Marcus Neervoort has made a MPEG video (136 MB) of last Saturday’s Amiga OS4 event which includes demonstrations of Hollywood, Audio Evolution, Mame and Arteffect 4.0 Alpha on Amiga OS4. Many event pictures are available. Also Elena Novaretti and Massimo Tantignone recently ported Elena`s PowerIcons (32-bit PNG icons) project to AmigaOS4: Screenshot1 Screenshot2
everytime I goto the amiga page and try to find info all i find is screenshots.. what platform does the OS run on? x86 or PPC? is the OS out? or do they make there own computers like back in the day?
AmigaOS 4 is on a pre-release version for developers, so not officially out yet. This requires PPC. I believe they have certain system requirements. The AmigaOne motherboard (already selling), fulfills those specs.
I used to be an Amiga fan. I’m out of touch, but I might be interested in becoming part of the user base again.
Try http://www.intuitionbase.com/ it should answer almost everything you need :O)
But fast answer …
AmigaOS 4.0 is going to be able to run on classic Amiga’s with PPC and PPC computers under the AmigaOne license.
The OS is not out yet … the prerelease should be released next week, but there is no date for the final release.
They don’t make their own computers, but read some info about the computers @ http://www.intuitionbase.com/
Best regards,
hnl_dk – Henning Nielsen Lund [Denmark]
The video is great, i always enjoy seeing events like that. =) It was informative, and even had a “Demo” feel to it, sweet!
7/7/9
Nevermind the OS (j/k)
— where can I get those icons?
What language is the video?
Those icons would make a MacUser GREEN with envy, ja?
Oh wait: that would imply it’s even coming out.
heh, those are pretty nice icons, but I think green with envy is a little much. There are quite a few very nice icon sets for OS X.
As for AmigaOS… If they could ever actually release it, and make it work on my iBook, I’ll surely give it a try.
It looks exactly like Gnome, with a different icon theme. (Maybe it really is Gnome with a different icon theme.)
Screenshots (and that video was just a singing and dancing screenshot) can only tell you so much about a piece of software. Unfortunately, most Amiga websites don’t say much of interest about Amiga OS 4 either. What I want to know is how does it compare to OS 3.9 in terms of responsiveness and stability, performance and memory efficiency. Unfortunately, the Amiga (or Pegasos) are not Wintels or Macintoshes. You cannot simply go over to a friend’s place or a store to give it a test drive.
Looks cool.
These ones?
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=7214
Sorry, they are some pretty awful screenshots. I realise that nothing is anything nowadays without wonderfully detailed, pretty, useless crap all over it… but really, is the best way they can show off their OS by opening windows and windows full of hundreds of confusing icons?
I realise the icons are very clever and each one has some subtle clever difference from the next, but I don’t want to spend ages looking through different icons to find the one with a monkey eating an icecream in the background with a doohicky wrapped around its tail that is supposed to signify a .log file by some programmer’s warped imagination.
” I realise that nothing is anything nowadays without wonderfully detailed,
pretty, useless crap all over it… but really, is the best way they can show off their OS by opening windows and windows
full of hundreds of confusing icons? ”
It’s ok to show a bit what the stuff will look on the “screen” but what i would really want not only on OSnews but from the OS teams themself is more performace chart and internal architectural block diagram. Like the other said: it might just be gnome with another theme from what they show.
“Those icons would make a MacUser GREEN with envy, ja?”
Possibly older MacOS users, but MacOS X users have photorealitic icons. Those icons are very well done, but they are not photorealistic as far as I can tell.
music
“I realise the icons are very clever and each one has some subtle clever difference from the next, but I don’t want to spend ages looking through different icons to find the one with a monkey eating an icecream in the background with a doohicky wrapped around its tail that is supposed to signify a .log file by some programmer’s warped imagination.”
That Dock can be configured to display as simple buttons with the names of the programs. I think I might prefer that myself as I am not a great lover of icons.
My experience is that a dock is much easier to use than the nested Start menus of Windows, or the pages of web-style links used by a Novell setup we have at work.
“What I want to know is how does it compare to OS 3.9 in terms of responsiveness and stability, performance and memory efficiency.”
I don’t think those can be judged from a pre-release, or even from a point zero release. Check again in a year or two.
Cool video!
Those iocns look much nicer than the dated looking onet they have a few months ago.
It looks exactly like Gnome, with a different icon theme. (Maybe it really is Gnome with a different icon theme.)
