Yet another PowerBook G4 MorphOS video

[recidivist]

Wow!

[Rob]

@Piru

Will 3D support be available for the Radeon 9700?

[Piru]

Any chance to run MorphOS on iBook G4 with ATI Mobility Radeon 9550?

@Piru
Will 3D support be available for the Radeon 9700?

We don't have definite answer to these questions yet.

[kolla]

@kolla

Seem a little nervous with morphos, this can be the first amiga-like OS running on a portable machine and you just jocking.

Huh, AROS runs on laptops, as did Amithlon way back.

I'm not joking, for MorphOS (or any other OS for that matter) to be of much use on a laptop, wireless networking is quite important, dont you think?

Without wireless networking, it is actually more usefull to be able to run the "Amiga system" in a hosted environment that provides it, like how I can run hosted AROS and UAE on my laptop.

It would be great of MorphOS could have a "un*x-box" to provide networking and various services that is simply too much work to implement natively. Like Haiku uses FreeBSD for these things.

[Piru]

for MorphOS (or any other OS for that matter) to be of much use on a laptop, wireless networking is quite important, dont you think?

Release of MorphOS doesn't exclude the possibility of writing a WLAN driver.

What we have decided, however, is that lack of WLAN driver doesn't block release of MorphOS for specific hardware.

In a similar manner we're not considering PC Card or bluetooth support critical for release.

[kolla]

Release of MorphOS doesn't exclude the possibility of writing a WLAN driver.

There's more to it than "a WLAN driver", as you know.

What we have decided, however, is that lack of WLAN driver doesn't block release of MorphOS for specific hardware.

In a similar manner we're not considering PC Card or bluetooth support critical for release.

That's all good and well, as long as it is clearly communicated, alot of people - especially those coming from "the outside" - take these things for granted.

[Piru]

There's more to it than "a WLAN driver", as you know.

Yes I do. That "more" part is actually what is the hard part (all the infrastructure needed to manage encryption and other options and so on). WLAN without encryption (or with WEP) would be kind of a bad joke really. WPA2 (IEEE 802.11i) would be kind of a requirement. This is why we're not going to spend resources on it for now.

[kickstart]

Huh, AROS runs on laptops, as did Amithlon way back.

Hmmm... with all my respect for the aros and amithlon devs, aros need native or recompiled software and for amithlon i prefer winuae fir this work. AROS or amithlon arent in the same level than morphos imho.

About the wlan driver development, release of morphos on a portable machite is a giant step for a wlan driver in the future, imho again.

[haywirepc]

From all that I have seen of morph os, I like it but I simply don't understand all the effort to port the os to outdated mac hardware.
 
All of this effort would be better spent porting to x86. If it ran on x86, I would buy it that day, and so would so many others.
 
Might we ever see Morph ported to x86, or like AOS are they totally against this idea? I'm simply curious, I don't think I ever read or saw any position on this issue from the developers.
 
Steven

[SamuraiCrow]

@haywirepc

By the time any hardware is ported to it will be outdated by the time it is done.  That's why Amiga, AROS, and MorphOS will forever have to come out with custom hardware even if it is using off-the-shelf components.

[amigadave]

From all that I have seen of morph os, I like it but I simply don't understand all the effort to port the os to outdated mac hardware.
 
All of this effort would be better spent porting to x86. If it ran on x86, I would buy it that day, and so would so many others.
 
Might we ever see Morph ported to x86, or like AOS are they totally against this idea? I'm simply curious, I don't think I ever read or saw any position on this issue from the developers.
 
Steven

It is perhaps a hundred times harder to port PPC MorphOS which was started on Phase5 PPC accelerator boards for Classic Amiga computers to x86 than it is to port it to any other PPC platform, such as the MacMini and other G4 Mac models.

That is why the developers have concentrated their work the way that they have.  There is a very limited number of team members and hours that they can work on MorphOS as they all have other regular jobs (I think they ALL have regular jobs) and they don't make their living from writing code for MorphOS.

The PPC Mac's are the most powerful and most widely available platform for the team to target at this time.  They may choose to target x86 hardware some time in the future, but it will be a long time coming and running MorphOS on the 1.42GHz to 1.67GHz G4 Mac hardware is the best option for the "Short Term" future of MorphOS, until the team has more time to work on a different alternative.

There are some that say they won't buy or use MorphOS until it is ported to x86 and others that say they will abandon using MorphOS the day it is ported to x86.  It is silly to say either and be so fanatic about which chip it runs on.  Try it out and see if it meets your needs.  The hardware it runs on is varied and runs the price range from $99 for an Efika mobo, to almost $1,000 for a used Pegasos2 complete system with a registered keyfile.

The demo of the OS is free to download and try and there are no limitations on it's functionality for each 30 minute period of time before it slows down, so you can get a very good idea of how well it will suit your needs during that time.

[smerf]

Here's a small video I made of current MorphOS development version (so called "3.0") on PowerBook G4:
PowerBook-G4-MorphOS-3-newyear-teaser.avi

This is on PowerBook G4 rev e, 7447B (or 7448, not sure which one) @ 1.67GHz, 2GB DDR2 RAM, 250GB HDD, DVD-RW, Radeon 9700M 128MB.

As always, the quality of the video could be better...

Happy New Year 2010 everyone!

