Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga community support ideas => Topic started by: Madshib on June 25, 2013, 02:27:35 AM
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Hello everyone. I have been silently watching this web space for quite awhile and only recently decided to jump back into the conversation with the hopes of an A1200 purchase from Petro T. in July.
I stopped using my Amiga when I moved out in 2000 and my dad bought me an Athelon64 based PC. I think it was his way of sending me into the cruel dark world ;)
I used Windoze for the next few years(still do at work, but that's a different life) and discovered Linux and it's community back in 2008. I now use it exclusively. I like the ideas behind the community and the development process that goes into the big hitters like Red Hat and Debian.
Since I've resumed my boyish interest in the Amiga community I've noticed the nature of the development is from those that love the platform with little help. I'm not talking about the PPC route here, I like the idea behind OS 3.9 being continuously developed by fans and gifted (and patient) programmers.
This leads me to my discussion point/question.
Would the Amiga community enjoy seeing the OS Open Sourced for the community to continue development? This would be the original 68k code released into the wild, so to speak.
Also, what type of governance would need to be in place to control and manage it's growth in the right directions? (committee, OS Dev Board, etc.)
Finally, do you think that it would attract more programmers (both beginner and advanced levels) to help revitalize and/or expand the platform as with Linux?
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The owners of the OS, Amiga Inc, aren't interested, and neither is Hyperion. Your best bet is to get involved with AROS if you are looking for open source.
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Hiya,
The only kind of 'open source' you get with the classic side is when people reverse engineer something (which obviously takes ages).
I guess in an ideal world, the owners (whoever the hell they are) of the original OS could have released the source code to the community after they'd finished developing it (around the year 2000).
The other problem is that a lot of the original OS was written in 68k assembler which doesn't lend itself to being developed further (due to a lack of skilled asm coders).
It sounds like Hyperion have spent the past decade converting all of that cryptic assembler code to straight C code. I guess that makes them the only entity that's really in a position to open source Amiga OS.
Then of course you have AROS which has taken a different approach (built from the ground up).
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See http://aros.sourceforge.net/ and http://aros-exec.org/
An open source reimplementation of Amiga OS 3.1. Currently has versions that run on x86, PPC, and 68k.
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See http://aros.sourceforge.net/ and http://aros-exec.org/
An open source reimplementation of Amiga OS 3.1. Currently has versions that run on x86, PPC, and 68k.
Well, a reimplementation of the API anyway.
And after all that trouble, what would you have?
An open source variant of an OS over two decades old?
Doesn't sound all that usefull.
What wrong with using the closed source version that makes you interested in this idea.
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What wrong with using the closed source version that makes you interested in this idea.
Hahaha, you don't know freetards do you.
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Well, a reimplementation of the API anyway.
And after all that trouble, what would you have?
An open source variant of an OS over two decades old?
Doesn't sound all that usefull.
What wrong with using the closed source version that makes you interested in this idea.
What's wrong with having it open sourced so people interested can join easily? There's no
BIG money to make in the "Amiga" OS business anyways.
Also AROS isn't just two decades old, there's lots of new stuff there too. So it's as useful as any of the three AmigaOS 3.1 clones.
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Hahaha, you don't know freetards do you.
What do you mean exactly?
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Hello everyone. I have been silently watching this web space for quite awhile and only recently decided to jump back into the conversation with the hopes of an A1200 purchase from Petro T. in July.
I stopped using my Amiga when I moved out in 2000 and my dad bought me an Athelon64 based PC. I think it was his way of sending me into the cruel dark world ;)
I used Windoze for the next few years(still do at work, but that's a different life) and discovered Linux and it's community back in 2008. I now use it exclusively. I like the ideas behind the community and the development process that goes into the big hitters like Red Hat and Debian.
Since I've resumed my boyish interest in the Amiga community I've noticed the nature of the development is from those that love the platform with little help. I'm not talking about the PPC route here, I like the idea behind OS 3.9 being continuously developed by fans and gifted (and patient) programmers.
This leads me to my discussion point/question.
Would the Amiga community enjoy seeing the OS Open Sourced for the community to continue development? This would be the original 68k code released into the wild, so to speak.
Also, what type of governance would need to be in place to control and manage it's growth in the right directions? (committee, OS Dev Board, etc.)
Finally, do you think that it would attract more programmers (both beginner and advanced levels) to help revitalize and/or expand the platform as with Linux?
you are talking about aros here, as others mentioned, in particular aros68k. it isnt exactly consumer ready yet, but if you wish to try it i can help you to setup it on your machine. note though a plain a1200 would not be eonough. aros needs some 4-6mb ram to fully boot and is better usable with faster cpus.
what concerns open sourcing the genuine os it has been proposed multiple times and against all reason met deaf ears. no chance there. the aros kickstart is the answer to that,
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...... note though a plain a1200 would not be eonough. aros needs some 4-6mb ram to fully boot and is better usable with faster cpus.
That is disappointing, AOS would run on a 68000 and 512K ram, what more does AROS do to justify the faster cpu and 6M ram?
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That is disappointing, AOS would run on a 68000 and 512K ram, what more does AROS do to justify the faster cpu and 6M ram?
Aros was developed for and on X86 and never intended to be run on 20 years old hardware :-)
So it is not optimized for classic hardware whereas AmigaOS (classic) was and is tightly connected to the old hardware and parts of the OS were in the ROM to save memory. Try to run anything modern on A500, if you find anything you can show it to me because I would like to see it.
There is certainly still room for improvement in AROS 68k and the Kickstart Replacement but I do not believe that it will ever work on a 1 MB A500.
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That is disappointing, AOS would run on a 68000 and 512K ram, what more does AROS do to justify the faster cpu and 6M ram?
The same reason that Amiga OS 3.9 won't run on a 68000 with 512K RAM.
In short, C vs Assembly.
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Im going to have to also agree that AROS is your best bet here. Its basically what your looking for. Its open and has an active user base as developer base working to improve it.
One of the nice things about it is the relative ease to port over MorphOS and Amiga OS4 code over and from it.
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That is disappointing, AOS would run on a 68000 and 512K ram, what more does AROS do to justify the faster cpu and 6M ram?
i think the previous answers to that are not exactly spot on. sorry pals.
its true that aros has been developed on comparatively fast x86, but is meant as cross platform and attempts to be also usable on lower end devices such as pi, or the 68k hardware. it isnt optimized enough yet, but the advance towards those lower end systems, in particular genuine amigas forces it into optimizations that could be avoided before. i can observe it very well, running it regularly on amiga hardware. it has become at least two time faster in the last time. its progressing constantly.
also 68k maintainers like winuae autor, toni willen, attempt to allow it run on lowest end hardware possible. aros is compiled without 020 and higher optimizations for now so far i know, so theoretically should run on 68000 cpu with enough ram. on the other hand the question is, why would anyone need or want to substitute operating system on unexpanded a500. no applications need it or could take advantage of additional features on such a limited system, that is actually best used with its genuine 1.3 kickstart. so why bother?
what concerns the system speed and demands, its wirth to mention that on cpu bound tasks, aros is exactly as fast as the genuine aos (i have benchmarked this). the memory allocation is still some 4 times slower i guess, but it is worked on and also tlsf gets implemented. remember also that systems like 3.9 have their demands as well, dont run within 512k ram and need more time to boot. my a4000/060 cold boots from slow internal ide with old slow 1.3 gig drive almost in a half minute, while almost half of that time the drive is spinning up and aros gets softkicked on genuine kickstart after reboot, aros loading up to full desktop/wanderer/workbench would be about 20 seconds then. but booting it to the shell without startup-sequence will take almost an instant.
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You can download individual upgrades from Aminet. Or if you want the whole thing free, wait for AROS.
Open source is great, it means no one can ever shelve it and abandon it. Like what happened to Amithlon.
If your asking... Could you buy OS 4.1 and Amithlon and sell them both at $20 with no hardware lock in?
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The same reason that Amiga OS 3.9 won't run on a 68000 with 512K RAM.
In short, C vs Assembly.
If you build a 3.1-alike setup with almost only 3.9 components, what would you call that?
http://kolla.no/minimig/
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If you build a 3.1-alike setup with almost only 3.9 components, what would you call that?
http://kolla.no/minimig/
I'd call it a "3.1-alike setup with almost only 3.9 components" running on an A500 with 1.5MB Chip RAM and a 16MHz 68000.
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Hahaha, you don't know freetards do you.
Baffles me. AROS is already free. And how closed can it be?
Its got a multitude of developers.
Only the two primary PPC variants of the OS3.1 API are closed.
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Also AROS isn't just two decades old, there's lots of new stuff there too. So it's as useful as any of the three AmigaOS 3.1 clones.
I wouldn't go that far, but it's getting there.
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Baffles me. AROS is already free. And how closed can it be?
Its got a multitude of developers.
Only the two primary PPC variants of the OS3.1 API are closed.
See, freetards don't think that way. In the Gospel According to Stallman, all proprietary software is capital-E Evil, and the goal of all software is (obviously) to metamorphosize into a Free Software Alternative, probably with four different variants depending on whose UI toolkit is the Free-est at the moment, two separate Windows ports for the poor benighted peons stuck on Proprietary Software, and eleven abandoned forks, at least one of which was an attempt to "integrate social media features."
Thus saith Lord Stallman!
