Morphos Archive

"SceneCON is an annual meeting of underground computer artists who are members of the famous demo scene. With SceneCON, the organizers aim to follow the two decade old tradition of demo scene parties in Hungary. Yet, with a bit of a twist. This years party was held from the 16th until the 17th of June, 2007. Among its highlights was an extensive demonstration of bplan's EFIKA miniature mainboard running various flavours of Linux as well as a work-in-progress version of MorphOS 2.0. Luckily, the presentation was captured on video. The entire presentation has a total length of nearly an hour with MorphOS 2.0 being featured in the last 14 minutes of it."

Genesi has posted a whole batch of screenshots of the upcoming MorphOS 2.0 release on their weblog. "MorphOS 2.0 brings not only a new OS release, but a host of applications developed by a motivated group of Developers all over the world. These applications have been tested and work with the EFIKA."

The Efika motherboard is now available for the promised pricetag of USD 99. On top of that, MorphOS 1.5 2.0 is apparently on its way, and it will support hardware accelerated transparent windows, among other things. Screenshots and pictures can be found at MorphZone. As promised, MorphOS 2.0 will run on the Efika.

Last July OSNews hosted the first version of the article "MorphOS - The Lightning OS" by Fulvio Peruggi as an entry to the OS Contest. The article has now been updated and extended, making it an even better introduction to the MorphOS operating system for a reader who does not know anything about MorphOS, and can be found here. Italian, German, Russian, Spanish and French translations are available as well.

The MorphOS Team is pleased to announce that the next public release of MorphOS will support the EFIKA. MorphOS is a lightweight and flexible operating system and EFIKA is a low-power and silent miniature mainboard based on the Freescale PPC5200.

On BBRV's blog: "The PegasosPPC will be on sale this week for $399. Neither the board nor an upgrade card will be produced again by Genesi or bplan. It is the end of an era for us. It has been a great experience."

Axel Knabe will show the EFIKA board running MorphOS 1.5 at the 'Amiga Meeting Nord' in Bad Bramstedt this weekend. Axel will also take preorders for the board which is planned to be available before christmas 2006.

"The final version of EFIKA, an MPC5200B System-on-Chip based 'miniature mainboard' by bplan/Genesi and one of the most important PowerPC community support projects sponsored by Freescale had its first public demonstration at an embedded electronics symposium in Germany. PPCNUX has been on site to find out more about the versatile PPC entry hardware."

In a comment on the Power.org blog, Pieter Van den Abeele wrote that Genesi will be releasing the Open Server Workstation, which will be based on the PowerPC 970 (G5) chip. The system is scheduled for release this month give or take a few weeks, and will cost $1599. Developers can also register for a free workstation.

MorphUP, the packet manager for MorphOS has been released after six months of development. There is currently no central repository, but one can generate and host own packages on any http-server.

The MorphOS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of an updated MorphOS version for Amiga computers equipped with PowerUP accelerator cards. Some of the included changes are improved graphics hardware compatability (drivers for the popular Cybervision64, Cybervision 64/3D and Picasso IV cards), a bugfix for machines with more than 128MB of memory installed, an experimental version of a 4IDE driver, and new Hungarian language support. You can read the changelog, and follow the download instructions.

Genesi is pleased to announce the order period for evaluation systems for the High Density Blade and HDB Chassis is now open. The HDB can be deployed in a variety of configurations. The HDB features one or paired Freescale MPC7447, MPC7447A or MPC7448 PowerPC processor(s) and the Tundra Tsi109 host bridge.

Reggae Release B has been released. "Reggae is a new approach to media streams processing in MorphOS operating system. Now MOS media library has the stabilized API and entered public beta stage. Unlike old datatypes system, Reggae has full support of streaming and is highly modularized. Streaming support means that media stream is not buffered in the memory as the whole. Small portions of data are passed through a chain of connected objects (called a pipeline). This way the library can deal with extremely big media objects (or continuous streams) keeping memory footprint low."

With a delay of a few days, Genesi has released the schematics to its Pegasos Rev.2b5 motherboard. You can download it from here, but you'll need to sign up (free) on Power.org. They even blogged about it, stating: "If you are just along for the ride you can stop reading now. Your challenge: be the best you can be. That is the competition. We are in the human line that stretches behind and beyond us. We all can have a role to play. To participate we have to start within ourselves, find firm footing, and launch into the world around us."