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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Topic started by: SysAdmin on October 21, 2013, 02:20:43 AM
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News from Petah via Amigaworld.net
As the annual Amiga convention AmiWest draws to a close, Petah is happy to present a short news report from yesterday's keynote held by Trevor Dickinson, founding shareholder of A-EON Technology (http://www.a-eon.com/) and AmigaOS4 Team Lead, Steven Solie.
As expected, A-EON presented its Cyrus motherboard meant to serve as the hardware platform for an upcoming and yet unnamed Amiga computer. The Cyrus will sport the dual-core Freescale QorlQ P5020 PowerPC CPU running at 2 GHz and support up to 16 GB of RAM when AmigaOS (http://www.amigaos.net/) will allow for it. Interestingly enough, the motherboard also features a Xena/Xorro-chipset described as "enhanced" to its predecessor. It remains unknown, however, in what way the chipset is updated. Telling from the applause and cheering, the audience was pleased to hear that A-EON will invest $1,200,000 USD in Amiga hardware in a partnership with British hardware manufacturer Ultra Electronics Varisys (http://www.varisys.co.uk/), paving the way for more and yet undisclosed future Amiga computers.
On the software side, shareholder Dickinson also announced that Libre Office (http://www.libreoffice.org/default/) is still being ported to AmigaOS, and showed the first publicly presented screenshot portraying the open source office suite.
Behind Hyperion's (http://hyperion-entertainment.biz/) doors, work with AmigaOS 4.2 continues. One of the major hurdles right now, as chief engineer Steven Solie implied, is getting the AmigaOS Exec-kernel to support multiple CPU cores. As part of the process, a new so called "scheduler" is being implemented. The new scheduler is apparently already running in the current, internal builds of AmigaOS although Solie suggested there will be room for improvement and optimizations prior to an official release. AmigaOS 4.2 will also introduce the Gallium3D (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium3D) WinSys API for hardware accelerated 3D graphics. Since the new API will allegedly support older PowerPC hardware targeted at legacy Amiga models, Steven Solie made it clear no existing Amiga users will be left behind and that compatibility will be upheld.
Yesterday's keynote also established that future version of AmigaOS will support the NTFS file system used by most Windows platforms. Although chief engineer Solie didn't explicitly say whether or not NTFS for AmigaOS will support both read and write access, having support for NTFS will likely be a welcome addition to AmigaOS by users who want to be able to read USB-memory sticks and other removable media formatted with NTFS.
Despite the surge in interest the low cost Amiga laptop caused when it was announced at AmiWest two years ago, the project has now been officially declared as dead as chief engineer Solie said the final product would have been anything but cost efficient. Apparently, the hardware manufacturer couldn't come up with a financially viable solution acceptable for Hyperion and its partners as the consumer product would have offered too little hardware for too much money. It does, however, seem like Hyperion still hasn't ruled out a portable Amiga since Solie stated that other options are currently being investigated.
Although the date of the release of AmigaOS 4.2 is still unclear, the AmigaOS development team doesn't currently rule out another 4.1 update. The contents and general availability of the update, which will be the 7th after AmigaOS 4.1 was released in 2008, is at this point unknown.
Courtesy of the AmiWest TV team, videos from yesterday's speeches are being uploaded to its YouTube-channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/Amigatekmage?feature=watch).
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Can't wait to see how the get smp or multiple core support without breaking the whole os or the need to recompile every current application...
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News from Petah via Amigaworld.net
Since the new API will allegedly support older PowerPC hardware targeted at legacy Amiga models, Steven Solie made it clear no existing Amiga users will be left behind and that compatibility will be upheld.
That's all I really wanted to know from this years event. :)
(although, I really wish they would fix Timberwolf!)
The new sound card seems interesting too!
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News from Petah via Amigaworld.net
ok just to recap in short:
- aeon invests seriously in further ppc linux boxes that may happen to run os4 too to certain extent. (depends on how well os4 itself progress in the meantime)
- libre office is still not given up in contrary to os4 netbook and in particular warp3d for radeons hd that has been claimed to be in final stage of development (or at least fairly advanced) in the first quarter of this year.