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Hello everyone. I have been silently watching this web space for quite awhile and only recently decided to jump back into the conversation with the hopes of an A1200 purchase from Petro T. in July.
That's good news... the more Amiga users the merrier! The A1200 is a fine machine as well, so I'm sure you won't be disappointed. ;)
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See, freetards don't think that way. In the Gospel According to Stallman, all proprietary software is capital-E Evil, and the goal of all software is (obviously) to metamorphosize into a Free Software Alternative, probably with four different variants depending on whose UI toolkit is the Free-est at the moment, two separate Windows ports for the poor benighted peons stuck on Proprietary Software, and eleven abandoned forks, at least one of which was an attempt to "integrate social media features."
Thus saith Lord Stallman!
One of the advantages to a proprietary systemi is that decisions get made by a small, more cohesive group.
So far I have good experiences with the decisions the MorphOS development team has made.
I'm typing this on a MorphOS system right now.
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I wouldn't go that far, but it's getting there.
Guess it depends on what you're using it for. 3D Games Aros wins hands down. Web browsing I would go for morphos. Retro fun Classics or Winuae for me. as for Aos4 well I don't know enough to judge there.
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@commodorejohn
If you love closed source you must be an Apple fan....
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@commodorejohn
If you love closed source you must be an Apple fan....
Which is based on FreeBSD which is fairly open.
More so than Amiga OS.
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@commodorejohn
If you love closed source you must be an Apple fan....
You need to take remedial set theory. There are how many closed-source OSes out there? For all you know I could be a fan of BeOS, OS/2, or (*gasp*) Windows.
Actually, I don't love closed-source so much as I have been quite forcefully disillusioned from buying into the FSF propaganda that open-source is magic pixie dust that makes everything better unilaterally and has no disadvantages whatsoever. Comes from multiple attempts over a solid seven years and change to try and get a really usable, pleasant user experience out of any of the eleventy billion mutually-incompatible Linux distros.
I do like Haiku as it's shaping up, but then Haiku takes the unorthodox but eminently sensible approach of allowing open access to the source but forbidding forking, so you actually get a single cohesive user experience.
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See, freetards don't think that way. In the Gospel According to Stallman, all proprietary software is capital-E Evil, and the goal of all software is (obviously) to metamorphosize into a Free Software Alternative, probably with four different variants depending on whose UI toolkit is the Free-est at the moment, two separate Windows ports for the poor benighted peons stuck on Proprietary Software, and eleven abandoned forks, at least one of which was an attempt to "integrate social media features."
Thus saith Lord Stallman!
I always find it funny that people think Stallman actually says these things. I guess it's akin to Christians saying that Jesus said to kill everyone who didn't think he was God or Son of God or whatever.
Stallman himself has said that there are use cases where proprietary software is understandable, but nothing he'd really use. But then he also makes a difference between proprietary and closed source. I tend to agree with him that even if it's proprietary software, the source code should be available to the users for auditing purposes (at the very least). How much easier would it be to debug crashes in Windows if we could get reports saying "Dll crashed in function blah of line blah" or something. I have been able to track so many issues down and fix them, or work around them simply because of this with (for example) php scripts, etc.
AmigaOS is horrible at this too "Error in ramlib #8000004" what the crap is that? Fortunately in this day and age we have the Internet to look that up. Anyhow, I always find it funny when people are calling others things like 'freetard' even though for the most of the part the ones who are all up in everyone's faces about 'Free' software (mind you Stallman also states that Free Software and Open Source Software are not the same thing, though they overlap at times) are really trying to look out for software freedoms and really if they had started sooner, maybe the AmigaOS wouldn't be in such a horrible state right now with 3 different offshoots of the 3.x line, all with different hardware requirements.
If there had been enough 'freetards' at Commodore when they were going bankrupt, maybe they could have 'leaked' the source code Online then we could have had cross platform Amigas everywhere!
That could have changed the whole scene. Well, perhaps except for the fact that most of AmigaOS was written in Assembly and C, which is completely alien to most younger programmers. Most of the people I talk to these days say that the only thing they learn in college is basic C (rarely) and Java.
slaapliedje
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You need to take remedial set theory. There are how many closed-source OSes out there? For all you know I could be a fan of BeOS, OS/2, or (*gasp*) Windows.
Actually, I don't love closed-source so much as I have been quite forcefully disillusioned from buying into the FSF propaganda that open-source is magic pixie dust that makes everything better unilaterally and has no disadvantages whatsoever. Comes from multiple attempts over a solid seven years and change to try and get a really usable, pleasant user experience out of any of the eleventy billion mutually-incompatible Linux distros.
I do like Haiku as it's shaping up, but then Haiku takes the unorthodox but eminently sensible approach of allowing open access to the source but forbidding forking, so you actually get a single cohesive user experience.
What makes you think the Haiku licence forbids forking? It's MIT licenced which is even more permissive than the GPL. You can literally do whatever the hell you want with it, including refusing to release the source to your own changes.
We've been here before John, your problem with the *nixes is that you don't know how to use UNIX to do what you want to do, nothing to do with the licencing model of the code*. Different strokes for different folks.....
There's a big difference between Free Software as defined by the FSF and Open Source as defined by the OSI too.
*Correct me if I'm wrong but you'd be just as baffled by the closed and proprietary HP/UX and AIX as you are by GNU or OpenBSD.
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What makes you think the Haiku licence forbids forking? It's MIT licenced which is even more permissive than the GPL. You can literally do whatever the hell you want with it, including refusing to release the source to your own changes.
I could be wrong on that, it's what I recall being told but I'm not 100% sure. In any case, there aren't Haiku forks, so there's still no confusion over which of a multiplicity of distros is good for what; there's just Haiku.
We've been here before John, your problem with the *nixes is that you don't know how to use UNIX to do what you want to do, nothing to do with the licencing model of the code*.
*Correct me if I'm wrong but you'd be just as baffled by the closed and proprietary HP/UX and AIX as you are by GNU or OpenBSD.
I love how "doesn't like *nixes" automatically equates to "doesn't know how to use them." I know perfectly well how to find my way around Unix derivatives; the fact that Linux distros are plagued by terrible UI, nightmare depency trees, and a "who cares if it works so long as it's free" attitude has little to do with the basic Unix architecture (which is old and crufty, but fundamentally workable) and even less to do with confusion on my part.
But no, it must be that I'm just some poor benighted soul meddling in things I can't possibly understand, because there's no way my grievances could be legitimate just because Linux software developers neither know nor care what makes a good, cohesive user experience.
And I've never used HP/UX or AIX. From my limited experience with Solaris, I can say that that at least is a significant improvement in terms of consistency and intuitiveness in the user interface, though that may be down more to the Common Desktop Environment, I dunno.
There's a big difference between Free Software as defined by the FSF and Open Source as defined by the OSI too.
Yes, there is. OSI doesn't care about whether the product is good because it can probably be fixed later, at some point indefinitely far into the future and possibly not until after World War III, while the FSF doesn't care about whether the product is good because who cares if it's good when it's a Free alternative, why don't you just go back to your Micro$haft masters you backwards ingrate Uncle Tom!
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I could be wrong on that, it's what I recall being told but I'm not 100% sure. In any case, there aren't Haiku forks, so there's still no confusion over which of a multiplicity of distros is good for what; there's just Haiku.
There are no AROS forks or Linux forks either.
Linux is the kernel, the distro is not Linux.
There are several AROS distros, although usability wise they are pretty much the same.
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Linux is the kernel, the distro is not Linux.
That argument would be meaningful if a kernel were the same thing as a complete operating system.
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I always find it funny that people think Stallman actually says these things. ...
Stallman himself has said that there are use cases where proprietary software is understandable, but nothing he'd really use.
What Richard does say is that non-free software is unethical; main reason I am open source proponent but I am not a follower of the free software church.
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It's funny how the questions asked brought about a separate discussion on it's own about open software. I don't know enough about the organizations referenced to make any arguments for or against. I do like using Linux though.
One thing is for sure, I like using Amiga OS much more! Reading everyone's comments, I knew AROS would come up eventually. I have tried to use it in the form of Icaros Desktop and that is partially why I asked the questions of everyone in the first place.
AROS may be an alternative that is modern to AOS, but it just doesn't seem as fast and responsive as AOS. Now that I know that AOS was written in Assembly(I thought it was C and Asm combo), I suppose that the genuine 68k code really doesn't do anyone any good since the instruction sets are different.
I just can't help but think that the mechanical concepts behind what make AOS work so quickly could be re-implemented in another form, or clone, of AOS.
So regardless of what everyone thinks about this organization or that group or whether or not Hyperion will release the code, what would the community do with it once it was released?
(If anyone can help and show me how to make AROS as fast as AOS, I'm all ears. I tried it and was completely lost from the door, so I didn't really give it a fair shake, so to say.)
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@ommodorejohn
Without open source there would be no Gimp, no Open/Libre Office, no Firefox...
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AROS may be an alternative that is modern to AOS, but it just doesn't seem as fast and responsive as AOS. Now that I know that AOS was written in Assembly(I thought it was C and Asm combo), I suppose that the genuine 68k code really doesn't do anyone any good since the instruction sets are different.
I just can't help but think that the mechanical concepts behind what make AOS work so quickly could be re-implemented in another form, or clone, of AOS.
