Expert Zone reports: “A lot of reviews of the Pegasos have been published since its release, more than two years ago. Unfortunately, most were written from a fan point of view and were not really objective so I decided to write my own review. The goal of this article is to present the Pegasos/MorphOS couple so I won’t mention anything about other OSs running on the machine, such as Linux, or even MacOSX.” This review, translated from French to English at Expert Zone’s request, covers the hardware and software of the Pegasos I machine. Photos and screenshots included.
Into The Pegasos 1 & MorphOS
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I bought one which now seems a long time ago, the OS wasn’t finished enough and the hardware was slow (memory speed).
It was quiet though.
But it turned out a bit disappointing so to keep the case, the harddisk and the memory module I replaced the board with an 1GHz Via epia (replaced the noisy cpu fan with a zallman nothbridge cooler) and it still runs today…
If you want a PPC better look at the Mac mini.
Didn’t know it was legal to run OS X on the Pegasos…
That’s a beautifully presented review. I’m a MorphOS user who enjoys the OS and sees a lot of good things in it, but there are many things that just aren’t there yet.
It is super responsive where Linux is sluggish. It is quickbooting where Windows and Linux and other take some time. In a lot of respects it is a “fun” OS. There are some good and powerful apps like Papyrus and mPlayer and others. But the browser situation needs improvement and there is a variety of stuff you take for granted on Windows or Linux and you can’t do it with MOS, or it takes a long time to set up and troubleshoot with MOS. And there is still no in-built TCP/IP stack with MOS. You really need to work at a MOS installation to get it up-to-speed and really it is mainly ex-Amiga users who have the patience and know-how for this.
It’s real difficult to recommend or advocate MorphOS to someone who is not an Amiga user and comes at it from a different angle. Hopefully this will change, the developers keep plugging away at it. There is the long-rumored version 1.5 that is supposed to include the TCP/IP stack and other stuff.
Hopefully 1.5 includes a web-browser and has improved user-friendliness, more stuff done right off the CD for you. If 1.5 somehow manages to live up to the potential of MorphOS, to tie up and represent all the stuff from the past with the new features, it could really be a meaningful option for regular people or at least geeks of all stripes, and it would be possible to advocate it somewhat more.
do I need to say more
A review of the Pegasos I? that’s recent stuff! Got any reviews of fruity imacs?
I’m a fan of Pegasos and MorphOS, but I don’t quite see what’s the point of this review. I mean, Pegasos I is an old product that’s no longer in production. It’s like publishing a review about a second generation iMac. What’s the point?
Well, remember, the Pegasos I was discontinued in 2003. The Pegasos II is better hardware now.
> lack of memory protection
That’s only a problem of the ABox for compatibily reasons to old Amiga Software. The Kernel has everything and the QBox will have too.
> Didn’t know it was legal to run OS X on the Pegasos…
It runs only through MOL (Mac-On-Linux).
> > Didn’t know it was legal to run OS X on the Pegasos…
> It runs only through MOL (Mac-On-Linux).
MacOSX license agreement clearly states that MacOSX can only be run on Apple hardware, so you can’t run it legally on a Pegasos machine.
@All: If you read it, you’ll notice that the review doesn’t focus on hardware specs/speed… But rather on the usability of the MorphOS/Pegasos *couple*. The Pegasos 2 doesn’t have any impact on it. And except some more speed and the removal of hardware bugs, what’s the difference between Peg 1 & 2 ? GigaBit Ethernet ? No MorphOS drivers…
@DJBase:
>That’s only a problem of the ABox for compatibily reasons to old Amiga Software. The Kernel has everything and the QBox will have too.
Yes, and the only other problem is that we only have ABox right now…
Leo.
“MacOSX license agreement clearly states that MacOSX can only be run on Apple hardware, so you can’t run it legally on a Pegasos machine.”
Well, except the license agreement might not be legally binding.
Also I don’t see the value in a peg1 review, the earlier ones had troubles due to a buggy chipset, genesi made a hardware fix for that and the old boards where exchanged and sent out for free to developers who wanted them.
Later they released the Peg2 with a better chipset and DDR-memory support, and let people upgrade real cheap (don’t remember but i think it was like 50 euro or so), and the old peg1s where resold for a low price to people who might have wanted to jump on but didn’t wanted to spend all that much money (althought I would have bought the real thing (the peg2) instead since memory, hdd, gfx and so on are so expensive anyway).
