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Indeed, this might convince me to buy a pegasos...
Interesting read anyway

Edited 2006-07-17 20:15

"This board will be sold for $99 through an OEM this year. "

Not a bad price at all.
Any hints on month/quarter?

I assume that price is for the board alone with no case?

bbrv, a 99$ efika board! very nice. I have a kurobox/hg (ppc nas), this board would make a great experimentaion for me to build a new nas.

Well, the article DOES say that the OS does not include a TCP/IP stack, text editor, or browser.

Though how one is supposed to download a TCP/IP stack from Aminet without already having a TCP/IP, I'm not quite certain.

Right... Of course, the TCP/IP stack should be built in.

But, say, when I load my XFCE desktop, it says that about 130 megs of ram is in use. When I booted my A1200 back in the days, max 512 k was in use for the system, plus some bells & whistles I'd thrown in.

The functionality of my XFCE desktop does not in any way compare to that of the A1200 in terms of how much RAM in use. In fact, I don't think I missed anything but the weather-plugin, and of course tcp/ip as you mention, but should those take 129,5 megs of ram?

Of course the GNU/Linux system as a whole does lots more things than Amiga or MorphOS, but in the case of just using the thing I cannot see many things wich one should think required 129,5 megs of ram, and wich I didn't have on the A1200.

It seems to all revolve around the TCP/IP stack; X was written to be network-transparent, so all X programs have to be, too. Plus, the original Amiga system software folks had the luxury of being hardware-dependent, which the designers of UNIX and X could not afford to indulge in.

I'm not making excuses for X and/or UNIX; but I suspect that if the Amiga's designers had had the same goals for the OS and Workbench that the designers of UNIX, X and GNOME/KDE have (that would including designing Workbench so that there was no default look-and-feel), they would have come up with much more bloated software than they did. But they couldn't; in fact they were so impressed with the design of the Amiga that, having been contracted to write system software for what essentially was a simple computer-cum-console, they came up with possibly the most advanced 1980s OS *outside* of UNIX/X.

Hi guys

Great article. Very nicely written and fun and informative to read. Some notes:

There is a new version of the Operating System in development that has not been released that covers all the things that were listed that was lacking in Morphos.

Also, there IS a Native TCP/IP stack that is quite nice based on the *nix tcp/ip stack downloadable from www.morphzone.org.

There is also a very nice Text Editor, and C++ and other language editor available for free.

Not only this but there is a FREE MorphOS SDK available as well if you register on MDC.

you are aware that the official UNIX does exist and was licenced and ported for the a2500 and that at the time, that was the most advanced UNIX for that CPU.

UNIX could have taken much of what made the amiga os great and licenced these back into UNIX to the benifit of both, and then your average linux might be a far different beast today.

anyone that says that amiga OS would have become far larger if they had this or that goal in mind , dont know the core OS/HW developers storys very well, the answer is your assumption is wrong, they always say even today, that you should always make your project as efficient and compact as your able to do given your breaf, case in point 'rebol core and view'.

hmm, 130 MB. how many daemons are running?

Of course, here : http://www.amigahistory.co.uk

Thank you.

Elwood, it's now 2006 and we now know a lot that was unclear back in the days where there was so much strife between MorphOS and OS4 supporters. How can you still believe this kind of old myth?

MOS is *not* just an enhanced AmigaOS 3.x. It is as far beyond OS 3.x is 3.x was beyond old orange and yellow Workbench 1.3. It was totally reimplemented using OS3 as a template, but its features and APIs are very much expanded. Your comment is about as fair as, "Well, OS4 is just OS3.9 on an AmigaONE", or "Windows XP is just Win98 with skins."

winxp is more like win2k with skins...

>"Well, OS4 is just OS3.9 on an AmigaONE", or "Windows XP is just Win98 with skins."

While I can't comment on MOS, but I certainly can assure you guys AmigaOS4 is not OS3.x with some gimmicks (skins etc.). I, however, doubt, that MOS delivers anything beyond AmigaOS4, maybe in a different way (if you want to count Ambient and MUI4 + some api extension, and I don't know what it adds to the (amigaos)kernel below).
AmigaOS4 has changed dramatically (new kernel, new intution, new graphics, usb/tcp/>4GB files, etc) - well, mostly under the hood, though. But the comment "MOS extends AmigaOS" can only be true for it's base, the AmigaOS33.1.

You are wrong, MorphOS isn't "enhanced AmigaOS" at all, it's another OS which was first developed for PPC Amigas which is almost like AmigaOS and owns it.

It would also be the most intresting alternative os if it was open source and had more developers behind it.