Of course it can. But AROS is written to be generic and portable, and has mainly targeted much more modern systems until recently. It's only been working on real Amiga's for something like a year or so by now, and is very much a work in progress. So you're comparing apples and oranges.
There's nothing conceptually that'll prevent optimizing AROS until it's as fast as genuine AmigaOS. Whether anyone will be motivated to push things that far (which would also mean stripping out functionality) is another matter.
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Comes from multiple attempts over a solid seven years and change to try and get a really usable, pleasant user experience out of any of the eleventy billion mutually-incompatible Linux distros.
My experience is that in recent years, installing Ubuntu is easier than getting Windows to run reliably at anything than snails pace, and things like getting it to recognize printers requires far less voodoo (what a change from a few years ago..).
More importantly, even if it isn't suitable as a desktop OS for you, the immense success of open source is demonstrated quite well in that most of us have at least one device running Linux (or less likely another open source Unix clone) in our house - even if you don't know it. Most routers and set-top boxes run a Linux version these days, for example. And of course any Android phone.
Both open source and proprietary software is hit and miss. The big difference is that if a proprietary product doesn't measure up, the company goes bankrupt and the product disappears, so you mostly get to see those which are at least modest successes, while for open source you get to see all the in-progress and failed projects too.
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Without open source there would be no Gimp, no Open/Libre Office, no Firefox...
Firefox is the only one of those worth its filesize, and that was open-source but also managed and coordinated by a semi-traditional (if nonprofit) company. And even then it got off to a rocky start and had to learn the hard way that, to quote erstwhile Netscape/Mozilla developer Jamie Zawinski:
Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea. If there's a cautionary tale here, it is that you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of ``open source,'' and have everything magically work out.
- jwz, "nomo zilla" (http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html)
As for GIMP, that shıt is the final, monstrous UI nightmare that crystalized all of my various frustrations and finally drove me away from Linux.
My experience is that in recent years, installing Ubuntu is easier than getting Windows to run reliably at anything than snails pace, and things like getting it to recognize printers requires far less voodoo (what a change from a few years ago..).
That's lovely for you then. My experience is that I had to struggle endlessly with a nightmare of dependency issues, libraries that just plain broke other libraries, assorted random failures, and a user/developer culture that lives by the mantras "works for me," "you don't need that," and "you have the source, fix it yourself!" all in order to have a full complement of software that wasn't even as good or as usable as the software I can get for free for my Windows machine.
More importantly, even if it isn't suitable as a desktop OS for you, the immense success of open source is demonstrated quite well in that most of us have at least one device running Linux (or less likely another open source Unix clone) in our house - even if you don't know it. Most routers and set-top boxes run a Linux version these days, for example. And of course any Android phone.
The fact that stripped-down Linux-kernel builds with a custom userland (i.e. not the nightmare that normal distros use) have seen success in embedded applications means jack shıt about its usefulness in any other setting. Maybe it runs my toaster; I don't care, I don't want to compute on my toaster.
And Android is a perfect example of exactly the point you aren't trying to make. When the single most important step you can take to make something good from Linux is to completely jettison everything except the kernel and roll your own entirely different replacement, maybe that should tell you something about the quality of the Linux userland.
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I can vouch for having an easy Linux install. I wrote it to DVD, so I didn't have to fiddle with a USB install. After about half an hour KDE was up with all drivers installed.
Also heaps of third party apps like mp3 player, pdf reader etc.
It takes about two menu clicks to search for all the installed apps and remove the ones you don't want.
Compared to Windows 7, I have to install the ATI drivers, the sound drivers and also the network drivers.
I will spend the next hour uninstalling features, installing third party software and adjusting all the default settings.
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Oh, any distro will give you a working install fresh from the CD. It's when you decide that you want something different than the default applications that the dependency shıt hits the package-manager fan.
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That was always the problem I had.
Whenever I want to install a repository package under Linux, it's great - just point and click.
But I've found myself in dependency hell just too often - when I want to install a package that's a few years old, or even build from source - it can get really messy trying to find the right package to install.
With AmigaOS, if you need a library to run software, 99.9% of the time it's a matter of an Aminet search, copy the library or whatever and you're ready. With Linux it just gets messier and messier the more you install.
That's my experience anyway.
Personally I'm glad AmigaOS is closed source. It's the best way to keep things consistent and clean - too many times I've seen Open Source stuff cluttered and inconsistent.
All IMHO, naturally!
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Inskcape and Gimp, Blender is very cool programs. Takes a few turns to master them, especially Blender but complaining about UI's is like complaining about other peoples rugs. They might look awkward to you at first, but have another look at them and you may start to like them.
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No. Just no. Blender is insane, though at least they're making efforts to get better. GIMP is just wretched. I've gone over it in detail in another post, (http://amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?p=713277#post713277) but really it's just inexcusably bad. It doesn't even know where its own windows are. That's braindead. GIMP displays every symptom of having its UI hacked together by programmers who really only care about the backend functionality and only include an interface as a begrudging concession in order to get people to actually use their software, and while it's an extreme case that's really true of the vast majority of Linux software to one extent or another.
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See i don't get why a computer thats got multiple cpu's running 100x faster clock with massive on board caches, and 500x more memory doesn't feel 10's time faster, and brings up wait pointers more often. What the F-ck is it doing?
I was drawn to Linux in the hope i would find a system as responsive and as resource efficient as my 68060 A4000. I was told windows was inefficient and bloated compared to Linux. Well thats bull****. Windows XP blows out of the water every full featured distro I've tried.
And I'm yet to find and hardware that doesn't have a driver written for XP. I can't say the same for Linux. Download, click install and I'm done.
I've wasted too many months of my life getting (simple) things to work in Linux to ever go down that road again.
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It's about bottlenecks. CPU to cache. CPU to RAM. RAM to hard drive.
It's also about bloat. A Windows 7 install is 10GB. There are about 40 processes running before you install anything.
If you can hack the OS, you might be able to turn off some of the processes that are slowing things down.
Are you running on an SSD? Very fast for the OS.
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I was drawn to Linux in the hope i would find a system as responsive and as resource efficient as my 68060 A4000. I was told windows was inefficient and bloated compared to Linux. Well thats bull****. Windows XP blows out of the water every full featured distro I've tried.
The days of the popular Linux distros being faster and more efficient are long gone, I'm afraid. Most of the Linux distros like Ubuntu are now actually substantially less responsive than Windows! They've tried so hard to beat Windows they've lost their man in advantage.
That said, I believe there are Linux distros which are centred around speed and responsiveness, and a light weight. Take a look at some of the smaller distros and you may find one more suitable for you.
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Inskcape and Gimp, Blender is very cool programs. Takes a few turns to master them, especially Blender but complaining about UI's is like complaining about other peoples rugs. They might look awkward to you at first, but have another look at them and you may start to like them.
+1 three of the most amazing pieces of software I didn't have to pay for!
Sadly Learning to use blender is like tying to shave your eye balls, but the program is phenomenal in its power!
GIMP is just slow and Inkscape is buggy, though both of these criticisms are aimed at their interfaces rather than the software directly, as I run all three on a Mac and the non native interface is jarring.
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AROS may be an alternative that is modern to AOS, but it just doesn't seem as fast and responsive as AOS. Now that I know that AOS was written in Assembly(I thought it was C and Asm combo), I suppose that the genuine 68k code really doesn't do anyone any good since the instruction sets are different.
AOS *is* a C and Asm combo.
(If anyone can help and show me how to make AROS as fast as AOS, I'm all ears. I tried it and was completely lost from the door, so I didn't really give it a fair shake, so to say.)
What aspects of AROS did you find slow? What kind of PC did you try it on?
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a user/developer culture that lives by the mantras ... "you don't need that,"
Some companies have that attitude too, e.g. Apple.
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No. Just no. Blender is insane, though at least they're making efforts to get better. GIMP is just wretched. I've gone over it in detail in another post, (http://amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?p=713277#post713277) but really it's just inexcusably bad. It doesn't even know where its own windows are. That's braindead. GIMP displays every symptom of having its UI hacked together by programmers who really only care about the backend functionality and only include an interface as a begrudging concession in order to get people to actually use their software, and while it's an extreme case that's really true of the vast majority of Linux software to one extent or another.
Blender is hard to master no doubt about that. But I didn't expect a 3D application to be easy to learn at all. Imagine on Amiga was hard at first too. Only after a few tutorials one could get satisfying result. It's all about how hard you want to learn or not. Complaining abut UIs just because you don't have time or will to learn is pointless.
I could also complain about the syntax of C, or C ++, I never really learnt how to master coding in C. It must be because the language is too complicated, right ? It has nothing to do with my desire wanting to code, has it ? Had I cared enough then I'd learnt it is my point.
You can put some Photoshop look on GIMP if that's what you long for. That wouldn't do any good for me cause I never had the time to learn Photoshop. Guess it must be because Photoshop's UI sucks :-)
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Blender is hard to master no doubt about that. But I didn't expect a 3D application to be easy to learn at all. Imagine on Amiga was hard at first too. Only after a few tutorials one could get satisfying result. It's all about how hard you want to learn or not.
I might buy that if 3D Studio Max and even friggin' Moray weren't a hundred times more intuitive and sensible.
Complaining abut UIs just because you don't have time or will to learn is pointless.
I could also complain about the syntax of C, or C ++, I never really learnt how to master coding in C. It must be because the language is too complicated, right ? It has nothing to do with my desire wanting to code, has it ? Had I cared enough then I'd learnt it is my point.
