Amiga.org
The "Not Quite Amiga but still computer related category" => Alternative Operating Systems => Topic started by: Managarm on September 10, 2005, 04:25:44 PM
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Hi, (this is a long post please bear with me.) I'm looking for some general advice. I've owned an Amiga since 1992 and the only change has been to go from an A500+ to an A1200. Someone gave me a PC with Windows '95 a couple of months ago. It's not very powerful and it seems that upgrading it would be more hassle and cost than buying a new one. There's a shop near me selling a PC with a Pentium 4, 80gig HD, 512mb for £150. (It comes with Windows XP and the guy said he'd knock money off if I didn't want it.)
The point is I don't want it, I don't like Windows. It's not an anti-Microsoft thing I just don't like using it. We have Windows 2000 at work and I'm not mad on it at all. As for my Windows '95 machine I think I'm going mad. I've encountered what the net refers to as 'DLL Hell' I spend my whole time reinstalling DLL files.
What other operating systems are there I can use? I know the main alternative is Linux, I don't know too much about that. I've used Mac OS on a friend's machine and quite liked it; Idon't suppose there's anything like it that will run on x86 architecture. Something that handles like Amiga OS would be nice. :-) I have to say I'm not mad into the idea of getting Morph OS or any of the other Amiga derivatives. Any ideas would be much appreciated.
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theres still no easy way of getting MacOS X on x86
which leaves you with only a few options that will give you an OS which can actually do anything
Id say that linux is the best choice there are many good distros like SuSe, mandrake, ubuntu etc
but you might be better off with something a little easier to install like Linspire, but it costs money
also theres stuff like solaris that might be of some use
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Nice one, thanks. I'll Google the ones you've told me and see what comes up. Is Linux really difficult to install?
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You're selecting an OS for all the wrong reasons, to be brutally honest. First select the applications you want to run, then choose hardware, OS, and coolness factor. Chances are quite big that you will not find Linux to your liking as well. You can tinker with it to your heart's content and some internals really have an Amiga-like feel to them (even if they're much more elaborate) but unless you like to do that all the time, it is not really that different from the rest. It just crashes less often---although I have to admit that Windows 2000 is already quite stable.
The only idea I can think of besides the OSes you already mentioned is SkyOS, but there you have to work with an appbase which might (or might not) be big. I am not that interested in these things anymore.
I think it is time for you to come to terms with the fact that something like the Amiga is no longer available nor feasible. Well, if you insist, you can use AmigaOS4, or MorphOS, or perhaps even AROS, but you already indicated you're not that keen on those. It took me a few years, but when I tried AROS a year ago, it felt almost like sacrilege to have something that (relatively) simple run on hardware nearly two orders of magnitude faster. My entire usage pattern has changed too: I cannot do on an Amiga what I now do on the PC anymore.
Of course the above is invalid if you don't care about apps; then SkyOS would be my first non-Windows, non-Linux, i86-based OS of choice.
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food for thought... To be honest I was only holding out for something vaguely Amigaesque in a lazy sort of way. I see your point about choosing apps first. I'd mainly be wanting to browse the net, emulate old games, store pictures from the digital camera I'm about to buy. I've read too many horror stories and seen too many ruined computers to dream of putting a Windows machine on the net. (Last week a friend of mine had their computer knackered and they were using Firefox which I thought was secure.)
I'm going to spend a while looking up Linux on the net. It seems to be quite well supported in terms of books and websites about it.
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Managarm wrote:
Nice one, thanks. I'll Google the ones you've told me and see what comes up. Is Linux really difficult to install?
I just installed suse 9.3 on my parents pc, and it turned out to be much less painful than installing windows. The installing process was 100% graphical and it had some reasonable good plug and play features.. Popped in a bluetooth adaptor into the usb, and got a popup box saying: "found new hardware: bluetooth adaptor blah blah. Do you want to configure it now?"
Just as easy with usb cameras, flash disks and so on.. Never had to touch the cmd line once.
But if you already like amigaos, then why not get hold of an amigaone?
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I was only holding out for something vaguely Amigaesque in a lazy sort of way.
Try Zeta (http://yellowtab.biz).
More apps than SkyOS, and it's quite Amigalike.
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lookup BeOS, it's probably the most Amiga like OS there is. It'll do everything you mentioned.
It's available as "Zeta" these days but you'll need to pay for it.
There is a free version of BeOS out there if you want to try it, there's also "BeOSMax" which is also free.
I've read too many horror stories and seen too many ruined computers to dream of putting a Windows machine on the net. (Last week a friend of mine had their computer knackered and they were using Firefox which I thought was secure.)