It's cool arguing semantics ain't it... you happen to know that a stage and time MorphOS WAS to be AmigaOS 4, and there are many things that actually make it an 'enhaced AmigaOS', it's just that you wouldn't know what they were even if they bite you... :roll:

> you happen to know that a stage and time MorphOS WAS
> to be AmigaOS 4

According to some people involved at the time, MorphOS was only being negotiated to become a stepping stone towards AmigaOS4 at a time when MorphOS was only usable as an Workbench 3.9 (/OS 3.x) host. Such an approach could have saved some time for all the parties in having something available, but the negotiations apparently failed.

Edited 2006-07-19 16:55

Even phones have more memory than and are fast enough to run Linux,... so why spending time feeting the OS in 5Mb when you can spend it on more important stuff ?

It´s called "optimizing your code", sometimes also referred as "good engineering". You probably is too young for that but I remember the good old days when you had to code a TSR application that shouldn´t take too much of those 600 Kb of Base memory in DOS (630 Kb if you were lucky enough to be using QEMM :-)). You had no choice other than squeezing your code to the max in order to make it snappy enough to run in limited circumstances like hardware was in those days.

I love Linux as much as the next guy, but this is not a reason to not give props where it is due.

hmm, mem protection. i could have sworn that it was said in the article that morphos does have that feature...

Running all of the existing Amiga-ported software requires you to run in the ABox mode of MorphOS. This mode offers very little memory protection because AmigaOS 3.x offered no memory protection whatsoever.

A proposed QBox mode of operation is supposed to be included in the not-yet-released 1.5 version of MorphOS. This mode will break the source code compatibility with AmigaOS and establish MorphOS as an independant entity (or dash it as a non-entity altogether).

The few AmigaOnes found aren't new. They're reconditioned AmigaOnes. They're being restored to a good condition (also known as refurbished.)

http://www.amont-info.com/spip.php?breve1

Edit: Typo.

Edited 2006-07-17 20:38

@ ronaldst

> The few AmigaOnes found aren't new.

Well, AFAIK these boards haven't been sold through Amiga dealers before. The mentioned boards were "resting" awaiting the required CPU modules or so I was told.

@ ronaldst

> The few AmigaOnes

I believe this batch to be multiple times larger than what was made available at Pianeta Amiga last year (September 2005). But still only double digit figures like the batch back then though. So I guess they will be sold out again in no time, just like was the case back then... Hopefully some good 3rd party developers get the oppertunity to buy them, in anticipation of alternative options.

BTW, I plan to attend Pianeta Amiga in September for the first time myself this year. Looks like some interesting stuff is... :-)

I would rather say that a boot time of a few seconds is a good way to be *ahead* of your competition.

The guy who had the quarrel between him and Genesi is no longer developing for MorphOS.

He was developer of Ambient the graphical GUI of MoprhOS and he relased all his source code under GPL license.

Development of Ambient GUI is now in the hands of other persons.

However, yes this was a big trouble in the past, but seems that Genesi is making steps to resolve pacifically any further remaining quarrel and re-fund entire MorphOS project, including Ambient developers.

Csynt wrote:

>it would be nice if Morphos could be licensed for other PPC platforms like mac...

Actually is not possible. However I bet that if Apple could provide detailed informations about their firmware, perhaps one day it will be possible.

But I want to remind you that you could run MorphOS only on recent machines with PPC that are no longer manufactured.

MorphOS has sure enough horsepower and it is so lightweight that sure could re-vitalize recent PPC Macs and let them to be used for years and years, but it could not run on new MacIntels.

This is due to the fact that Macintels does not run PPC code but X86 code and MorphOS is all based on PPC code.

In the meantime you can run Mac OS thru emulation on Pegasos II machines together with Linux distros and MorphOS and multiboot all of these OSes at your wish.

Edited 2006-07-18 22:56

MorphOS is based on quark Mickrokernel which pilotes sandboxes. Actually two are active: ABox and QBox. ABox sandbox contains the Amiga related API.

Any sandbox is protected from other sandboxes running of their own.

At this stage, if some old applications crash into ABox, it crashes the entire MorphOS, just because the fact that Abox contains all the hardware drivers and device handlers (monitor, graphic card, drives, memory managment).

When all these device handlers will be moved into QBox, then if ABox will crash, it will just only ABox that will need to be restarted like as stopping or quitting and restarting a single program.

From the other side of the Amiga planet, then AmigaOS 4.0 just reached a new stage in its history because it has got its own protected memory system. read more about it here:

http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/index.php?option=content&task...

I just signalled these news to OSNews and hope it could be inserted soon in the main page because such an important notice of a serious upgrade needs a visible space to be published in.