And here we go again with this line of argument that "you're not allowed to complain about something being overly complex and unintuitive because it just has a steep learning curve and you must not want it hard enough." You've got it backwards: it has a steep learning curve because it is overly complex and unintuitive. C is fundamentally intuitive and easy to understand once you grasp a few simple principles like pointers that are ignored in most of the "teaching" languages; the same cannot be said for Blender or the GIMP.
You can put some Photoshop look on GIMP if that's what you long for. That wouldn't do any good for me cause I never had the time to learn Photoshop. Guess it must be because Photoshop's UI sucks :-)
If you think that making one program look like another program equals changing its interface, you will never understand the difference between good and bad UI. It's not how it looks, it's how it behaves.
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I might buy that if 3D Studio Max and even friggin' Moray weren't a hundred times more intuitive and sensible.
Not to mention that 3D Studio, like most Autodesk software, has free licenses that last three years and can be renewed for free. No need for Blender, unless you want to use the software commercially.
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I might buy that if 3D Studio Max and even friggin' Moray weren't a hundred times more intuitive and sensible.
So who said there couldn't be differences. Once you learn how to do things you get along with it. Take a look what they accomplish with Blender. They wouldn't have done half of what they've done if it where 100 times harder to do. You make it sound like it's no point in using Blender. Of course it is, just because you have a hard time learnin how to use it doesn't automatically mean your neighbour has too. :P
And here we go again with this line of argument that "you're not allowed to complain about something being overly complex and unintuitive because it just has a steep learning curve and you must not want it hard enough."
And here we go again with commodorejohn telling the utter thruth so there can be no other truth. If you haven't manage render one image with blender yet then you haven't tried hard enough. That's just it.
You've got it backwards: it has a steep learning curve because it is overly complex and unintuitive. C is fundamentally intuitive and easy to understand once you grasp a few simple principles like pointers that are ignored in most of the "teaching" languages; the same cannot be said for Blender or the GIMP.
You see problems where there's none. I don't say GIMP is the sharpest tool in the box but you can do lots of nice things with it. And since it's free why don't learn to use it. The same with Inkscape, it's really simple to use and makes amazing results. And it doesn't cost a dime for you to learn. Many times I use PaintNET instead of GIMP when I don't need the features GIMP has, when I need less work done. Again PaintNET an excellent tool, free to use. Just learn how to use it.
If you think that making one program look like another program equals changing its interface, you will never understand the difference between good and bad UI. It's not how it looks, it's how it behaves.
No I must be dumb then because I thought User Interface meant the Interface, buttons, sliders presented to the user and how to activate/combine them to get desired results. Instead we seem to be talking about rendering alogritms and god knows what then.
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So who said there couldn't be differences. Once you learn how to do things you get along with it. Take a look what they accomplish with Blender. They wouldn't have done half of what they've done if it where 100 times harder to do. You make it sound like it's no point in using Blender. Of course it is, just because you have a hard time learnin how to use it doesn't automatically mean your neighbour has too. :P
Contrariwise, just because my neighbor invests an assload of time in learning Blender's arcane interface doesn't mean that it was a good use of time and he wouldn't have been better served spending that time to learn his way around the actual functionality of a program with a saner, cleaner UI.
The fact that people can use a tool for something doesn't make it necessarily a good tool. Political prisoners have written on cell walls with their own crap; they still would've been better off with a pen and paper.
And here we go again with commodorejohn telling the utter thruth so there can be no other truth. If you haven't manage render one image with blender yet then you haven't tried hard enough. That's just it.
This is like saying that if I haven't managed to break through a wall by banging my head against it, I just need to bang harder. Strictly speaking it might be true, but wouldn't it make more sense to use a sledgehammer?
You see problems where there's none. I don't say GIMP is the sharpest tool in the box but you can do lots of nice things with it. And since it's free why don't learn to use it. The same with Inkscape, it's really simple to use and makes amazing results. And it doesn't cost a dime for you to learn.
I never bad-mouthed Inkscape, because I've never used Inkscape. But the fact that you can accomplish good results with the GIMP means only that its backend functionality is good, which I never disputed. It's still a giant pain in the ass to use.
No I must be dumb then because I thought User Interface meant the Interface, buttons, sliders presented to the user and how to activate/combine them to get desired results. Instead we seem to be talking about rendering alogritms and god knows what then.
What. I was never talking about algorithms or backend functionality of any sort. What I said was that skinning GIMP to look like Photoshop won't make its UI behave like Photoshop. It'll still be a half-assed, incomplete clone of Photoshop's UI.
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Ladies!
Just use the tools that fit your workflow best, whatever they may be. End of.
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AROS may be an alternative that is modern to AOS, but it just doesn't seem as fast and responsive as AOS. Now that I know that AOS was written in Assembly(I thought it was C and Asm combo),
It is. (Pre-2.0 it was full of BCPL too). MorphOS, OS4 and AROS are all rewrites of the OS in mostly C.
If you are a coder you could sign up to the AROS Dev mailing list and volunteer your services to help Toni and Jason improve the performance of 68k AROS.
https://www.hepe.com/mailman/listinfo/aros-dev/
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Amiga also has forks. From the beginning people wanted non-Amiga features.
I like things like enhanced icons and hi-res desktop. I don't like pop-up help. I didn't like pop-up menus, but I don't mind them now.
If you want to remain Amiga pure, everything should remain simple. Any adjustments should be put in and done in the prefs. The startup-sequence should remain editable.
I think some people would hijack AmigaOS and turn it into Windows, while still calling it Amiga OS. I can guess that the only reason is out of spite, or else they would be using Windows.
Thanks, I'm with the let's dumb down Amiga and add as much bloat as possible crowd. When it reaches 10GB in install size people will be saying, "When are they going ditch some of the legacy drivers. It makes the OS slow."
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I think some people would hijack AmigaOS and turn it into Windows, while still calling it Amiga OS. I can guess that the only reason is out of spite, or else they would be using Windows.
This is, of course, in stark contrast to the people who hijacked AmigaOS and turned it into Linux, which we all know is the Only True Future of the Amiga.
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This is, of course, in stark contrast to the people who hijacked AmigaOS and turned it into Linux, which we all know is the Only True Future of the Amiga.
I've always pretty much figured the only 'real' future of the Amiga OS is AROS, 1) it's open source, so even if the current developers die, or whatever, it'll be out there for people to pick up and work on. 2) supports the most hardware platforms.
Regardless of how awesome AmigaOS 4 and Morphos are, eventually there'll be no PPC chips/boards for them unless we start getting them ported to IBM i or pSeries. And if people thing the X1000 is expensive...
Only other way would be if some company could get all the manufacturing rights for 68k and PPC line to start making their own processors / boards specifically for the Amiga. Then maybe there could be a continuation of Amiga compatible OSs. Since an operating system doesn't mean jack without hardware.
If AmigaOS4 would become open source and could be ported to ARM or x86/64 then maybe it'd have more of a chance. You could still require physical kickstarts and replace the UEFI systems that are common to the newest motherboards, to have 'real' Amigas.
I came real close to buying a Mac back in 2005, only because I wanted a PPC based system, but then Apple right around that time had announced that they were going Intel, so I gave up on that idea. It's also a shame that the Amiga doesn't work on a Coldfire. That would have been another possibility.
Just a quick note on those previously in the thread that said they had so many issues with dependencies in Linux, and that Aminet makes it easy for the Amiga...
I would LOVE apt-get for Aminet... 'apt-cache search gcc' 'apt-get install gcc' and have it fetch all the geek gadgets stuff and install and configure gcc for me? that would be AWESOME!
I did see fink on Aminet (which basically is what the Mac uses for debian style awesome) but it was really old, and the notes on it said it didn't work all that well anymore.
I've also found that for the Amiga there is Aminet (huge, and is awesome) but then much like Debian, there are bits and pieces that are required for smooth running all over the Internet. To be able to apt-get Samba, and SSL support, and nfs, etc would be fantastic. As it is a few bits of Amiga software are still in git or svn repositories and people have to set up a full development system just to use them (like anfs).
slaapliedje
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I use Linux and loads of free software, and I'm enjoying it. Using a package manager surely beats downloading an installer or a zip file as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sure what package manager you are using, commodorejohn, but to me, "dependency hell" means that pacman will display a list of required packages and prompt me to install them. Admittedly, I don't use software like photoshop or any 3D modeling software, but as a developer, I can say that to me, both professionally and personally, free software has been all great. I modify and incorporate components of other software as far as the licenses permit, I port existing software to officially unsupported platforms and I learn from reading freely available source code. Open source and free software is a huge resource however you look at it.
And hey, let's just mention things like nginx, apache, gcc, python, linux, gecko, webkit -- you'll find that free, open source software supports the bulk of the very infrastructure you use to call its proponents "freetards". From this site running apache, to your router most likely running Linux and into your browser.
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The coldfire is interesting, but cold you get the same speed from 68060
at 100mhz?
While we are at it can we have an FPGA implentation of AGA for people still on an A500 or A2000. If you can get at least a 1000 people interested, the project is worth doing.
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The coldfire is interesting, but cold you get the same speed from 68060
at 100mhz?
While we are at it can we have an FPGA implentation of AGA for people still on an A500 or A2000. If you can get at least a 1000 people interested, the project is worth doing.