Firefox is secure, Windows isn't.
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Managarm wrote:
I've read too many horror stories and seen too many ruined computers to dream of putting a Windows machine on the net. (Last week a friend of mine had their computer knackered and they were using Firefox which I thought was secure.)
No computer program is secure, even Firefox has its share of bugs, but---and this is important---far less than Internet Explorer. Even so, you can configure Firefox to accept ActiveX controls and the like, and that is like rolling out a red carpet for anything fishy wanting to get in. In addition, if your friend was surfing the web as an administrator, and not as a regular user, he was not really thinking about what he was doing either. And we're not even sure it was Firefox's fault: for all I know he could have been IM-ing with a shady person, or double-clicking a bit too hastily on a program/crack he got off a P2P network.
My point: Firefox is just a part of a long and hitherto unfamiliar chain of programs, access rights and basic security measures needed to keep a machine safe and healthy. That chain specifically includes the human operator: you have to think about what you're doing. There is no real reason to write off a PC with Firefox as 'bad' or 'unsafe' based on the experiences of a single friend: the fact that I have been using the exact same combination for over a year behind a tiny print server annex firewall without a single problem is sufficient testimony that you can use this combination very easily and without any problems. And I'm not even running spyware or antivirus programs. The only time I needed them was when I was using IE---it didn't even matter whether I turned off or on ActiveX. (Which reminds me, I need to scan my computer. Last time was 6 months ago :-P.)
There are plenty of sites out there to help you lock down a Windows-machine, and while the end result may not be as robust as a properly configured Linux-box, it will make it very hard for a hacker to get in in the first place. Don't forget that those guys are not going to hack a well-guarded run-of-the-mill machine when there are still thousands just waiting to be abused with a minimum amount of fuss out there.
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Managarm wrote:
Nice one, thanks. I'll Google the ones you've told me and see what comes up. Is Linux really difficult to install?
Only if you make it difficult. SuSE, which I use, installed in every case I have used it falling off a log easy. Gateway 500SE, a Frankiputer 2 1.2 celerons, An IBM Thinkpad 600X, a drive transplant into a Dell 1 gig. Each and every time it was easy.
The functionality is as simple or as hard as you make it. You can even find X servers that are close to Amiga or Mac in feel.
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I just downloaded Linspire 5.0 and was uterly disapointed it seems to get anywhere near the usability of my Mandrake install would cost a bundle. I also found the Mandrake installer much easier to use. My system with mandrake comes up completly runnung. I would suggest you purchase the 10.1 Discovery disk as it is by far the easiest and most full distribution (if you are not doing server or development)I have found includes Non Linear editor Sound editor two complete office sweets and all the software you would need for your stated needs. As well as plugins for browsing and 3d drivers for NVidia and ATI.
A word of caution make sure you make sure all your periferals are compatable to the dist you choose (especially printers and scanners)Caps printer drivers support the most printers and SANE supports the most scanners. Your hardware may just dictate the dist you buy. :-)
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If you have the funding getting a proper MAC with the latest OS X is a nice investment, and well worth it for the extra bucks.
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Hi,
Fedora Core 4 is also worth looking at, as is Ubuntu. Generally, to install Linux these days, it's pretty much just a case of booting the machine with the installation media in the drive and following a few simple on-screen instructions.
If you want something Amiga-like, you could always install Linux with UAE and have it boot directly into the emulated Amiga environment! :-D
- Ali
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Haiku has my interest at the moment... I wonder if it is destined for any reasonabe maturity.
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Thanks for all the help everyone. I was at the North Thames Amiga meeting on Sunday and was VERY impressed by OS4 (First time I'd seen it.) To be honest if I was getting a PPC machine that's what I'd be after. The skins are a nice feature, if you're a sadist you can make it look like Windows XP. Zeta looked quite good too. I think the winner is SUSE Linux though. I get my beast of a machine on Friday and it will be Linuxed.
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/overview.html
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@Managarm
I don't know why No one has mentioned this (Someone sort of did) but Why not get Amiga OS 3.1 0r 3.9 on your PC? especially on the Pentium 4.YOu can run an almost )S4 like Amiga OS 3.9 through Amiga FOREVER (WinUAE with legal ROMS and OS)
Dude.just get Amiga FOREVER CD from Cloanto..it boots straight from the CD. I actually attached my REAL AMiga IDE harddrive to my PC and ran it through WinUAE and copied all the partitions.and now I have an exact copy of my REAL Amiga Harddrive on my PC and run the Same Amiga OS and applications :-).it was a 2.5gig HD.I can also burn this HD to a CD for backup :-)
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I have Ubuntu Linux on my main machine (AMD XP3300) And I have never had a problem with it, great applications, great OS!
