Aniway: It would be nice at the least to have a piece of hardware so the ROMs can be installed and the WB run.
Better to have a boot manager and image. That makes it much easier to do diagnostics where, otherwise, you have to tell the OS to do checks and diagnostics the next time you restart, and go through reboot hell. Try re-installing WinNT or Win2K on an NTFS partition for a taste of this.
Core drivers for all boot devices should be in EEPROM, like it is done on the PC. It would be nice if there was a "user" section of the EEPROM that works like a boot floppy, so you could add your own boot drivers and delete the ones you don't need, to clear up space. Only mission-critical hardware tests and a serial reprogrammer *need* to be in ROM.
Aniway: Do you know how often the Windows crashes, particularly SE?
Second Edition? Win98 SE was the fastest, cleanest Windows I've used, but not the most stable by a longshot. A glitch in IE or any game would bring it down hard. Once, my system got trashed by emtying the recycle bin, and I found out it wiped out almost the whole system (and I'm a guy who used to run Win98 Scandisk every day).
WinCE is crap. WinME is *CRAP*. Win2K is where it's at. ;-)
Aniway: I tried to install Linux, but I was amazed at the incompatibility.
Me too. That's what happens when you have lots of distros of the same OS core. Things are not going to work together perfectly because there's very little central management. That's why I prefer commercial software over free software. Commercial developers *HAVE* to worry about cross-compatibility with their own products, or they don't sell (unless you're big enough to avoid having to worry about it, or your users like pain, like Apple fans).
Tried it... it's not for me... and not for the masses. Ever. It's a marketing issue, and has nothing to do with technology.
Varthall: Have you tried other Linux distros? Have you tried to find the latest drivers for your hardware?
I tried 8 so far, and they were all pains. I've been tempted to try Gentoo, but haven't, yet.
Glaucus: AmigaOS on a P4/Athlon64 would have been a better option then the PPC route chosen.
I'm regaining my faith in AMD since they are now capping their cores. About bloody time!
Tomas: What software would you have? A OS without software wont do much...
68K software. There aren't many PowerPC-only apps as far as I know. JIT emulation on a high-speed x86 would probably be comparable to straight-recompiles (with no optimizations) to a low-end PowerPC, like the 600-800 Mhz chips in the AmigaOne. It'll tide us over untill new titles arrive.
That's what Intel is doing for the transition of IA32 to IA64, so it can't be all bad. I'm more interested in new software than old favorites, anyway.
The real question is, on a scant number of PowerPC boards, is OS4 going to get anywhere near as much developer support than if it was more widely available on PC hardware? I seriously doubt OS4 will get much software other than cheap, generic ports, which won't fully utilize the PowerPC hardware, anyway. At least with x86, there's tons of kick-ass compilers and CPU APIs to choose from.
Mingle: Do you think LINUX would be where it is today if it had been tied to the PPC platform?
Even though it isn't, it still hasn't made a splash on PowerPC, either!
Mingle: It's a pity that so much time and effort has been put into porting Amiga OS to proprietory (medicore?) PPC hardware, when it could have been better spent migrating to x86.
I wonder what's the point of writing a HAL for AmigaOS if they're going the route of custom hardware, anyway. If all new AmigaOS software is written for PowerPC, they can't really switch to something else later without a HUGE loss of performance. That's why I liked the meta-binary approach of TAO. It's not optimum, but that's meaning less and less if you can guarentee flexibility. Almost the whole Internet runs interpreted languages these days, like Java, Perl, PHP, Python... native code seems like just a way to ensure Intel gets a paycheck and new hardware won't break apart the monopolies.
AmigaDE is a brilliant idea for applications with full network integration and sophisticaed GUIs. AmigaDE-for-mutimedia,-games,-and-sort-of-OS-capabilities isn't going to go anywhere. Most hardware abstraction in those respects is already done with drivers and APIs, which are platform-restricted by marketing issues, not technology.
Plexus: Amiga OS to Intel PC crap!
Ah, one of the rabid anti-x86 crowd. you're in very light company, pal, and dwindling every day. ;-)
