AmiKit on Amithlon.

[EDanaII]

All right. Continuing my adventures...

I managed to fix the problem with AmiStart not executing applications. It seems that I need load BOTH the Workbench using the LoadWB command AND Directory Opus using the LoadDB command. This, of course, uses extra memory and seems wasteful, but at least AmiStart is functional now.

Using only LoadDB with the AmiStart tooltype USEWBSTART doesn't seem to work.

As always, thoughts, suggestions and comments welcome. :-)

Ed.

[EDanaII]

AmiKit's Log, Amithlon-date 070104.49:

Yesterday, I discovered that my problems with opening a lot of windows and then closing them, as well as, selecting "Show As -> View All" from the floating system menu -- both of which caused a system reboot -- were solved by simply not loading DOpus.

Now I load Workbench, will also allows AmiStart to function, but I lose a lot of the nice functionality that Opus brought. The trade-off for all of this is that whenever I use Unarc, the system resets.

I can live with this trade-off, it's obnoxious but tolerable. When I use Unarc, I simply load DOpus and unarchive stuff there.

Ed.

[jmbattle]

Not wishing to shift the topic too greatly, however you could always use an alternative archiving client, such as one of the interfaces for the XAD libraries, or my favourite, WizARC.
 

Cheers,
James
x

[weirdami]

Was your Amithlon all tweeked and modified before you put AmiKit on it? I wonder how you would have fared if you had started from scratch with a blank hard drive, installed Amithlon, then installed AmiKit.

[EDanaII]

The answer to your question, weirdami, is "yes" and "no." :-) I had fiddled with it, but not everything was working fully. Sound, it seems, was at one time functional, but I'm not sure when I lost it. Graphics were mostly functional, the only time it wasn't was on video play-back, which is in black and white. Everything else was up-to-date with the latest and greatest.

I considered a clean install, but then remembered all the tweaking I had to do to get it to its current state. So, instead, I duplicated my current system, keeping the original as a reference point for debugging.

To answer your final question, I suspect doing a clean install would have been much more work.

Ed.

[EDanaII]

@ jmbattle:

Thanks for the tip on alternate archivers, James. I'll definitely look into it, but for right now, my goal is to get this system as near to 100% stable as I can.


@ All

I restored MMKeyBoard functionality by replacing the AmiKit version with the most recent Aminet one. The AmiKit version was modified for UAE, which, of course, Amithlon is not. So, replacing it with the appropriate version fixed the problem, as expected.

With one curious side-effect, the program works nice and I can use it to override my keyboard commands, the keyboard works great, except... when I try and enter text into the prefs editor for MMKeyboard, the "Name" gadget doesn't accept any keystrokes. None of the keyboards I've tried so far work. Everything else works otherwise.

Ed.

[AMIGA-FAN]

Hi all. I have a fully functional and features rich Amithlon setup running on my P4 2.4Ghz, with a GeForce 2 MX400 graphic card.. I'll tell you what I did with Amikit. As my Amithlon environment is very stable (have sound, networking and USB stack handling all my USB devices) and did not want to go all over again through all the hassle of reinstalling/reconfiguring everything (something which tooks several weeks/months of hard work) in a new environment (Amikit under Amithlon), I actually proceeded the other way around: that is, instead of trying to get Amikit to run under Amithlon I used my original setup and added some extra features of Amikit (ShowAmiga96, AmiStart and various other apps) and
installed/configured them in my Amithlon environment, making some adjustments where necessary to reflect my current Amithlon system. I obviously left DOpus out as my Amithlon system is currently setup to use PNG icons (through PowerIcons by Elena Novaretti) and, as you know, DOpus can't handle PNG icons.
So my current Amikit system is actually a combination of my original Amithlon system and Amikit. In such a way, I can't really say that I have a full Amikit system running under Amithlon but I have a system that resembles the Amikit
environment that I have under WinUAE (including sound, networking and USB drivers) without actually being a TRUE Amikit system. This because I wanted to have everything I had under my original Amithlon working the same in my new
Amikit environment.

 :-)

[EDanaII]

I considered doing it the way you did, AMIGA-FAN, but since I did it when I had some time, I decided to put it on the fast-track.

So, what kind of issues did you have? Did you attempt to use Opus? Were there stability issues? How about AmiStart or any of the other issues I mentioned?

Inquiring minds wanna know.

Ed.