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Sorry but it sounds like the easiest and best OS for what you want to do is XP.
Its very much like Amiga after all. Applications multitask and you can fire up a prompt just like Cli in Workbench. Better yet every web page you will want to view will look great because you can run Internet Explorer which is the de facto standard for web pages if you look at browser standards. And you can easily connect your digital camera to the USB port and transfer pictures. Windows is not that bad really. For me the choice is easy, I work as a web designer and I dont want to pay to be in the exclusive Apple club.
An XP machine feels like a good old Amiga on stereoids.
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I have to give my support to Ubuntu Linux. I have tried quite a few Linux distrubutions during the years and this is by far the easiest and nicest to use this far. Installation was extremely easy and it found all my hardware without any hassle. Works like a charm and the people on the official IRC channel was very friendly, unlike most other Linux IRC channels I've been to.
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As one of the windows-lamers (in my defence I am moving to gentoo+ I am installing openBSD on a machine right now), I have to add that runnning w95, w98, or millenium is about as smart as tieing your dog to your balls and throwing tennisball.
for security, stability and support resons run at least windows 2000.
:)
Btw, I read recently that vista will have a brand new feature that sounded really cool. Some kind of "load stuff in ram-feature".
How long have you had that on AOS?
10 - 15 years?
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by cv643d on 2005/10/13 19:09:20
Sorry but it sounds like the easiest and best OS for what you want to do is XP.
Its very much like Amiga after all. Applications multitask and you can fire up a prompt just like Cli in Workbench. Better yet every web page you will want to view will look great because you can run Internet Explorer which is the de facto standard for web pages if you look at browser standards. And you can easily connect your digital camera to the USB port and transfer pictures. Windows is not that bad really. For me the choice is easy, I work as a web designer and I dont want to pay to be in the exclusive Apple club.
An XP machine feels like a good old Amiga on stereoids.
Yes, an amiga on steroids, but still struggling under the weight of a load of inefficient or superfluous crap. Having said that, XP is probably your best bet (personally I'd tell the guy not to install it then sorce your own copy elsewhere, if you know what i mean...) but yeah it's still not the same. The annoying thing is that this is a supposed 'professional' OS, with multimillion pounds of R&D poured into it, and yet there are still niggling flaws, and things that coming from the amiga background, and seeing how that works, tend to annoy (ie having to restart after making changes, long boot times, renaming a network took a couple of minute to update the other day- rather than just saving a file in the ENV like on amiga, also I had to go through the whole wizard to do so, there's probably another way but i've yet to find it.) Oh yeah, and the whole registry and indecipherable codes whichg mean that certain programs start up, and its not obvious how to change, unlike opening startup-sequence in a text editor. But I've come to think that old Billy boy wants the general public to know less and less about how computers actually work, so he can get awa\y with a less efficient OS ( I mean on my PC, an AMD sempron if i waggle the mouse pointer about, the CPU usage goes up to about 50% - are we supposed to believe that it takes 1Ghz to move the pointer? How did computers used to work if so? :crazy: )
and also so people are less inclined to migrate to another OS, or figure out that they don't need to buy a new computer (and pay for another copy of windows) just beacuse it's not running as fast as it used to, or the hard drive is full. (probably with lots of little pointless files and archives created by windows for that very purpose- I find that it get harder and harder to free up space on a drive the longer you've been using it)
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Managarm wrote:
I'd mainly be wanting to browse the net, emulate old games, store pictures from the digital camera I'm about to buy.
If this is what you want to do, there's no reason to install Windows XP as any modern Linux distribution will cater for this and more. Any distros mentioned by the other posters will be fine: Fedora Core, Ubuntu, Suse, Mandrake, etc. If you just want to give Linux a quick "test drive", download an ISO of Knoppix as this'll boot straight from the CD into a nicely configured environment.
The E-UAE Amiga emulator is available for Linux, as are a number of emulators for old computers / consoles / arcade machines, so you should be sorted there.
Firefox's Linux version differs little from its Windows counterpart, as does the Thunderbird email client, so your web browsing needs will be covered.
OpenOffice.org is a free fully featured office-type suite (word processor, spreadsheet, etc) and that'll cater for the main productivity-type tasks.
IMHO, the only reason for a home user to install Windows XP is to either run the latest games or if there's a specific requirement to run an application that's XP-specific where a reasonable alternative doesn't exist for Linux.
cv643d wrote:
Its very much like Amiga after all. Applications multitask and you can fire up a prompt just like Cli in Workbench.