If I recall correctly, the reason the Coldfire project was picked up by the Atari ST/TOS guys and not the Amiga guys is due to it not having 100% of the instruction set that the 68060 supports. It didn't bother the TOS guys that much because TOS is open source and they were able to tweak the core OS to emulate the bits that were missing through software.
Here is the story from the Natami team; http://www.ppa.pl/sprzet/12-questions-to...-natami-team-part-1.html
An FPGA implementation for the OCS/ECS machines to get AGA would be AWESOME! From both the users and the developers point of view, since then all the developers could actually target AGA or better, without feeling like they're leaving out a huge chunk of users.
slaapliedje
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Contrariwise, just because my neighbor invests an assload of time in learning Blender's arcane interface doesn't mean that it was a good use of time and he wouldn't have been better served spending that time to learn his way around the actual functionality of a program with a saner, cleaner UI.
You're grasping at straws here. Prove it :P
The fact that people can use a tool for something doesn't make it necessarily a good tool. Political prisoners have written on cell walls with their own crap; they still would've been better off with a pen and paper.
Ahh come on, if don't have anything to say why even try.
This is like saying that if I haven't managed to break through a wall by banging my head against it, I just need to bang harder. Strictly speaking it might be true, but wouldn't it make more sense to use a sledgehammer?
And what kind of reasoning is that ? But hey that may be just what you need to do. Bang your head against the wall a few times and sit down in front of Blender and learn something new. In your case the sledghammer in Blender was there all the time you just didin't search long enough to find it.
I never bad-mouthed Inkscape, because I've never used Inkscape. But the fact that you can accomplish good results with the GIMP means only that its backend functionality is good, which I never disputed. It's still a giant pain in the ass to use.
Pain in the ass only matters in how often you do something. Of course I cannot know what you need to get done in GIMP from time to time basis but in my case after a few years using it quite often it's not hard at all. It takes me somethimes a a quick google to refresh my memory if I need to do something that I did a year ago and don't quite remember.
What. I was never talking about algorithms or backend functionality of any sort. What I said was that skinning GIMP to look like Photoshop won't make its UI behave like Photoshop. It'll still be a half-assed, incomplete clone of Photoshop's UI.
I can't argue because I'd never would want GIMP to look like Photoshop, in fact I run circles around Adobe products if I can. At work I have had to use InDesign or Illustrator. Often I eneded up doing it in Inkscape insted because that's the tool I used more and the UI i know better thus I worked faster with it.
My point is you can cry all day long about how good A is to learn instead of B, but at the end of the day what matters is how often you have use of the programs. Try to use Illustrator once a year and see how easy that is to use. That I call a pain in the ass.
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The age old argument of "I spent all my time learning it THIS way, and this other program wants to do it THAT way. It sucks because it's different!"
I find it funny that when Pagestream was released for Linux, guess what style interface it used? That's right, the one that Gimp uses. With a separate toolbox from the main window. It's perfect for dual screens.
I realized the other day, when trying to use Dia or Flow to create some network diagrams, that I just don't use Applications anymore... weird, I know... I'm a Linux system administrator by profession, and I can get things done faster by the command line. Graphical user interfaces are starting to annoy me. Maybe it's because when I come home, I play around on my Amiga, and love how it's set up. Only thing I use Windows for anymore is when I'm in the mood to play an (eye-candy) game. A good chunk of those are coming to Linux, so that'll eliminate that need.
But overall, the majority of graphical applications I do end up using are Evolution (email) and web browsing. I could probably use Mutt instead of Evolution, too bad the Web is so graphical these days... or I'd ditch that too!
But as this thread is about the benefits or the want to open source Amiga, the whole "this open source application's UI sucks!" isn't even remotely on topic.
The Amiga, much like most other graphical interfaces, have guidelines for 'proper' application interfaces. Much like Gnome and KDE, etc on the Linux side and on the Windows and Mac side. But they are just guidelines.
I've found every 3D rendering software I've ever played with to be annoying, except perhaps Maya, which was way cool, but I really don't have the talent to use them. But I also won't go into forums and rant about how much they suck. I have ranted back at people who put the hate on the Gimp, simply because it's all open source, if you have such a vicious hatred toward it, FIX IT. The GPL even would let you fork it and call it GIMPSucks if you so wanted to. You would probably piss off a lot of people, but then so do politicians :D
slaapliedje
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You're grasping at straws here. Prove it :P
You prove it.
Ahh come on, if don't have anything to say why even try.
The irony that this would be your response to an actual argument is rather staggering.
Pain in the ass only matters in how often you do something. Of course I cannot know what you need to get done in GIMP from time to time basis but in my case after a few years using it quite often it's not hard at all. It takes me somethimes a a quick google to refresh my memory if I need to do something that I did a year ago and don't quite remember.
The fact that you've trained yourself around a crap UI does not make it not a crap UI.
I have ranted back at people who put the hate on the Gimp, simply because it's all open source, if you have such a vicious hatred toward it, FIX IT.
Why? There are perfectly good alternatives out there, and it would be far less of a waste of time to use them instead than to try to fix a project created by a culture of people who never cared about good design in the first place.
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You prove it.
The irony that this would be your response to an actual argument is rather staggering.
The fact that you've trained yourself around a crap UI does not make it not a crap UI.
Why? There are perfectly good alternatives out there, and it would be far less of a waste of time to use them instead than to try to fix a project created by a culture of people who never cared about good design in the first place.
LOL! Oh the irony of your replies..... I knew your would take it like a pissing contest.
Ok you won. Feel better now. :)
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http://xkcd.com/386/
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http://xkcd.com/386/
Ha ha, thank you for that, nicholas. Best way to start off the day!
@commodorejohn There really aren't any OPEN SOURCE alternatives to the Gimp. It's the only thing out there even remotely close in functionality to the "industry standard" of Photoshop. So if the UI is the only thing bothering you, rewrite it.
People who generally call open source supporters as 'freetards' and then turn around and complain that free software sucks and everyone should use something else just don't get it. Much like the hippies of old didn't get that if they wanted to be actual world shapers, they needed to stop sitting around in drug circles and get out there and change the world. Unfortunately when they did that they mostly became greedy yuppies. Stallman remained a hippy neckbeard, but started a huge movement to real software freedom. And for this he is mocked.
I like that he doesn't own a cell phone :D
slaapliedje
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im all for open source in case of amiga, but this is mostly because i relaize there is no place for anything else anymore. open source in most cases cannot replace industry standards. i like inkspace, it is within what i need a usable alternative to illustrator, blender seems ok, especially that it reminds of lightvawe, though the methods are not always that loigical, but gimp is truly not an option!
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Ha ha, thank you for that, nicholas. Best way to start off the day!
@commodorejohn There really aren't any OPEN SOURCE alternatives to the Gimp. It's the only thing out there even remotely close in functionality to the "industry standard" of Photoshop. So if the UI is the only thing bothering you, rewrite it.
People who generally call open source supporters as 'freetards' and then turn around and complain that free software sucks and everyone should use something else just don't get it. Much like the hippies of old didn't get that if they wanted to be actual world shapers, they needed to stop sitting around in drug circles and get out there and change the world. Unfortunately when they did that they mostly became greedy yuppies. Stallman remained a hippy neckbeard, but started a huge movement to real software freedom. And for this he is mocked.
I like that he doesn't own a cell phone :D
slaapliedje
As the late Ghandi once said: "Be the change you want to see in the world".
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Ha ha, thank you for that, nicholas. Best way to start off the day!
@commodorejohn There really aren't any OPEN SOURCE alternatives to the Gimp. It's the only thing out there even remotely close in functionality to the "industry standard" of Photoshop. So if the UI is the only thing bothering you, rewrite it.
See thats the Linux mantra.
Linux users are happy to tell people how much "better" their platform is but when users tell them "You know there is stuff here that from a users point of view is actually ****.." the response is:
"well fix it yourself, you have all the tools, all the source, to make it work exactly how you want it, for free that's the really good thing about open source"
To which the user thinks:" I'm not a ****ing programmer, I just want to use the damned thing without tearing my hair out...how do I remove this **** off my hard drive."
BTW people don't RUN operating systems, they run applications. And any free app on Linux usually has good or better app on Windows, for free as well if you want it.
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@CoomodoreJohm.
Most open source fanatics actually have no idea of the importance of usability, especially in the design of their interfaces.
Who cares if your program can crunch all the filters on a jpeg, but it frustrates the hell out of the user to get to use these tools?
Th Linux community does not know or care that a good user interface is 50 % the programs value. MS is learning quickly about that by putting a touch screen interface on the desktop..
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See thats the Linux mantra.
Linux users are happy to tell people how much "better" their platform is but when users tell them "You know there is stuff here that from a users point of view is actually ****.." the response is:
"well fix it yourself, you have all the tools, all the source, to make it work exactly how you want it, for free that's the really good thing about open source"
To which the user thinks:" I'm not a ****ing programmer, I just want to use the damned thing without tearing my hair out...how do I remove this **** off my hard drive."
BTW people don't RUN operating systems, they run applications. And any free app on Linux usually has good or better app on Windows, for free as well if you want it.
Well use those apps yourself and STFU dictating to everyone else what they should or should not be using.
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To which the user thinks:" I'm not a ****ing programmer, I just want to use the damned thing without tearing my hair out...how do I remove this **** off my hard drive."