[AMIGA-FAN]

Not many issues really, as far as I remember. I had some minor problems with datatypes, those I had under Amithlon were not all identical to those in Amikit. Some were up to date, some not. I have not tried to use DOpus as I think that PNG icons are faster at rendering and want to keep them on my WB. But I'm planning to experiment a new attempt. Will create a new partition and cross-port all Amikit files (from a second machine, over the network) onto the newly created partition. Will then make the necessary modifications (especially regarding Picasso drivers) in order to have a (full) working Amikit under Amithlon. Once I have achieved that, will eventually try to re-install (what a hassle) everything I need for sound, networking (MiamiDX, AmiTCP, AmiSSL, Samba etc.) and USB stack.
If I succeed in that (time permitting) will also use this platform on top of my current Amithlon system.
What I instead miss from Amikit is DOpus, DopusFTP (which, by the way, can be solved by using other FTP clients) and LiveUpdate.

I proceeded that way considering the fact that Amithlon is a lot more complicated to configure: considering that over the years I have achieved a very stable machine, I prefered to use this stable system and limit my effort at porting some extra-features from Amikit (only those I was interested in). Proceeding the other way around would have required a fresh new re-installation/re-configuring of all the above (sound, networking, USB etc.).

Regards.

[Amigamia]

I have done this in the past and with the same CD and bigger Hard Drive but now it is giving a problem I can't figure out how to bypass it. Here is the scenario:

I have a PC with 2 HDD (First: 13Gig, Second: 8Gig) AOpen AX6BC motherboard, 64 MB, Pentium 2 350Mhz, Sound Blaster Live, 3Com Network card, Nvidia FX Video Card.

I created two partitions on the first (13Gig) HDD, one of 10MB formatted as FAT16 made it bootable and copied over Amithlon files and all is fine. If I reboot, Amithlon will start just fine from the first partition.

The problem starts when I create on the rest of the disk, a new partition and change the type to 118 (Amithlon_vhd). If I reboot, amithlon will start like before but it shows a message on the left hand corner of the screen, before going into workbench: "Not a DOS disk in device dh0:" and "Cancel" or "Retry" won't do anything.

I tried to boot from the Amithlon CD, I thought I would bypass the whole setup, and to my surprise I get the same message.

If I delete the second partition which I changed to be type 118 (decimal, Amithlon_vhd) everything boots fine, CD and first partition with amithlong files on it.

I have done the same steps in the past with another machine and it worked like a charm.

I don't understand. Anyone can shed some light here???

Thanks in advance

[Unit21]

@Amigamia

Can't you just choose a different boot-device in the early startup menu?!
Most likely your new amithlon_vhd is mistaken for the first bootdevice. Just hold down both mousebuttons and choose hdh0 as your boot device. This should take you to the regular Amithlon workbench....

@All

Following the descriptions in this thread I now have Amikit on top of Amithlon inside my spiffy little Compaq n410 laptop.
Everything except my WLAN-card works.... ;-)
But it is a PRISM-based thingy, so all hope is not lost yet.

Also, due to a bug in the hardware on the laptop, Mp3s and sound in general plays too fast.
Does anyone know of a workaround for this on Amithlon??
I actually have to "work around it" in Windows too, but Linux seems to have better control on this laptop....

Apart from the little sound-issue my laptop boots from BIOS to working Amiga in less than 30 seconds, including bouncing balls and everything!!  :-D

[EDanaII]

AmiKit's Log, Amithlon-date 071028.58:

I finally got AmiKit 1.4.0 working on my Amithlon box today, after a several weeks of balancing it with other responsibilites.

The main issue I had to overcome was an apparent conflict between these commands:
C:SetPatch QUIET from my Amithlon Startup

AND

C:morelibspace
C:LoadModule L:Ram-Handler L:Shell-Seg LIBS:icon.library LIBS:workbench.library LIBS:mathieeesingbas.library DEVS:console.device REVERSE NOREBOOT     ;makes the modules resident (similar to SetPatch)

Used only the setpatch and commented out the AmiKit stuff, amithlon would boot fine but I'd lose the nice new PNG icons. When I used setpatch without the latter, I'd get the Icons but my system would lock rather than rebooting.

I modified my startup-sequence to include two startup files, one called Startup-Amithlon, which executes first, and one called Startup-Amikit, which follows. Moving the loadmodule command just before the setpatch command in the Amithlon startup script seems to fix the problem, except for the fact that my system locks if I try a reboot.

Still more to do to get 1.4.0 to work. My mouse cursor is black. Not sure how to fix that. ClickToFront works only a couple of times and then locks the system.

Any thoughts welcome.

Ed.

[Seiya]

of corse did you have  installed the amithlon-update?

[foody]

Excuse me. If you managed to get the AmiKit working 100% in Amithlon could you take your entire setting and turn it into .ISO so that I can simply install it as is into my Amithlon setup and bang done, I have AmiKit into my Amithlon? Thanks in advance.