Genesi just did the official launch of MorphOS & Pegasos at the Amiga and Retro show in Aachen, Germany at the weekend and won the Amiga Award 2002 by popular vote. The company got their first 50 production boards and these have been sent out already. This is the first new desktop system/platform launched since Be launched the BeBox 7 years ago (HW & Software – there are plenty of new OSs and hardware but entirely new platforms are pretty rare these days). The companies (Thendic-france and bplan) are merging into a new company called Genesi.
Pegasos Wins the Amiga Award 2002 by Popular Vote
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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http://www.osnews.com/www.amiga-award.org!?!?!?
I fixed this before you actually write this comment down. You were just seeing the *cashed* osnews front page.
The pegasos board specs look suspiciously like that of a Mac. is there something that im missing?
“The pegasos board specs look suspiciously like that of a Mac. is there something that im missing?”
Well, it’s an mATX board and it doesn’t look like a Mac board at all!
The Macintosh, for all of it’s fancy case design and pretty OS, is really a fairly poor performing machine. IBm’s own engineers claim that Apple hasn’t gotten even 60% of the potentcy of the PowerPC out of their design, due to motherboard and memory control setups. The Pegasos, by comparison, was designed around extracting every oz of performance out of the CPU. A real-world comparison at the Retro show at Aachen had someone amazed over it’s performance compared to a G4 Mac.
Wait till the G4’s start arriving.
Nathaniel: Where did you hear that? If this is really true, shame on Apple!
On the other side, now all Amiga community has to concentrate their forces to convert Hyperion (makers of AmigaOS4) to support Pegasos. As Bill Buck (one of the owners of Genesi) pointed out, after TerraSoftSolutions entered the market with their PPC-motherboards, the market is not big enough for three competitors. Eyetech (AmigaOne maker) and Genesi both targeted also on Linux-market, because, they just can´t afford to stay in Amiga niche. But now TerraSoft covers the needs of Linux users especially because they are well known there. Hardly anyone outside Amiga community knows Eyetech and Genesi.
Just my 0.02
Anton
A new g3/g4 mainboard? What’s the point?
Haven’t they figured out that motorola’s PPC chips have hit a dead end performance wise?
This would be much more interesting if it were on a CPU arch that’s actually seeing some new developments.
Even if this performs better than a G4 based machine from apple, it’s still not impressive. G4 macs are _slow_.
I’m not just talking about OS X here, everything seems slower than it should(using netbsd/linux/etc) on any of the macs i’ve tried or owned.
PPC? bah!
Sorry to be so negative about an otherwise neat project:)
hmm… so we have three platforms based on the same CPUs pretty much, right?
MorphOS, AmigaOne and YellowDogLinux.
Indeed, people won’t buy a pretty similar machine just to run different OSes. I wish there was a way to have one such machine, but being able to run all three OSes (plus Mac/OSX via a MacOnLinux port
And maybe a licensing of BeOS 5 for PPC ported to these machines (should be trivial). That would have been cool actually, having a new “x86-like arena” with lots of OSes running on this PPC hardware! As an OS junkie, I find this cool.
“When I talked to one of the developers, he told me that the PEGASOS can also run MAC OS 10.2 (Jaguar) out of the box! Just insert the CD-ROM and you do have a real G3, G4 or double G4 MAC, which is running faster than a real MAC! Though Thendic isn’t allowed to sell MAC OS but they are negociating with Apple on this subject, and things aren’t looking so bad!
Of course you can also run PPC Linux on the Pegasos and also Windows! Yes Windows! That is all the Windows Display functions are emulated so that the real Win Prog runs on a Windows PC but the screen output and data input (keyboard, mouse…) comes from the PEGASOS.
There are also negociations to get QNX and BeOS running on the PEGASOS.
As you see the PEGASOS is an OPEN-OS-COMPUTER. One computer for all OS. Only the AMIGA OS 4 is missing. According to the Thendic crew it should be no problem to run it on the PEGASOS, but the problem is that Amiga Inc. only wants that ONLY AMIGA OS is running an a computer and NO OTHER OS, except LINUX.”