It might look that way, but it definitely is nothing like Gnome. 🙂
Also you can’t compare AmigaOS directly to Gnome, as one is an OS and the other is sitting on top of an OS. AmigaOS is tightly integrated with its GUI. When you start an Amiga and jump into its Early Starup Menu, you’ll see a GUI driven environment. When you boot directly into a shell, it’s a windowed shell from which to can start other shells, graphical programs, use screens immediately, etc. These are part of the Kickstart ROM and you can use it without any floppy drive or harddisk present. This will change a bit with OS4, where everything will reside in RAM.
The AmigaOS equivalent of Gnome is Workbench, which is very basic. It resembles a MacOS8 environment with a spatial file manager. The beauty is that you can replace it totally with other filemanagers as you wish and never look at Workbench again and it won’t be loaded and hog your system. It’s no hack. You can also extend Workbench or program it through ARexx, a scripting language which allows you to communicate between most Amiga programs. It comes with AmigaOS and has been a standard part of AmigaOS since around 1987-88.
Being highly modular, you can also replace or choose not to run or install a TCP/IP stack. You can choose not to start Workbench, but only specific server applications and reduce your boot times. I’ve seen a system reboot from shell to a new shell in less than one second. This is going to be more like 5-10 seconds for normal use.
You have a GUI driven harddisk partitioning tool, which is easy to use. It’s standard and comes with the OS. It makes sense to include that, because power users always need it.
I can only speak as a 3.9 user, but where Gnome feels very streamlined and is very aware of user friendlyness through nicely arranged dialogs and Human Interface Guidelines, Workbench combined with many standard applications give you all options at your fingertips and has a base system that makes sense and you can get to all corners of it in a matter of a week.
With all this control, you can maintain a very effective and no-frills system.
So what may not be as easy to use as Gnome early on, you won’t feel many restrictions after spending a few weeks with AmigaOS. Beginners and power users are equal, here.
Workbench and the tools that come with it dive deeper into the system than Gnome does on Linux/BSD with having to resort to use a shell. You can for example examine usage of libraries, devices and debug why programs won’t start with a GUI driven program called SnoopDOS.
Even beginners can use it and it makes sense. AmigaOS is a very honest system. Unfortunately through this honesty, it’s not particularly suitable as a multiuser system. But it’s incredibly easy to get the feel of why something doesn’t work and spyware and suspicious activity is extremely difficult to get away with on AmigaOS…
Some things are not present in AmigaOS, simply because they aren’t really needed as it’s solved using other methods:
Virtual Desktops are Screens which you can switch between utterly instantly (no window redraws). It’s fun to demonstrate this to a Windows or Linux user on my old Amiga 4000 with a 25 MHz CPU, because there is litterally no waiting, no harddisk swapping or anything. You can also create something that resembles real virtual desktop, simply by defining a larger screen which you can scroll around in.
Configuration handling tools. I know this will change to an XML format with OS4 from IFF in OS3.x. If an application runs haywire, because of bad settings, you can simply delete its configuration file and create a new one. There is no huge “AmigaOS Control Center” to load. All settings are decided through small programs, which focus on specific system parts.
There is no registry. Therefore the effects of deleting a program or a library usually don’t result in knocking down the entire system. System repairing tools are therefore much simpler and less needed. The old “Reinstall if it doesn’t work” mantra is simply not there, as you can hunt down what’s broken, quite easily. That’s also why the only two installation tools on AmigaOS aren’t very complex and they are free to develop for.
Like the mac, you can copy the entire system from one machine to another with settings without having to resort to installers and uninstallers and Norton Ghost-like tools. That way, it’s very easy to create your own customized recovery system, should your harddisk crash.
There is no language specific version of AmigaOS, because all localization is handled through catalogs which you can switch between on the fly, very simple. All available languages come as standard on an AmigaOS installation.
In short, it’s one hell of a flexible system, which just lacks a bit in the latest applications and some stability issues. I hope that will change with OS4.
Hmm, not real keen on some of them icons, reminds me of old style computer game gfx. Need to reduce the border thickness to make em less cartoonish.
I noticed those purple icons are the exact same ones that gentoo chose to be its default theme for gnome, (even though gentoo is working on its own iconset). I use them as default and there are several other screenshots of desktops fully themed with the Lila iconset at this wiki:
http://www.newtolinux.org.uk/wiki/index.php/lila
I guess gentoo users like them because their clean and simple (and cartoonish), hope you like the screenshots
.