Hi,

@Piru,


Watched your video on morphos, OK, I hate anything having to do with Apple, will morphos also run on a A1200 with a 250 mhz blizzard board or will I need an apple to run it.  What are the advantages of morphos over say an Amiga Emulator?  Do you know anything about AROS, how does morphos compare to AROS?

smerf

[pVC]

WLAN without encryption (or with WEP) would be kind of a bad joke really. WPA2 (IEEE 802.11i) would be kind of a requirement. This is why we're not going to spend resources on it for now.

I wouldn't say that harsh anyway... There are situations when WLAN without encryption would be much better than no WLAN at all I wouldn't use it for everyday use, but for occasional needs it would be nice.

For example our free city WLAN in unencrypted, user just have to be aware of it and use encrypted protocols in clients when accessing the net and do things which aren't too private. And what I would use it for would be private lan on countryside where I take my mini every now and then. Nearest neighbours are kilometers away, so I could use WLAN without encryption just fine there

[kolla]

Ofcourse, but open wireless nets is becoming a thing of the past these days, just sitting here at home I see 8 networks, of which none are open, 2 are WEP, 5 are WPA/WPA2-PSK and 1 is WPA/WPA2-EAP/1X. Our "city net" is also uses EAP/1X, at least that is how I connect to it (eduroam).

It's not just about encrypting the wireless line, it is also about making sure the client connecting is allowed to do so, hijacking authenticated sessions on web based portals is just too easy.

[Piru]

@Piru,

Watched your video on morphos, OK, I hate anything having to do with Apple, will morphos also run on a A1200 with a 250 mhz blizzard board or will I need an apple to run it.

You can (for now) use the following HW:

• Pegasos I (slower than Peg 2)
• Pegasos II (moderately fast, best expandability)
• Efika (slowest of the bunch, but also cheapest, very limited RAM)
• Mac Mini (fastest, somewhat limited gfx memory for the non-1.5GHz models)

What are the advantages of morphos over say an Amiga Emulator?

Amiga Emulator is limited to running AmigaOS 3.x. Regardless the performance of the 68k emulator, the OS itself will never advance.

MorphOS on the other hand is fully PPC native. When running old 68k applications on MorphOS they'll use all the PPC native components of the OS, and appear 100% identical to the native applications (there is no separate window or difference in appearance). MorphOS is under constant development and new innovative features are added constantly.

MorphOS comes with latest Magic User Interface 4, giving the best and latest in amiga like system UIs.

MorphOS can run WarpUP and PowerUP applications, including Warp3D games.

However, it really depends on what you want to do. Are you interested in mostly playing old amiga floppy games? If so, you're probably better off with WinUAE or like. However, if you want to run the demanding, high end amiga OS compatible applications, watch movies and browse web with CSS and flash capable browser, and have extremely fast UI experience, then perhaps MorphOS is best for you. Sure, UAE can do that as well, but while UAE itself can get better, the OS will not. It will still be the 3.x line, stuck there forever.

If you have a Mac Mini nearby, or perhaps some friend has one, it is very cheap and easy to test MorphOS: Just download the ISO image, burn it on a CD and boot the Mac Mini with the CD by holding down the 'c' key. The Mini will boot into MorphOS, in "Live CD" manner. No data will be destroyed from the HDD (unless if you continue installing the OS). The fully working demo version of the OS has a session limitation of 30 minutes, after that point the OS slows down and you need to reboot. You can have as many 30 minute sessions as you like.

Do you know anything about AROS, how does morphos compare to AROS?

I hate doing such comparisons myself, especially since I haven't looked into AROS in detail for years. What I can tell however is that AROS has come a long way lately. Yet, MorphOS has several advantages over AROS, even today:

• MorphOS has very high amiga compatibility built-in. MorphOS can run OS compatible 68k amiga applications without resorting to UAE. AROS is trying to integrate UAE seamlessly, but it still has a long way to go, and arguably it can never integrate as well as direct support for amiga applications, such as in MorphOS. You can for example take some 68k OS component and install it to MorphOS system. The OS and all applications (even the native PPC ones!) will be able to take advantage of this component. This will not be possible with integrated UAE.
• MorphOS is more polished and mature. AROS still has several rough edges and some stability problems.
• MorphOS has very highly evolved desktop environment - Ambient - in many aspects similar to Directory Opus Magellan.
• MorphOS has native support for VFAT, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3, XFS, HFS and HFS+ (some read only), some with 64bit file size support. To my knowledge AROS has VFAT.
• MorphOS can run WarpUP and PowerUP applications.
• MorphOS has mature 3D support (Rave3D, TinyGL, GOA Warp3D wrapper for 68k and WOS Warp3D applications).
• MorphOS has hardware accelerated graphics with transparency effects.
• MorphOS comes with highly advanced console (MUICON-handler/PowerTerm) which provides not only tabbed console with review buffer and sessions, but also SSH2 remote shell connections.

This is what I could think of right now. There are tons of small things that I probably missed, and I perhaps have a bit different view of things than others.

For the closing: While MorphOS certainly has a lot to offer, do not be fooled: It cannot seriously compete with Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, except for some very limited areas (for example overall responsivity). It is a niche OS, written by bunch of ex-amiga coders. It is a ton of fun, however.