I found it here:
http://www.amiga.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=4762&foru…
@ Anton Klotz
> On the other side, now all Amiga community has to
> concentrate their forces to convert Hyperion (makers of
> AmigaOS4) to support Pegasos
Yes quite a few people in Germany would like to see this happen. However according to a preference poll for Aachen visitors, the AmigaOne/AmigaOS4 solution is still clearly in the lead, despite that the Pegasos is a German product.
http://www.amiga-news.de/forum/umfrage.php3
Also for the Pegasos board to be supported by AmigaOS4, Genesi would require a license and sadly there have been many differences between them, so personally I don’t see this would happen anytime soon.
So my advise would be that if you want AmigaOS4 get yourself an AmigaOne board and if you want MorphOS get yourself a Pegasos board.
The first of these companies to come out with a laptop (it doesn’t have to be super elegant/sleek like the Macs) will get my business.
How, exactly, does one “negotiate” to get BeOS running on these systems? Be, Inc. nor Palm have anything to do with BeOS any more. Are we talking about kernel hacks to get the PPC BeOS R5 Pro working on it?
Some more info please, I am very interested.
> Be, Inc. nor Palm have anything to do with BeOS any more.
PalmSource has BeOS now. And they would of course listen. For the right price (whatever that price might be)!
>The first of these companies to come out with a laptop
>(it doesn’t have to be super elegant/sleek like the
>Macs) will get my business.
Not a Laptop but, See tomorrow 🙂
What a shame. The BeBox was seven years ago? So here we are, there’s a new platform coming out for the first time in seven years, and it’s not a single bit ahead of the BeOS/BeBox platform? Looking at the specs of Morphos and Phoenix, I have to wonder if anything at all has happened in the past seven years.
I wouldn’t read too much into that posting, I don’t know who spoke to who but the message seems to have gotten seriously garbled…
OS X Native – Windows, Ehe???
But, there are negotiations going on with various people about various things including Operating Systems 😀
> PPC? bah!
I agree, but amiga people have been talking about going (completely) ppc since 94-95 or something. Now it’s finally here, so i’m guessing they aren’t about to change their minds anytime soon 🙂
“PalmSource has BeOS now. And they would of course listen. For the right price (whatever that price might be)!”
IF they would listen to another company, would they be willing to sell it to the open source group, like what happened with blender? Sure it would be a lot more(several million?), but there are a lot more people willing to suport BeOS, possibly even other companies wanting to sell BeOS. This company might donate a lot even to get it open sourced since they are a hardware company. They could even get it cheap, as far as their actual bill goes.A bunch of money would go a lot further than those petitions that were signed when palm first aquired BeOS. They could legally sell it to an open source group, and keep their own proprietart version for their development, they just couldn’t use contributed code from the open source version.
There is no way in hell you can raise $2+ million for BeOS in any open source community. Blender has MORE userbase than BeOS ever had (BeOS largest *committed* userbase was about 100,000 and that was in 2000) and it took them almost 4 months to raise $100,000. Make your own calculations as to much time it will take you to raise that kind of money for BeOS. Plus, BeOS has some parts (e.g. font rendering engine) that can not be open sourced, which is another obstacle.
Also, please let’s keep the discussion on topic.
I’m puzzled.
And besides, do these operating systems run old Amiga software?
> I’m puzzled.
MorphOS is one OS. AmigaOS is another. They look similar, but they’re completely seperate things.
My suggestion to OSNEWS folks: don’t post MorphOS news as AmigaOS news, this confuses people. MorphOS’s logo is the blue buterfly you can see at their site (www.morphos.net), use that for MorphOS news.
but I asked someone to compare and contrast MorphOS vs. AmigaOS; so I understand what does one do and what does the other, and where they come from.
And I am still curious about whether these OSes can run old Amiga software (the stuff I’ve run on my Amiga 500).
>don’t post MorphOS news as AmigaOS news, this confuses people
MorphOS is related to Amiga and its community, even if it is something new. For the OpenBeOS and BlueEyedOS we also use the BeOS icon, even if they are not “BeOS” as per se. We have already 68 icons in our backend, and it is getting out of hand when we want to post a new news item (they all display in the page where you create the news). As you can understand, we have to be very careful for what we are creating icons for.
