Submitted by The new AROS Developer Robert Norris has been interviewed by the AROS Show. “One of the original goals for AROS was 100% compatibility with AmigaOS 3.1. This is a noble goal, but it’s not particularly forward-looking. AmigaOS has moved on since then, and there will be no new m68k hardware, yet many AROS developers are intent on making sure everything they do can be made to work on the older systems. That’s their perogative of course, but my concern is that by constantly looking backwards we’re missing the opportunities in the future.”
I would love to run aros on my a600 HD ;D maybe porting to amiga and backporting to pc would do some wonders :=
Edited 2007-02-01 01:17
Your comment about AmigaOS and MorphOS is spot on. I can only imagine how teeny tiny their market shares are. I bet AROS’ is larger than the two combined. But really it’s too bad that the work has become divided. Imagine where things could be if all of us were working together on a single open source Amiga OS.
Keep up the good fight. Kick those DOS packets into gear!
And whoa! Your name is my my middle name!
transami : “Your comment about AmigaOS and MorphOS is spot on. I can only imagine how teeny tiny their market shares are. I bet AROS’ is larger than the two combined.”
I can tell you are totally wrong. AROS idea is nice but it is too complicated to install and too limited by software availability.
OS4 and MorphOS have many more apps (even big ones), run fast and stable.
I don’t understand why Amiga fans don’t go to PPC. You can even run Linux for missing apps that have to be used times to times.
Forget the idea of running it on a Amiga 600, I want aros on my pc, and as my primary os. Aros is increasing for the future.
It’s getting there with ftp client, paint program, and no juicy mp3 program! I just need a mail client, web browser, automatic tcpip setup, and a decent file system ported.
Very happy with progress over the last year. If this carries on into 2007, aros will arrive soon rather than later.
I’d like to have AROS on PS3. Fixed powerful hardware is what the doctor ordered.
AROS should be very good on tight memory system (192mb).
Once 64 bit port and ppc port become mature,
the only thing left is a good SPE management subsystem.
There are times when I can see the point of cloning an OS, but I don’t really see that with Amiga OS. The design was incredible for a desktop OS in 1985, but that was 20 years ago and there are lots of problems with the design from a modern perspective that can’t be easily fixed. Furthermore, there really isn’t much worthwhile software for Amiga OS that isn’t tied to the old legacy hardware. In many ways, AROS for legacy hardware (or some crazy Coldfire based new amiga) makes a lot more sense than AROS on a PC.
I’m not suggesting that the world should just be Linux or Mac OS or even Windows, but I don’t see the point in trying to bring an old broken design to new hardware when there is seemingly little benefit to doing so. If you don’t like how bloated and complicated the more mainstream OSes are there are other alternatives that have much cleaner designs. Syllable (which doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves IMHO) boots fast, isn’t a resource hog, is much simpler than the mainstream operating systems and it’s a lot further along than AROS. It has a useable web browser and e-mail client, USB support, a modern filesystem, a modern GUI system, NTFS support (read-only) and it’s not hobbled by a legacy design. Haiku also has relatively modern design (in fact the design is quie similar to Syllable as Haiku is a BeOS clone and Syllable’s design was heavily influenced by BeOS) though it’s not as far along as Syllable from the looks of things.
Given statements like “my concern is that by constantly looking backwards we’re missing the opportunities in the future”, it would seem that the AROS developers are starting to realize this too, but they haven’t come to what is, at least to me, the logical conclusion that Amiga OS isn’t a logical base for a modern desktop operating system.
but I don’t see the point in trying to bring an old broken design to new hardware
So, what is broken actually?
The only bad thing i see is what OS internals are exposed to applications.
SAS memory protection could be added on 64 bit processors even without the software modifications. Same for resource tracking.
Multiuser support may require api modifications of course.
SAS memory protection could be added on 64 bit processors even without the software modifications
You cannot have proper memory protection, even in a single address space, in Amiga OS without modifying the API. Now from what I recall, the people (person?) involved in the x86-64 port was interested in making those changes if he/they haven’t already done so.
You can’t move to multiple address space (which makes things like virtual memory and memory mapped files much more practical) without completely reworking the message passing system in an incompatible way.
If you’re going to break API compatability why bother trying to be compatible at all? What does Amiga OS do better than the alternative I mentioned that makes it worth dealing with the legacy issues it presents?
Full protection may not be possible without finegrained memory access privilegies.
But most recent programs could be modified to do it.
Non-modified programs can be partially protected in this system to prevent code corruption at least.
The lost memory and global memory fragmentation issues also can be easily avoided.
Multiple address space is old-fashioned technology for memory constrained machines
Today, machines has a plenty of virtual memory to map everything into 64bit space.
In current desktop unux/windows environments this address space is just wasted.
Itanium have some hardware support for SASos, but too sad, software industry is too inert to use it.
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Why to bother with it at all?
I remember using the AMIGA was fun =)
Maybe not so fun anymore, but all OSes i use today are slow, bloated and hard to configure/fix.
But too sad for me, they have the software i need.
I didn’t tried syllable or Haiku, although i used Beos in the past and it was good.
BTW, i don’t see why anyone need to build legacy-compatible API as OS foundation if one can run old software in a sandbox and share resoures between the environments, like the Mac.
I for once have never understood why they have wanted to make it like AOS 3.0 since it’s old “shit” which noone would use anyway. I’d much rather had seen a new modern multimedia OS.
They went for AOS 3.0 for the same reason ReactOS originally went for NT 4.0 and Haiku for BeOS 5.0. If you don’t aim for something fixed at the beginning nothing gets done, in the early days people where just arguing about what they could do better and how so that no work actually got done.