Yup. And this would be why 90% of the Linux userbase is Linux programmers...and why desktop Linux has something like a 1-3% market share.
Well use those apps yourself and STFU dictating to everyone else what they should or should not be using.
Nobody was saying anybody should or shouldn't be using anything. You wanna bang your head against the wall of crap UI and tell yourself that it's better for you, you go right ahead. We just want to note that you may find it feels pretty good to stop doing that.
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Aros is open source...
The amiga grave robbers will never let amiga 68k os to go open source...
But then, AROS 68k can fill that gap. (eventually)
I still check in here all the time. Still love amiga, but I use linux for my everyday machine, and boot to windows for games. (not for long though I think!)
A nicely customized finely tuned linux system after some work is the closest feeling to me of my old amiga love. Yes I have an aros box, but because browsing is not great, I find myself just using my main rig running linux most.
Also, I'm not going to run an os that only uses one of my 8 cores...
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Yup. And this would be why 90% of the Linux userbase is Linux programmers...and why desktop Linux has something like a 1-3% market share.
Nobody was saying anybody should or shouldn't be using anything. You wanna bang your head against the wall of crap UI and tell yourself that it's better for you, you go right ahead. We just want to note that you may find it feels pretty good to stop doing that.
(https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/p480x480/482179_10151278807966615_366772665_n.jpg)
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As it is a few bits of Amiga software are still in git or svn repositories and people have to set up a full development system just to use them (like anfs).
What is anfs?
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http://xkcd.com/386/
I love that XKCD. It's one of my favorites :D
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@commodorejohn
If you love closed source you must be an Apple fan....
@Persia,
I always thought you were a MorphOS fan.
Or have I been off the Amiga Org site to long.
smerf
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This is, of course, in stark contrast to the people who hijacked AmigaOS and turned it into Linux, which we all know is the Only True Future of the Amiga.
Hi,
@commodorejohn,
Don't know what to say, you are actually starting to think like me, after all the original Amiga is based on Unix, which Linux is an off shoot of.
But
Lets not make to much common sense here, we might actually get something good going.
Just think all this brain power headed in a common destination. Unthinkable.
smerf
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What is anfs?
It is the common Amiga org person, oops they spelled it wrong, they accidentally typed an "F" instead of a "U"
smerf
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Don't know what to say, you are actually starting to think like me, after all the original Amiga is based on Unix, which Linux is an off shoot of.
The fact that you can't detect sarcasm aside, this isn't even remotely true. AmigaDOS is well-documented to have been based on TriPOS, a minicomputer operating system; the rest was created specifically for the Amiga. There's pretty much nothing Unix-like about it at all; the Amiga eschews memory management while Unix (outside of esoteric variants) depends on it, the Amiga uses shared-memory message-passing for inter-process communication while Unix (generally) uses a "file" construct, the Amiga operates on the basic assumption of running on a single-unit workstation with local video and sound while Unix abstracts those out to a client/server model in case it's running on a mainframe, etcetera etcetera.
But, you know, keep passing that myth along. Maybe some day the power of belief will make it true!
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I agree that some Linux apps are dodgy, but there are plenty that I like.
Having a bunch of free applications is better than having no applications. Or expecting someone to fork out $$$ to buy the same program they already have on Windows.
I don't think this is the place for a discussion on economics. You could download WinUAE which needs a nice interface before you could expect someone to pay for it.
Or you could end up paying $50 for some bloated DVD software that doesn't have region free options and other features that you would find on a free version.
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Well use those apps yourself and STFU dictating to everyone else what they should or should not be using.
Whoa there!
Where did I dictate to anybody what they should or should not use?
And if I do make recommendations, who are you or your Linux zealot buddies to tell me not to make the recommendation?
But I'm nor surprised.
I once ran PCLOS. One day booted into a command line due to a single 200 k CD driver update that hadn't been properly tested but was put in anyway by the maintainers. It took them 2 weeks to rectify it. And I needed to use a Windows PC to get online to find out what to do. "How about not using the rolling-update model for your distro Mr Maintainer?"
Mr Maintainer: "If you don't like it go somewhere else"
L'lle ol' 2% Linux has stayed that way for very very good reasons on the desktop.
Having a bunch of free applications is better than having no applications. Or expecting someone to fork out $$$ to buy the same program they already have on Windows.
I don't think this is the place for a discussion on economics. You could download WinUAE which needs a nice interface before you could expect someone to pay for it.
Or you could end up paying $50 for some bloated DVD software that doesn't have region free options and other features that you would find on a free version.
See the "Linux apps are free and Windows aren't" argument doesn't really hold water anymore.
DVD player/media player: http://mpc-hc.org/
Office: http://www.libreoffice.org/
Paint/Image processing: http://www.getpaint.net/
Photo catalogue: picassa
Web browsers are all free
Plenty of free email clients.
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(https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/p480x480/482179_10151278807966615_366772665_n.jpg)
Wait: you've logged in. read his posts, spent time hunting up some image on the net, because you didn't care?
And I find your "short bus" reference disgusting if by it you mean the buses that disabled people sometimes get driven in.
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Wait: you've logged in. read his posts, spent time hunting up some image on the net, because you didn't care?
And I find your "short bus" reference disgusting if by it you mean the buses that disabled people sometimes get driven in.
(http://sweetbiandbi.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/soapbox.jpg)
ok now that that's done. I'm not sure how much "time" you think finding an image takes. But judging by you response the 10 seconds it took me was worth it.
Oh and btw once the term "freetard" is used in a thread you can off your...
(http://evilcrayon.com/comics/2012-08-20-Get-Off-Your-High-Horse.jpg)
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@terminillus. Gee you're such a clever piece of sh! T
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@terminillus. Gee you're such a clever piece of sh! T
And you're a rocket scientist appartently. Cut and Paste to hard? Must be complex on that closed source OS you're using. Let me spell my handle so you can try again with the insults. t e r m i n i l l s.
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The love is great in these two :D
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Definitely past time to close this thread.
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See thats the Linux mantra.
Linux users are happy to tell people how much "better" their platform is but when users tell them "You know there is stuff here that from a users point of view is actually ****.." the response is:
"well fix it yourself, you have all the tools, all the source, to make it work exactly how you want it, for free that's the really good thing about open source"
To which the user thinks:" I'm not a ****ing programmer, I just want to use the damned thing without tearing my hair out...how do I remove this **** off my hard drive."
BTW people don't RUN operating systems, they run applications. And any free app on Linux usually has good or better app on Windows, for free as well if you want it.
If you're not a programmer, pay one to fix it for you. Companies do it all the time. Most of the people will work off of donations. The fact is, open source software is usually written to scratch an itch, and if that itch is scratched for the writer and not for all the people that complain about usability, than what should the actual answer be? "Sure, I'll completely redo my program for free even though it works fine for me...." People have to eat and all that.
Usually these free applications on Windows are the same ones on Linux. The big difference is you can get them from a trusted repository most of the time on Linux (or even compile from source) whereas in the Windows world, you'll be lucky if you can download a free program without Yahoo toolbar or some extra crap that you don't want.
slaapliedje
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What is anfs?
anfs is a newer version of NFS (Network File System) for the Amiga. http://sourceforge.net/projects/anfs/
slaapliedje
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Definitely past time to close this thread.
Is it weird, or what, that a simple question on using open source to further a dead or dying operating system could cause so much grief between people.
Seriously, if you have such a hatred toward open source software, stop using the Internet, in fact stop using Windows, because we all know some BSD licensed code got in there.
I like Open Source for two things, 1) you can see what the code is doing (even from a non-programmer like me, this is useful). 2) they don't bundle extra crap in it if you get it from the original creator. (this BS that CNet started doing and adding crap like the yahoo toolbar and other retarded stuff for Windows downloads is absolutely horrible! Not to mention how they make the actual DOWNLOAD button tiny, but have a huge DOWNLOAD NOW! for whatever advertisement they are currently pushing.)
The fact that they're usually free only helps my pocket book. There are commercial distributions of Linux, and there are completely free ones.
For those that complain of breakage, use a mainstream and tested STABLE version. I use Arch Linux, because I know what I'm doing and I expect breakages. If you need stable, use CentOS or Debian. Pretty simple, really. I can guarantee you that both of them test packages before uploading them.
slaapliedje
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If you're not a programmer, pay one to fix it for you. Companies do it all the time. Most of the people will work off of donations. The fact is, open source software is usually written to scratch an itch, and if that itch is scratched for the writer and not for all the people that complain about usability, than what should the actual answer be? "Sure, I'll completely redo my program for free even though it works fine for me...." People have to eat and all that.
My beef isn't as much with the programmers who can't be assed to write a halfway decent interface (though seriously: come on, guys, if you're going to do GUI at least do it well,) and I'm not going to demand that they spend all of their free time fixing it. My beef is much more with the zealots who try to sell an OS and software ecosystem written by Unix nerds, for Unix nerds as being all Love, Freedom, and Rainbows and The Future of Computing when it has UI that in the best circumstances is still not as good as that of most Windows or Mac software and in worse cases is actually more of a pain than just using the command line.