Anyway, decent product for a decent price. And a very nice OS. What we need is less split in the Amiga community and very cheap hardware so everyone can jump back again. x86 is ok, something the the mac mini or a cheap peg is ok, an expensive amigaone is not.
I don’t know if it would be possible to join the AmigaOS4 and MorphOS projects together (and maybe AROS) and keep on moving from there. To bad the best platform is dead
> Yes, and the only other problem is that we only have ABox right now…
Thats another Story…
> MacOSX license agreement clearly states that MacOSX can only be run on Apple hardware, so you can’t run it legally on a Pegasos machine.
Not in every country is the EULA valid.
As several ppl wrote already: the PegasosI is outdated and discontinued. the PegasosII is the current product which is by far better than the PegasosI.
The PegasosII is not end of development, currently new designs are under evaluation. Also the PegasosII might experience a hot price drop since Genesi and Directron are evaluating a mass production right now.
MorphOS is very nice, but not ready for a braoder audience yet. The lack of MP is not that big deal if you know about it and do not run crashy apps.
Avoid also to run a nuclear power plant on MOS (but remember to avaoid this with Windows, too). For generic use MOS it better and more stable than one might think. But as said, too many things are still missing (decent browser,native tcp/ip, improved file manager, better 3d support) to qualify for a broad audience OS *yet*. But I love it and it does nearly everything I want (if there would be a better browser, than I would be happy).
The (oftenly repeated) comaprision with a Mac mini or iMac is a bit lame, since those devices target to a different audience. Mac mini is a nice device, so is the iMac and of course the PegasosII also.
I’m afraid you can’t easily dismiss the lack of memory protection in a present day OS. It was much easier to make the arguments like “avoid ‘unstable’ apps” and “be careful and everything will be okay” back when every single PC OS had the same short coming. Today it is simply unacceptable to bring a computer to its knees because of one misplaced pointer reference in any program that is running on the machine. Above someone stated that this is only a problem for “Abox” not “Qbox.” If that is to say that it is only a problem for legacy apps, then I would think they could partition the memory space and run the legacy apps in a light weight emulation environment that would make bad memory accesses crash the emulator, not the OS and the rest of the apps with it. The lack of an integrated networking stack and other features, again coming from the article and users above, make it sound like it has a long way to go. I do wish them well though. I always like seeing new hardware/OS companies coming along. It sounds like they just need a bit more polish and features at this point.
>Above someone stated that this is only a problem for “Abox” not “Qbox.” If that is to say that it is only a problem for legacy apps
It is a problem for *every* MorphOS app available today.
Leo.
Are they using a third-party kit?
If MorphOS runs on QEMU then it would be quite interesting, especially since it would probably run at a good speed. It could also allow users to keep flaky applications seperate from the others (by running QEMU 2 or more times).
It would be cool to run Linux on a PegasosII. Morph OS looks cool, but is just missing a few key features.
Quote:
Well, except the license agreement might not be legally binding.
Answer:
yes, but EXCEPT if you are wrong, in some countries you’ve committed a FELONY, and will not only lose a great deal of money, but may go to jail too.
I actually disagree with draconian laws myself…but nevertheless I also disagree with the practice of ignoring license agreements, I would think that a tech company would have more respect for intellectual property, but one company I could name, has shockingly little respect…
yeh, great pr move..
haven’t seen any pear pc users thrown in prison
The used GUI-Toolkit is MUI, the magic user interface. It is part of
MorphOS, quite powerful and fast and very customizable.
AFAIK violating a license agreement would be a civil matter, at least here in the USA. No one would go to jail.
“Above someone stated that this is only a problem for “Abox” not “Qbox.” If that is to say that it is only a problem for legacy apps, then I would think they could partition the memory space and run the legacy apps in a light weight emulation environment that would make bad memory accesses crash the emulator, not the OS and the rest of the apps with it.”
It is planed to move the ABox into the QBox as a task for legacy or current apps and new native apps will then running in QBox. So if old programs crashing the ABox it will only kill the task not the complete OS. But thats future sound…
benn wrote:
It would be cool to run Linux on a PegasosII.
You can. There are at least 4 distros available.