I have the butterfly logo, ready to upload. I was going to do so two weeks ago, but uploading images on osnews is a pain in the butt, as we have 8 mirrors to upload and 3 of them have their own protocols on how to connect to them. So, the way I do it, is to get many images together and then upload them in one go, an evening that I have nothing better to do because the process always gets in my nerves. That evening will be tonight.
MorphOS is a new OS based on the Quark kernel. It happens to include a legacy-compatability layer for AmigaOS programmed, called the A-box. Similar to how OS/2 2.x handles Win3.x programs or Mac OS X handles legacy Macintosh programs. It began as a mechanism for moving the Amiga to PowerPC back during the Escom days. Yep, this OS began 7-years ago. Several setbacks, including Escom’s own bankrupcy and closing off of AmigaOS to the team, didn’t stop development. The original plan, which saw beta in ’99, was to put MorphOS on a PPC accel card on a classic Amiga, with the ROM still in memory to use as the A-box. But with AInc cutting them off from that route, they cloned the API calls into A-Box. Otherwise, we would have been at this point in 2000.
AmigaOS is a new OS, began only 16 months ago. it runs almost entirely in emulation, on top of a new Exec called ExecSG which incorporates the 68k emulation. This is the approach taken by classic Mac OS for backwards emulation. It was a knee-jerk reaction to MorphOS when AInc could not come to a deal with the developers. Yet, this team originally claimed it would ship by November…. 2001. It’s now December 2002, and they’re still claiming a few months away, the exact same time claimed when they began the project.
> MorphOS is a new OS based on the Quark kernel. It
> happens to include a legacy-compatability layer for
> AmigaOS programmed, called the A-box.
The ABOX includes a second kernel, this second kernel is according to the MorphOS team, “a reimplemented Exec kernel”. Actually because of this MorphOS/ABOX is able utilize the classic Workbench (currently it uses a PPC native reimplementation called Ambient instead) and has a high level of Amiga software compatibility. The ABOX should be replaced by a so called QBOX in the future and nobody really seems to know how Amiga-like this would be.
> AmigaOS is a new OS, began only 16 months ago.
Completely false AmigaOS was started before 1985, AmigaOS4 is based on the official AmigaOS source code.
> it runs almost entirely in emulation, on top of a new
> Exec called ExecSG which incorporates the 68k emulation.
Completely false again, most components will be entirely PPC native. A big difference however is that AmigaOS4 will use one new greatly improved kernel “ExecSG”, while MorphOS uses a two kernel approach, with currently the Quark kernel hidden from the user. This is somewhat similar to the AmigaOS emulator Amithlon. (MorphOS is not an emulator by itself however)
>>>When I talked to one of the developers, he told me that the PEGASOS can also run MAC OS 10.2 (Jaguar) out of the box! Just insert the CD-ROM and you do have a real G3, G4 or double G4 MAC, which is running faster than a real MAC!<<<
This may be the case right now, but do you really think that will be case in future versions of OS X ?
>>>Though Thendic isn’t allowed to sell MAC OS but they are negociating with Apple on this subject, and things aren’t looking so bad!<<<<
This is the point where you blitzkreiged the looking glass, shot straight thru Wonderland and landed in the giant mushroom. Apple is a hardware company. In layman’s terms that means they sell hardware. Hardware companies want to get people to buy their hardware. Mac OS is one of those “things” Apple used to leverage THEIR hardware.
Pegasos is also in essence a hardware company. They want to sell THEY hardware too. So obviously being able to run any OS a user would want is an advantage to them. I believe its about this thought you Warped 10’d it for the second star to the left and went straight on for 9months. The reason I think this is because of one small problem.
WHY WOULD APPLE LET THEM SELL OR RUN THEIR OS IF IT IS NOT GOING TO HELP THEIR BUSINESS MODEL IN ANY WAY???
Now that I got that out of my system, pass some of whatever your on so I can fantasize about Apple releasing a Dual 1.25 Ghz TiBook for 10 dollars.
@ Mr. Bouma
“The ABOX should be replaced by a so called QBOX in the future and nobody really seems to know how Amiga-like this would be.”
This is wrong. The ABOX will not be replaced, i.e. removed from MorphOS. In fact, it will sit happily next to the QBOX once it is finished. We might even see an L-BOX (no pun intended) for running LinuxPPC applications… Who knows?