These are the people who brag on their blogs about how Granny needed a new computer because her Windows 98 box "can't do the Facebook" and so they totally got a new computer for her and installed Linux on it, so now she has to acclimate to a different environment, but hey, at least she'll be completely free of crashes forever, until someone in upstream testing misses a bug report and she updates anyway because they turned on auto-update because you can trust the repository! And let's not forget FREEDOM! And then they pat themselves on the back for advancing The Cause and move on to imagining that they're Woody friggin' Guthrie. (http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossible.mp3)
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This has gone bad because of the personal attacks against the people who use the above mentioned operating system.
You should have a debate without making personal attacks.
If someone has a complete loathing of Linux because it wouldn't install, I will leave that be.
It's like: Windows is buggy, I think I will try Linux.
Linux wouldn't install, I will go back to Windows.
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This has gone bad because of the personal attacks against the people who use the above mentioned operating system.
You should have a debate without making personal attacks.
If someone has a complete loathing of Linux because it wouldn't install, I will leave that be.
It's like: Windows is buggy, I think I will try Linux.
Linux wouldn't install, I will go back to Windows.
+1
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Yeah, personal attacks toward programmers, and people who use the software. Pretty funny. Personally, I like the GIMP's interface more than Photoshop's, but that's because I've used it on random occasions, and I think it's easy to find things.
Anyone who is used to Workbench should be able to pick up any Linux stuff. I like the Linux distributions because they allow me to choose how I use my computer, and not how Microsoft wants me to use my computer.
A great example of this are themes. I was in a discussion last night with a friend of mine, we were talking about how awesome some of the themes for Gnome-Shell look, and I had to tell him that I wait for every release of Windows, hoping that they'll include some sort of ability to theme. What do we get? Colours... Sure there is Window Blinds, but it costs money and doesn't fit very well with the OS and takes more resources than it probably should. Even the Amiga, as old as it is, has great themes for it!
slaapliedje
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@ slaapliedje
I don't have any real animosity for open source software or it users and developers.
I've just never been completely satisfied with most of what I've used.
Most of it feels incomplete.
I did enjoy Ubuntu for awhile, and then they went out of their way to screw that project up.
As far as I'm concerned, use what works for you.
I'm seriously considering adopting Pascal's Aeros operating system (I've been exchanging some messages with him about what he wants to use as a base and what hardware might be supported).
So its not a completely open source Amiga like system, its close.
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I think one of the advantages of open source software is also a disadvantage, in that they are open about what development they are working on, in which case then you automatically think "that's an awesome feature, why isn't it already in there?"
This I think is one of the biggest reasons why people tend to think open source software is incomplete.
I tend to be kind of the same way, where I'm always chasing that latest version, and it moves so fast, which is why I used Arch Linux. Unfortunately some major design changes which Arch decided to adapt after Fedora has made me move away from it. Namely the whole move toward 'let's throw everything under /usr/bin!'
slaapliedje
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I only talk about open source and closed source in context of amiga
to use Microsoft and Windows 8 as a good example for the advantage of closed source is too strange to me.
open source and closed source both have advantages and disadvantages. The most obvious advantage of closed source have we all seen on a lots of times (abandoned software), that is of course the biggest advantage of opensource. Of course are most closed source projects partly or full commercial so the developer are perhaps more motivated to get a good package out. Opensource developer do the parts they like and it is more difficult to get a good package out. But generally I personal would say OS and basic applications like browser should be opensource.
when people here use Windows as example it is really not realistic.
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when people here use Windows as example it is really not realistic.
Hey, I bought a copy of Windows 7 and never installed it.
I still fall back to an XP system when I need to use Windows.
And frighteningly enough, Microsoft is still updating and supporting that OS (years after they said they were going to drop support).
At this point, instead of going to Win8, I might as well wait for ReactOS.
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I use Windows too (both XP and 7) but this cannot be compared to the amiga market (if it is called so) with its "limited" developerbase behind the closed source projects (expecially the both OSs). But that is a matter of taste and personal preferences.
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As someone who has worked on closed source software, I can tell you it is never complete either. The only difference is we have this thing called "release day" where it has to look complete to customers. There is a lot of code inside that is temporarily commented out because it didn't work well enough in time for the deadline. Also the marketing department keep moving the goalposts, and sometimes their non-technically informed requirements cause the code to get tied up in all kinds of horrible knots. Hacks and cludges get through to release because there isn't time to sort it out properly. But as long as it looks tidy on the outside, that's all that matters.
Code base is always full of "TODO" comments.
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I use Windows too (both XP and 7) but this cannot be compared to the amiga market (if it is called so) with its "limited" developerbase behind the closed source projects (expecially the both OSs). But that is a matter of taste and personal preferences.
Both?
I thought we had at least three.
I just picked to most polished one.
I could adopt one of the others if I saw a clear advantage.
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@ommodorejohn
Without open source there would be no Gimp, no Open/Libre Office, no Firefox...
Yes, yes... but 2 out of 3 were born as commercial products (StarOffice and Netscape Navigator).
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Yes, yes... but 2 out of 3 were born as commercial products (StarOffice and Netscape Navigator).
True, just like some of us would like something open source to be born out of the Amiga OS product. And as we can see, both of them have flourished a lot more than when they were commercial.
slaapliedje
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Yes, yes... but 2 out of 3 were born as commercial products (StarOffice and Netscape Navigator).
Yes, and they were both complete market failures.
Once they were opened up they both became massive successes.
It's interesting to note that OpenOffice lost most of it's market share to the forked LibreOffice not long after Oracle started to close up it's development.
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we have more than two "closed source" OSs? Which?
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we have more than two "closed source" OSs? Which?
Amiga OS - Closed and dead. The only OS with the legal right to be known using the trademarks "Amiga" or Amiga OS".
MorphOS - Semi-Open and semi-closed. Doesn't have the legal right to be known using the trademarks "Amiga" or "Amiga OS".
OS4 - Closed. Doesn't have the legal right be known using the trademarks "Amiga" or "Amiga OS" either but does have the right to use the trademark "AmigaOS".
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I of course thought of living OS (in development). AmigaOS (68k) is heavily patched but no sources and either no team developing it.
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I of course thought of living OS (in development). AmigaOS (68k) is heavily patched but no sources and either no team developing it.
Here I'll give my thanks to some of the people like PeterK who have reverse engineered libraries and / or have released them as open source. The new icon.library specifically kicks major butt.
slaapliedje
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+1
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As well as DonAdan with the modules:
- dos.library
- graphics.library
- scsi.device
- battmem.resource
- bonus (for A3000/A4000)
- cia.resource
- filesystem.resource
- mathffp.library
- misc.resource
- potgo.resource
- wbfind
- wbtask
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As well as DonAdan with the modules:
- dos.library
- graphics.library
- scsi.device
- battmem.resource
- bonus (for A3000/A4000)
- cia.resource
- filesystem.resource
- mathffp.library
- misc.resource
- potgo.resource
- wbfind
- wbtask
THIS!! :D This is the awesome of the coders in the Amiga community. Actually I knew about scsi.device and graphics.library, but the others? It'd be nice to have one Sticky post with all the updated libraries to help those that don't live on the forums or are just getting into (or back into) the Amiga scene.
slaapliedje
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Here I'll give my thanks to some of the people like PeterK who have reverse engineered libraries and / or have released them as open source. The new icon.library specifically kicks major butt.
+2!! This new icon.library made my A500 so fast that I bumped Workbench up from 8 colors to 16 colors, just to slow it back down. ;)
Also +1 to it would be great to have a one-stop list of where to download all the new libraries, etc., from, instead of having to hunt all over forums and Google searches. I'd suggest a Wiki, heh. ;)
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Wiki would be awesome for such things. Also for setting up a development environment. That info is all over the place. Maybe I'll set up a new domain for hosting such things. Though I know for code there is already amiga.sourceforge.net
slaapliedje
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So basically, if AOS was released as an Open Source project, no one has given a clear idea as to where they want it to go. AROS is not AOS but that seems like everyone's easy answer.
Put the key in the door and retire this thread.
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So basically, if AOS was released as an Open Source project, no one has given a clear idea as to where they want it to go. AROS is not AOS but that seems like everyone's easy answer.
Put the key in the door and retire this thread.
If I recall correctly, one of the biggest omissions of AmigaOS is memory protection, or lack thereof. If I recall, even AmigaOS 4 doesn't have it? Or maybe it was only recently added.
AROS is a good example of where it would go, simply for the multi-platform support. Amiga everywhere was what one.. *cough* person *cough* kept touting as the next awesome thing. If they had just released the code, we'd probably have that already, and AROS wouldn't need to reverse engineer all of the functions.
I think 4.x is going in the direction that it would have gone, though I really think it's only being able to run on very select hardware is what is killing it's popularity. We all know what made the Amiga awesome in the first place is the custom chipset, but custom chips aren't really viable anymore, simply because the CPU can provide so much raw power, not to mention the graphics chips. Oddly though the sound chips still pretty much suck.
I always kind of figured that if the hardware had improved and Commodore hadn't gone bust, we'd have something similar to the way the Atari Jaguar was set up. Custom Graphics and Sound chips with a 68000 for bootloading the whole thing. Would keep the software that is already written working, but give a nice fat bus speed for everything that is coded for the new hardware. Make the hardware fresh enough and fast enough that you wouldn't need to get any upgrades for 5 or so years. I think the biggest problem with PCs these days are sloppy coding and the constant upgrade path. Sure it's slowed down in recent years, but the fact that newer software takes so much more memory and so much more processing speed, but doesn't have much better graphics / sound is disturbing.
