New improved intuition.library version from the Kickstart 3.1

[wawrzon]

I don't? Read through this thread again and you will see that I have responded to the comments of various people. Without resorting to ad hominem attacks as you are doing now. I've made this point before, but again: yes you can add extra bits to AROS to get a semi-usable system. That doesn't make it a usable system. Someone could get a bare CPU and add various bits to it to make it a usable system, that doesn't make it a usable system in its own right. You have to download extra bits to make it equivalent to something that already works fine out of the box. What good is that?

Also with AROS x86 you can't even do that; if a piece of software is not available in an AROS x86 version you can't use it at all. Unless they finally have working 68K emulation, which they didn't last time I checked. And like I and others have said before, there's no reason for any 68K user to bother with AROS: it's slow, missing features and ugly. Really, it has next to nothing to recommend it except for copyright issues, which seemed to be the main reason Toni Wilen was bothering with it, because it could be distributed freely with WinUAE, not because it was actually better. The same applies to various BIOS replacements that are included with various emulators. For best compatibility you use an authentic BIOS which, by definition, is 100% byte-for-byte identical. Substitute BIOSes are included for legal reasons only, generally the first thing one does is get an authentic ROM dump.



The main one is that they aren't palette independent. So users have to keep the default colours; if the user changes their palette all their old-style icons will look awful. And if the developer used a non-standard palette to begin with, you have to match your palette to theirs. Not everyone runs MagicWB. MagicWB doesn't even define more than 8 colours IIRC. The original icon format was designed for OS1.x which didn't support deep screens. Even if you assume that neither the developer nor the user has modified the colours from the default, you still can't guarantee what palette is in use. Eg. 1.x has a different default palette as compared to 2.x.

as you yourself rightly observe aros allows to detach amiga scene from parent enterprises who proved to be untrustworthy one after the other. secondly it allows to preserve the code base, which even if thor and olsen claim to have at hand, well i don intend to be rude, but everybody can be hit by bus and then his work will be lost unregarded good intentions. and last but not least it allows to fix and extend functionality, support more different probably cheaper and more economic platforms, therefore allows for variety of choices, which looks like an important issue in an individualistic society. i think its worth it. but its everybodys own choice.

[guest11527]

Isn't this the same with Linux for example?
Also Linux as it - is just a Kernel.
All the programs in Linux are gnu tools and do actually not belong to Linux.

Which is certainly true, and distributions - or people preparing distributions - invest quite some time to compile a selection of programs that work well together with the kernel.

However, for AmigaOs the situation is in so far more complicated as even some "outside the kernel" components might be required, and unlike typical Linux distributions and GNU tools, the binaries are typically non-distributable (unless you can still negotiate with the author or owner).

Also, Linux distributions compile and patch the user-space tools to match the needs of the distribution, probably fix some minor bugs here and there. That's also not possible for most AmigaOs programs as sources are not available.

One way or another: The task for AROS is much bigger than for Linux. There is no sufficiently large ecosystem of free and open source software to make the system self-sustainable. Or at least "not yet".

Thus, anyone complaining that AmigaOs sources "are not available" should then contribute to AROS - that seems to be the only logical consequence for me.

[smf]

What if it was released as open source...  I wonder how much better WB 3.x can actually get.

Check out AmigaOS4.1 or Morphos and you will find out it will just be a lot slower on the old hardware.

[cgutjahr]

If there was 3.5/3.9 ROM chip with BVision support in boot menu it could have been much much better... dont you hate it when it stops booting and you dont have TV near?

The BlizzardPPC had a feature that would constantly copy the current screen from chip ram to BVision ram. It would be enabled if something was displayed during the boot process and disabled as soon as the first non PAL:Hires screen was opened. Display wasn't all that fast, but fast enough for BVision setup, ESM, or booting without startup-sequence.

Sometimes I was thinking my Amiga 1200 was better without those stupid complex expansions.

Yeah, a highly expanded A1200 is a major PITA if you're trying to get some real use out of it.

[psxphill]

Well, if you revert enough of OS3.5/3.9 you can turn it back to OS3.1.

"enough" is subjective. I consider the Amiga Technologies badge and the floppy hack on the A1200 to be trivial to revert, while I don't consider having to install a CD drive to be trivial.

I don't have a problem with icon or datatype changes, even a standard tcpip stack is a good idea. Some of the bundled software wasn't the best examples out there though, but it tried to gain traction by virtue of it being distributed on the official media.

It's a bit like saying that a PPC Mac or Intel Mac isn't actually a Mac, only a 68K Mac is a real Mac. I suspect that if anyone went to a Mac forum and claimed such a thing there would be howls of derision.

Apple didn't go bankrupt with a seven year gap between new products. Also Apple certainly had opposition amongst it's user base when it switched to PPC and to Intel, it was just so long ago now and they've been so successful that people have moved on. Which makes the two situations quite different.

[itix]

The BlizzardPPC had a feature that would constantly copy the current screen from chip ram to BVision ram. It would be enabled if something was displayed during the boot process and disabled as soon as the first non PAL:Hires screen was opened. Display wasn't all that fast, but fast enough for BVision setup, ESM, or booting without startup-sequence.

Oh, indeed... you are correct.

Unfortunate how much Amiga knowledge one can forget.