@ Vince
My post is just a quotation from another forum. Follow the link…
I thought the BeOS part was interesting. I don’t think Amiga/Morph/BeOS people would like to run OS X, it’s too slow. But you are probably right… It’s technically possible to run OS X on a Pegasos, but Steve Jobs will do anything to protect his monopoly.
> The ABOX will not be replaced
I did not mean deleted per se. Or will the ABOX be able to run simultaniously, together with (or inside of) the QBOX? (Like i.e. UAE does inside of Linux/Windows/QNX)
BTW I base this statement on a comment made by Teemu (a core MorphOS team programmer) recently. He stated that proper memory protection would only be possible when the ABOX is “removed” and applications are running outside the Amiga-like ABOX environment.
>I did not mean deleted per se. Or will the ABOX be able to
>run simultaniously, together with (or inside of) the QBOX?
>(Like i.e. UAE does inside of Linux/Windows/QNX)
Of course it can.
When I heard for a first time about Pegasos and AmigaOne I hoped they will use BeOS. Modern hardware with excelent OS – that’s what we need! A lot of old Amiga veterans and many new BeOS fans could buy it. There would be a future for both: new platform and OS. No more Windows and expensive Macs.
For one platform with limited number of hardware there is not a big problem with drivers. BeOS doesn’t have to be developed so extensivly as any new OS. And it’s stable. But it seems that Palm is not interested in it. They just wanted a few lines of code from BeOS for their computers and now they got it. They do not need more. So I cannot see big future for new hardware platform with a completly new OS. Sorry – everything you need, you find in WinIntel. 🙁
>I did not mean deleted per se. Or will the ABOX be able to
>run simultaniously, together with (or inside of) the QBOX?
>(Like i.e. UAE does inside of Linux/Windows/QNX)
Yes, obviously. They are not called “sandboxes” for nothing.
“but I asked someone to compare and contrast MorphOS vs. AmigaOS; so I understand what does one do
and what does the other, and where they come from.
And I am still curious about whether these OSes can run old Amiga software (the stuff I’ve run on my Amiga
500).”
They can run recent Amiga software that works with graphics cards and
sound cards, but in general the very old software from A500 days would
have to be run in a version of the UAE emulator – which you can do on
Windows or Linux now.
The basic difference between them is that MorphOS contains much more
new code. That could be a good or bad thing.
You use UAE inappropriately here Mike. ABox, from what I’ve seen, will nto run “inside-of” QBox, a la UAE, or “on top of” QBox a la Athlon. From how AMigaOS itself works gives the best clue: integration between two OS’s seamlessly. AmigaOS already does this, with PowerUP and WarpOS PPC kernels running on Blizzard and Cyberstorm PPC cards. It would work like this, but in reverse I would imagine. ABox would be one target, it’s components usable by any QBox apps. In short, from the users perspective, there would be no QBox, no ABox, just one MorphOS.
And note, before 16 months ago, there was no AmigaOS 4.0 development. THis classifies it as a new OS project. It might be based on an old OS, but that doesn’t mean much. Linux was a new kernel based on Minix and GNU. Doesn’t make it 15+ years old. The changes discussed by the AOS4 team label it as a brand-new OS that happens to have components of an old OS which will be replaced over time.
BTW Mike, have the AOS4 team paid for their licenses to the non-AInc IP yet, such as AmigaDOS?
> You use UAE inappropriately here Mike.
Why? Why can’t I ask such a question?
> ABox, from what I’ve seen, will nto run “inside-of”
> QBox, a la UAE
I hope more information about what the QBOX will really be like in the future will come available. Some say this and others say that, anyone here who know the answer.
> And note, before 16 months ago, there was no AmigaOS 4.0
> development. THis classifies it as a new OS project.
Yes AmigaOS4 is a newer project, but you didn’t state that. AmigaOS4.1 or MorphOS1.1 will be new projects as well.
> The changes discussed by the AOS4 team label it as a
> brand-new OS that happens to have components of an old
> OS which will be replaced over time.
It is labelled by the AOS4 team as a port of AmigaOS to PPC with lots of new features and other enhancements.
> Doesn’t make it 15+ years old.
“Yep, this OS began 7-years ago.”
So you mean to say that MorphOS1.0 is 7 years old? Please reread to what I was responding.
