping memory footprint low."