AmiKit on Amithlon.

[EDanaII]

OK, so I'm goofin' around and attempting to get AmiKit to run on AMIthlon and I'm so, so, close, but... I got these little itsy bitsy problems.

For starts, my startup-sequence complains "LoadMonDrvs: file is not executable." Which is annoying as all hell, 'cause, I know the file is executable. At least, when I boot under another amithlon configuration and execute the exact same file, it runs.

Furthermore, AmiKit boots up into a four color Workbench. When I run screenmode, it appears and I have all my available builtin display functions. They even appear properly when I test them, but, alas, the Workbench remains in four colors when I use or save.

Anyone got any clues here? I needs 'em. I know at least one user here has been able to get AmiKit running on his Amithlon box. Amiga-Fan I think is his "handle."

Help me, Amiga-Fan Kenobi! You're -- or anyone else who has a clue ;-) -- my only hope!

Ed.

[EDanaII]

OK, curiouserer and curiouserer...

Thinking, maybe, I should reinstall the Picasso drivers, I did so, only to have the screen go black on boot up. OK, nearly black, more like the brightness is getting turned down to, maybe, 10% of what it should be.

Going through my startup-sequence and commenting shtuff out until the problem goes away, I find that the culprit is... wait for it! ... LoadMonDrvs! You know, the thing that is "not executable..."

Grrrr... So, my Picasso drivers didn't install correctly? ...I'm still not sure how to fix this, clues still welcome. :-)

Ed.

[EDanaII]

That was a great clue, Motorollin. Thanks. I can now boot into a full color Workbench. However, I got problems still. Is anyone surprised? :-)

As the desktop boots, I get a series of Recoverable Alerts, all numbered: 0100 000C, the mouse pointer is corrupted and if I click on an icon the desktop freezes.

I can find Guru Meds on-line, but I'm not sure what 0100 000C means. Any clues here?

Thanks,
Ed.

[EDanaII]

Just a follow up... The problem definately appears to be Picasso related. If I remove the driver, I get a lovely four color workbench and everything seems to be stable. If I boot using the Amithlon supplied PowerFB device... it's a mess. Since this is clearly an Amithlon issue, I've taken it over to the Amithlon groups at Yahoo, but if, once again, anyone else has got ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Ed.

[EDanaII]

In the words of Hiro Nakamura, "I did it!"  :-D

AmiKit is now working on my Amithlon system, and, man, it looks nice!

It appears to be stable, but I'm sure I have a few more surprises waiting for me.

And, just for any who are interested, my final problem was solved by taking my my PowerFB device and setting all the tooltypes, except the boardtype parameter, to match the original UAEGFX device.

Suhweet! :-)

Ed.

[EDanaII]

It's definitely "snappy," Moto, which is the main reason why I did it. Under UAE, it's a little slow on my 2 ghz XP box. But running on my 1 ghz Amithlon box, it's very "responsive." :-)


@ AmiKit:

I'll make you a deal, Jan, as payment for my services, including my JBoing demo, how about you, I dunno... give me a copy of AmiKit for free!

Can I negotiate, or can I negotiate? ;-)


@ All

As to compiling a list, I can do that, but as I'm still fine tuning things, I've got a ways to go. I'll make you guys a deal, I'll post what I've done so far, you guys can give me some feed back, and we'll all refine it from there. Sound like a plan? :-)

And, now, for the standard proviso: I ain't responsible for any damages to your system if you attempt this. You, and only you, are. So, don't forget to do step one, or ya gots no one to whine to but yerself. ;-)

The story, so far:
1. Create a new or backup your old Amithlon System partition.
2. Either rename that partition to, or assign it, the name "AmiKit."
3. Be sure to preserve Amithlon specific files, such as C:AmithlonC directory, any files in the S: directory, any files in the DEVS: directory. (More to be added if found).
4. Copy the AmiKit files to the new AmiKit partition.

Tip 1: AmiKit contains a boat-load of files labeled "_UAEFSDB.___" and stored in every directory you got just to support UAE. Amithlon has no use for them and they take up space in the tens of megabytes. You might want to delete them before you copy.

5. Restore the Amithlon specific files, but be careful to preserve their AmiKit counterparts.
6. Create a new startup-sequence using a combination of the Amithlon and Amikit counterparts. Here is what my startup-sequence looks like.

Tip 2: DOpus5 requires, for some reason, that LoadWB be renamed LoadWB_Old. I did so, and then created an alias for LoadWB. Might be a better way to do this, though...

Tip 3: Remember to save BOTH your Amithlon AND AmiKit "User-Startup" files. I modified my Amithlon User Startup to include, first, a call to the AmiKit User Startup file.

7. Remove from the WBStartup directory, the following icons, as best I can tell, they're not needed or won't run under Amithlon: glmatrix68k_exe, winuaeclip, MMKeyboardServer.
8. Reboot!

If you end up with a 4 color, low-res Workbench, like I did, then:
9 In DEVS:Monitors, modify the PowerFB ToolTypes to match the UAEGFX ToolTypes EXCEPT for the BoardType parameter. Leave it equal to "PowerFB."

If that doesn't work, try reinstalling your Picasso96 drivers. Honestly, I did this the other way around, reinstalled and then modified the PowerFB device, but the reinstall may not have been necessary.

Tip 5: if you do something wrong and the system will not get to a point where you can edit the startup-sequence, or any other file, for that matter. Reboot and hold both mouse buttons down to bring up the boot menu. Select "boot with no startup-sequence." That will get you to a point where you can then "ed s:startup-sequence" and fix things.

The story, yet to come:
System is not 100% stable, but it is usable. If, for example, I open a bunch of windows, and then close them, the system will reboot. I suspect this may have yet to do with the PowerFB settings and is why I suspect copying the UAEGFX ToolTypes may not be exactly the right solution.

AHI does not work, but I'm not certain that it ever did on my box. Obviously, I need to spend more time figuring this one out.

Networking is not completely functional. I assume because AmiKit is configured to use the bsdsocket.library. Amithlon, if memory serves, uses the powerne2k.device. I'm not sure yet, what, if anything, I need to do to get the two working together. What I can do is start Miami, ping other boxes in my network and even "samba" over to another box. What I can't do is surf using any of the supplied browsers, including the ones from my original Amithlon configuration.

AmiStart is only partially functional. It displays, I can raise and lower windows, I can navigate to various programs but I cannot activate them. Not sure how to approach this one just yet. Those same programs, some of them, appear to function fine when I activate them directly.

And, I'm sure there's more, but this is all I've discovered so far.

As always, if you guys have any thoughts or suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Just give me a clue, I'm always in need of one. ;-)

Ed.

[EDanaII]

AmiKit EddyZone? Well, that's real nice naming it after me, but that's not really necessary. A free copy of AmiKit is good enough for me. ;-) Yea, yea, I know, it's probably the Czech word (or is it Italian?) for "edition" buy my name is Eddy and I do live in Arizona, so... I couldn't resist. :-D

Looks nice, Jan. AmiKit marches on! :-)


@ All

OK, I can't blame AmiKit for my network issues. It seems that my original Amithlon configuration has the exact same network problems. It's been a while since I used it, so...

Replacing the AmiKit version of AmiStart with a non-AmiKit version doesn't seem to fix it, so... Looks like I got more tinkering to do there.

Ed.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.