> BTW Mike, have the AOS4 team paid for their licenses to
> the non-AInc IP yet, such as AmigaDOS?
What are you talking about? The AOS4 team can use wahtever Amiga Inc want them to use. Amiga Inc/Hyperion own the AmigaOS source codes.
@ Don Cox
> The basic difference between them is that MorphOS
> contains much more new code. That could be a good or bad
> thing.
I comparison to the original AmigaOS code, according to the MorphOS team completely new code. We don’t want to bring up any legal issues, or do we.
@ Mr. Bouma
“We don’t want to bring up any legal issues, or do we.
”
If you have any proof that MorphOS was based on illegally stolen AmigaOS sources, I am sure everyone would like to see it.
/ME will not hold my breath…
For all outsiders: The Amiga community of today is heavily inbred resulting in a cult of lunatics incapable of picking up the platform and advancing it. This has resulted in a number of varyingly official, varyingly known OS and HW projects such as AmigaOS 4.0 and Morphos.
That is in fact a Good Thing(TM). However, the amount of FUD being spread and mud thrown is unbarable and as far from the original warm feeling one got from being an Amiga user.
Only time will tell, but my guess is that AROS ( http://www.aros.org )will be the last man (Amiga-like OS) standing as that project has yet to engage in spreading FUD and throwing mud.
@ André Siegel
As I said Mr. Siegel, we should say that MorphOS is completely new code, completely not based on or using any original AmigaOS source codes.
Please correct me if I was wrong.
> /ME will not hold my breath…
You still alive?
> That is in fact a Good Thing(TM). However, the amount of
> FUD being spread and mud thrown is unbarable and as far
> from the original warm feeling one got from being an
> Amiga user.
How I see it, over time things will sort themselves out. The Amiga community may divide itself onto several different paths and non-official paths can’t call themselves to be Amiga, so eventually this will start new communities, like for example a MorphOS community.
The problem is currently that the advocates of the different directions are currently mixed, resulting into endless flamewars and insults on difference of opinions. As AmigaOS as well as the official brand is owned by Amiga Inc, I believe this will eventually result into an specific AmigaOS4/AmigaDE community. So regardless of the current situation, I believe in time things will start to sort themselves out.
“What are you talking about? The AOS4 team can use wahtever Amiga Inc want them to use. Amiga Inc/Hyperion own the AmigaOS source codes.”
*BZT* Wrong, thank you for playing.
AInc only owns the source code that was owned by Commodore. Commodore itself licensed serious portions of the OS, such as AmigaDOS the font engine, ARexx, etc., from 3rd parties, in many cases non-transferrable licenses. It is because of this 3rd party content in AmigaOS that Escom lost it’s court case to claim ownership of AmigaOS. The licenses were not trasferred to Escom since it is highly likely that they could not be. Even code based-on or replacing the legacy licensed code is still covered under the original codes copyright, as you had access to the original’s source code.
Get your own facts straight Mike. Look at the copyright holders in your AOS 3.1 ROM sometime, it’s a who’s who of software companies from the 80’s.
Oh its a link, then sorry for being pissy its pretty much directed at who ever wrote that then and not you
Vince
Although this is a reason why the sources cannot be just open sourced of the *classic OS* (like some would have liked to see), due to 3rd party licensed code. I can assure you that AmigaOS4 is legally 100% sound. I would like to point out to you that Ben Hermans, who is the main AmigaOS4 project manager is also a lawyer and has negotiated sound licenses for all 3rd party owned source code to be included in AmigaOS4.
I should be correct to say that the MorphOS team has done the same, or am I wrong?
Nice try Mike, you’ve waited till after a message passed by the magic bottom-market to write a responce, then fill it with double-talk and back-speak. Fact is, if Hyperion has seen the original, licensed source code, then they are now not legally allowed to make AmigaOS4. THat means the only mechanism open to them is to either black-box it or to go after these 3rd parties to negotiate a new license.
The owners of TripOS have never even heard of Ben Hermans, so where does that leave AOS4? At least the MorphOS team has never seen the source code, which means that no copyrights were violated. Hyperion’s access to the source code makes them vulnerable and their product suspect.
Pfew, all this sounds more complicated than I thought