Hmm... Windows XP unfortunately still shows MS-DOS roots - the CLI is woefully inadequate when you compare it to an AmigaDOS shell. The whole notion of fixed drive letters is soooo 1981! :-)
Multitasking works well enough in XP most of the time, I'll give it that. But IMO, it's less efficient with resources than Linux on the same hardware.
cv643d wrote:
Better yet every web page you will want to view will look great because you can run Internet Explorer which is the de facto standard for web pages if you look at browser standards.
Err? Cough! Internet Explorer actually breaks a number of web standards and is not fully compliant. Granted, IE does display web pages as the designers intended, but this is only because those designers have to botch the standards to work around IE's non-compliance.
IE is one of the biggest security risks you can install on a PC if you leave it in its default configuration. If you use Windows, junk IE... Mine is relegated to performing Windows Update tasks and nothing else.
Anyway... all of this is just my 2c worth, I'm sure others will disagree!
- Ali
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Managarm wrote:
Nice one, thanks. I'll Google the ones you've told me and see what comes up. Is Linux really difficult to install?
Suse linux 9.3 is in my opinion much easier to install than windowsxp, unless you have some tricky unsupported hardware. It also autodetects and setup things like usb camera, usb disks and such when you plug them in. It even found my blutooth adaptor and 1min later i was transferring files between my nokia 6600 and my suse 9.3 box.
Everything was done using a graphical installer or gui. I never had to touch the cmd line at all.
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What do you want to do with this PC that was given to you that you can't do already on your Amigas? What speed and memory is the PC? If it is at least 500mHz or faster Pentium 2 or 3, it is fast enough to run WinUAE/Amiga Forever. Probably your best bet for non-Amiga, non-Windows OS is SuSe Linux 9.3 as others have suggested.
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Hi Managarm,
I went through a similar thing .. I used my Amiga 1200
daily until the end of 1999, then I needed to get a PC to be
able to do work at home. I never really liked it. Today at
work I use a laptop PC 1.6 GHz with an 80 Gig hard disk
and the best software my company can buy...and I still don't
like it.
Last December I was looking around the internet and found
to my shock that Amiga OS4 was being developed on a new PPC
based Amiga. I was sceptical at first, but after seeing
what it could do and seeing that it had the nearest thing to
the "Amiga" feel of any OS I've used (including BE and QNX)
I bought an AmigaOne. Now I use my AmigaOne exclusively
while my wife plays lame internet games on my PC. I am very
impressed with it and it does everything I want a computer
to do...plus its an Amiga and has the old Amiga "feel".
So if you are looking for an Amiga-like OS, why not try
Amiga OS4? If it does what you want ... try to use one if
you can find someone who owns one.
I'm glad that I did!
Scott
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OK I gotta put my 2p's worth in here. I use linux and have done for about four years now. I started with redhat which didn't agree with my laptop then moved to madrake (from 7.0 to 10.0) I now use fedora and I have to say it's about the best distro I've tried. I wish you luck with suse from what I've heard it's a good distro and is currently cover mounted on a couple of magazines (linux user and PC Plus I think) If Suse don't do it for you I would recomend Fedora.
Rat
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Thanks for the replies everyone, I thought this thread had died. I ended up installing Ubuntu on my new machine the other week. It seems pretty cool but I'm still getting to grips with the Terminal. I'm currently trying to install the java compiler and it's a bit troublesome. I loved the fact that you don't need to find drivers for sound and graphics which was quite annoying when I got the Windows '95 machine.
I now don't know what to do with my Pentium II, Windows '95 PC. It really only serves two purposes at the moment: Providing the Amiga with a HD floppy and CD through PC2Amiga and playing Golden Axe 3 on the Megadrive emulator. I was thinking of just storing some of my music on it but I'm not sure it's worth it as it's only got a 4gig hard drive.
Does anyone know of a good piece of software that does what PC2Amiga does with a Linux machine?
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since everyone already mentioned allmost all available OSes..
you can also try updated OS/2:
link (http://www.ecomstation.com/democd)
it should be on 'live' CD so no need to install it.
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It's a shame IBM didn't open source OS/2 once it got to the end of its life... would have been interesting to see the direction it could have taken...
- Ali
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well iv played around a little with Be|OS its clean runs fast very compairible to amiga runs on x86 hardware more info at bebits.com i think it is its been awhile since i did much with it but its very stable OS and was designed as in the Amiga "way": multitasking/video etc runs great on low end machines got a Mac/linux feel to it ..hope this helps .. probley should have looked at how old this post was but ohh well.
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@SCabit
Completely agree with ya :-)