That's where the AmigaOS shines. The OS itself is so lightweight and yet versatile, that really what it needs is bug fixes. Maybe add a few APIs to be native, like SDL, OpenGL, OpenAL, etc. Upgrade the languages to the latest (Perl, Python, C++11, etc) and make it easier to write software for, and a reason to write software for it. If programmers can look at how things were written to so tightly use the hardware, maybe it'll give them inspiration to make their software not require 8gb of RAM!
For what it's worth, today I told my manager that some computer was running at 99.9% CPU usage and was crawling because of some java software that is simply supposed to do something like FTP files. I made the comment, "He needs to write his software for computers that are made today, not 20 years from now." I have already gone blue in the face from them re-writing something as simple as transferring files in Java, and using UDP... but that's a bit off topic...
The Amiga is from an age when computers were fun, and not everyone knew how to 'use' them. When if you had a computer, you were most likely picked on as a geek. That's part of where the nostalgia comes in, but it could potentially bring more people back into the fold if the source code were available, and we could all learn from it as well.
But I would vote for bug fixes before features! Which I think is the way that most of the new libraries are going. Getting PeterK's icon.library installed really does improve the overall experience of the Amiga! I really need to look at the other ones!
slaapliedje
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If I recall correctly, one of the biggest omissions of AmigaOS is memory protection, or lack thereof. If I recall, even AmigaOS 4 doesn't have it? Or maybe it was only recently added.
As far as I know OS4 doesn't have memory protection. The problem is that the Amiga software architecture is designed on the presumption of processes having free access to the memory map; message-passing is done by handing off pointers between processes, API calls are done by simply jumping to system code with no context-switching. Trying to add memory protection to that would impose huge performance penalties, if it would work at all.
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As far as I know OS4 doesn't have memory protection. The problem is that the Amiga software architecture is designed on the presumption of processes having free access to the memory map; message-passing is done by handing off pointers between processes, API calls are done by simply jumping to system code with no context-switching. Trying to add memory protection to that would impose huge performance penalties, if it would work at all.
Yeah, that was my understanding of it as well (from last time I looked into it, and saw articles on one of the 'complaints'). It was kind of hard from the beginning to have such a thing as memory protection. I do know Linux requires an MMU which is why it won't work on a raw 68k for this reason (unless I'm remembering incorrectly, which is quite possible).
As far as I'm concerned, as long as applications aren't jerks, they should be happy together. I think memory fragmentation is a bigger issue, isn't it? (Having so many different banks of memory, some slower than others can't be all that fun to write around in.)
slaapliedje
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I think memory fragmentation is a bigger issue, isn't it? (Having so many different banks of memory, some slower than others can't be all that fun to write around in.)
Put this as the first line in your startup-sequence.
http://www.platon42.de/files/util/TLSFMem.lha
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It's interesting to see what has happened with the Atari Jaguar's development since Atari went bellyup (everything was given over to the community to do with as they wanted). Ok it's a console and it's user base was tiny compared to AmigaOS but it's still gives you an idea of what might have happen to AmigaOS if AmigaInk had been 'nice' and done the same thing after 3.9 was released. For one thing I guess we wouldn't have AROS/MorphOS today, or at least AROS/MorphOS would be derived from OS 3.x source code.
If AmigaInc had managed the project in a sensible way (stop laughing), they could have used the open source branch of OS3.x to feed back into OS4.x development.
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It's interesting to see what has happened with the Atari Jaguar's development since Atari went bellyup (everything was given over to the community to do with as they wanted). Ok it's a console and it's user base was tiny compared to AmigaOS but it's still gives you an idea of what might have happen to AmigaOS if AmigaInk had been 'nice' and done the same thing after 3.9 was released. For one thing I guess we wouldn't have AROS/MorphOS today, or at least AROS/MorphOS would be derived from OS 3.x source code.
If AmigaInc had managed the project in a sensible way (stop laughing), they could have used the open source branch of OS3.x to feed back into OS4.x development.
Exactly! There is a (rather tiny) group of people that are still doing homebrew and releasing things for the Atari Jaguar. I finally bit the bullet and bought Skyhammer and Robinson's Requiem for mine, but I'm on the fence of "Do I open them and play them, or do I leave them in the package for collector's reasons?" I'm sure I'll eventually open them when I have time. I don't really intend on selling my Atari stuff.
The beauty would have been if they released the source, that there wouldn't have been this huge in-fighting of "do we go x86 or do we support PPC, which Commodore may or may not have gone to after 68k was dying out.." 'cause simply, it could have gone both ways, or all ways, and we'd have it for ARM, PPC, PPC64, x86, x86_64, 6502... whoa, got ahead of myself there... :D Well, why not, they put Lunix on C64 :D
slaapliedje
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Put this as the first line in your startup-sequence.
http://www.platon42.de/files/util/TLSFMem.lha
Thanks! I did have that installed, due to Chaos Lord's suggestion, but it was before I thought my hard drive had died. It was actually the IDE cable, but I didn't realize that until after I had already formatted it!
slaapliedje
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For what it's worth, today I told my manager that some computer was running at 99.9% CPU usage and was crawling because of some java software that is simply supposed to do something like FTP files. I made the comment, "He needs to write his software for computers that are made today, not 20 years from now." I have already gone blue in the face from them re-writing something as simple as transferring files in Java, and using UDP... but that's a bit off topic...
I used to work with a guy who insisted that since everyone has 3GHz quad cores and 4Gb of RAM we don't need to worry about writing efficient code. But that doesn't even make sense, since if you're processing ever larger amounts of data it becomes more and more important that your algorithms don't run in polynomial time.
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As far as I'm concerned, as long as applications aren't jerks, they should be happy together. I think memory fragmentation is a bigger issue, isn't it? (Having so many different banks of memory, some slower than others can't be all that fun to write around in.)
Fragmentation shouldn't be too much to worry about as long as programs aren't wont to request large blocks of contiguous memory, which I guess is fairly rare these days. On old stock Amigas you could legitimately request 50% of Chip RAM in one go but a few Gb, not so much.
Besides, if that is a problem, one could maintain a single virtual address space, which would get round the fragmentation problem without breaking software, and have a few other advantages too (swap space, seg faults if unallocated memory is accessed). But unfortunately the real problem these days is malicious code. Computer security is big business. It's sad that computers should have to be so much more complex and less efficient just because of selfish idiots, but there you go.
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I used to work with a guy who insisted that since everyone has 3GHz quad cores and 4Gb of RAM we don't need to worry about writing efficient code. But that doesn't even make sense, since if you're processing ever larger amounts of data it becomes more and more important that your algorithms don't run in polynomial time.
There's a lot to be said for avoiding premature optimization especially if it comes at he cost of poor design, but I think that's taking it a bit too far. Reminds me of the Civ 4 updater that takes an hour to download the 100Mb patch purely because the process spends 99% of the time updating the bytes downloaded count :( I downloaded it manually from the same url in about 3 minutes...
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There's a lot to be said for avoiding premature optimization especially if it comes at he cost of poor design, but I think that's taking it a bit too far. Reminds me of the Civ 4 updater that takes an hour to download the 100Mb patch purely because the process spends 99% of the time updating the bytes downloaded count :( I downloaded it manually from the same url in about 3 minutes...
There's premature optimisation, and there's long overdue optimisation.
There's also optimisation you should do before you even write a line of code. If you write the equivalent of a bubble sort to solve a problem it's never going to be fast no matter how much you try to optimise it later, and woe betide you if it becomes an issue two years later when it has become such a central point of failure that nobody dare touch it in case it changes the behaviour.
I used to get all the optimisation CRs in my queue but it was like trying to stop the tide coming in. I'd make the code faster and mark it as fixed, but by the time anyone got round to verifying it some other code got bloated and it was slower than before, so CR got re-opened and sent back :(
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I used to work with a guy who insisted that since everyone has 3GHz quad cores and 4Gb of RAM we don't need to worry about writing efficient code. But that doesn't even make sense, since if you're processing ever larger amounts of data it becomes more and more important that your algorithms don't run in polynomial time.
You think that's bad, I was talking to one of my coworkers who used to be on one of the programming teams. Used to be because she was promoted to being a manager of a different team. She was talking about having problems with writing a professional sounding email, and I said I didn't have any issues with that, it's math that I sucked at, which is why I hadn't ever gotten heavily into programming. She replied, and I quote because I can't make this up... "Programming is easy, you just copy and paste."
:laughing:
Of course this is at a company where they (the programmers) were discussing whether or not we should start recommending to our clients that they should have 8gb of ram minimum...
slaapliedje
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She was talking about having problems with writing a professional sounding email, and I said I didn't have any issues with that, it's math that I sucked at, which is why I hadn't ever gotten heavily into programming. She replied, and I quote because I can't make this up... "Programming is easy, you just copy and paste."
slaapliedje
I send most of my time copy & pasting when I'm coding, the skill is knowing what to copy & paste :)
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I send most of my time copy & pasting when I'm coding, the skill is knowing what to copy & paste :)
Ha ha, this is true. But I already know how they tend to program. From talking to some of the other programmers that used to work here, they'd see the 'lead' programmer duplicating the same function over and over again. This is the same programmer that earlier in the thread I mentioned his java program taking 99.9 percent CPU and making the entire system crawl. It's like running your Quake port on an 68000. :D
slaapliedje