- since the developers got stuck with updating warp3d they switched back to working on gallium port, gathering experience with warp3d in order to utilize it on gallium port is apparently not an issue anymore.
- said gallium is now the only key feature expected for os4.2. multiprocessor support (whatever kind of it) has been apparently postponed even further since it seems since months stalled at some stadium where it boots but has Speed and compatibility issues preventing it to be of any value to end user. the problematic has been throughout explained by aros developer, jason mcmullan, who pursues similar project on aros. the problems will be likely pretty similar.
- in the meantime os4 catches up with another feature the partner systems (aros and morphos) provide since some time: read/write support for ntfs filesystem.
in conclusion the situation has not changed much since last year or year ago. except aros and morphos are not doing that much better.
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wawrzon
Unfortunately your report is pretty much accurate :(
why in the world do they obsess with dual core and SMP when the software for the platform is completely lacking which makes the computer not very usable in the real world. (unlike Morphos and AROS projects which focus on real world usability)
I am, however excited about LIbre Office port but imho Tiberwolf port and Odyssey port. Which through these we could use Googledocs.
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If their LibreOffice port is anything like their half-arsed Firefox port it will be terrible and they won't release the code either.
Leeches.
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Still PPC nonsense... Good Luck
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More info on here everyone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAq23xRiISI
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I think this is all good news, the Amiga needs more exposure.. any new machine is better than none, surely? we are lucky we getting a choice of 3 new machines.
Personally, I think they should call the new machines either A5000 or X2000 and go up with revision. variation using the old names like A3000/40 is a bad idea.. will make things confusion for new owners.
I think A-EON and Varisys and Amigakit need to create some social media advertising so we can spread the word.. we need some nice adverts showing the new machines.
Anyway, its only my thoughts, everyone has their own opinion or input..
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It sounds like A-eon are only committed to producing p5020 motherboards at this stage. Don't hold your breath for a choice of 3.
If only somebody was prepared to invest $1.2m in AROS development we could have a great range of cheap hardware from circa $50 boxes to plug into a TV, a range of tablets, netbooks, notebooks and up to high end desktops all running a free but very capable OS.
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"If only somebody was prepared to invest $1.2m in AROS development"
uhm, whats your definition of investment? Could someone really get a return on this investment in the AROS market? If, so, I've misjudged it.
I'm not thrilled with the state of OS4 hardware either, but, I do always enjoy updates and news stories like this one - and I have to say, reading about new hardware is better than not.
Still, the market moved on from desktop to laptops and on from that to phones & tablets some time ago, and since amiga OS didn't follow along with the trends, it's kind of hemmed in at this point.
The amiga market doesn't only have a problem with lack of SMP - it has a problem in that you can't add new features to the OS anyway - it's frozen in time.
We might like SMP and more application software - but imagine some radical new feature that made the OS feel different in a significant way - this market wouldn't appreciate those kinds of changes.
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Why the EFF are you people so obsessed with "SMP"
WE DONT EVEN HAVE A GOOD BROWSER HELLOO
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@MarkTime
this is one unusually thoughtful spot on post i have read in a while in favour of os4.
now.. investment in aros softwarewise may return if you fork a closed source distribution atop of aros, it shas been proposed and it has even been done afair to certain extent (some closed source elements)
I'm not thrilled with the state of OS4 hardware either, but, I do always enjoy updates and news stories like this one - and I have to say, reading about new hardware is better than not.
investment in hardware is difficult (if one has no funds, since it definitely needs some) but if once has These, it returns more certainly since hardware is still mandatory to run Software (not the other way around) and not that easy to copy/reproduce/redistribute. this is probably the reason why it is so exciting to read about os4 hardware development adventures if one prefers this. i personally prefer to look up aros git for contributions to see whats beeing really worked on.,
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"If only somebody was prepared to invest $1.2m in AROS development"
uhm, whats your definition of investment? Could someone really get a return on this investment in the AROS market? If, so, I've misjudged it.
There's heaps of cheap systems that could carry an AmigaOne badge but if it only runs Android, Windows or Linux it's not worthy of the name. It can't run OS4 or Morph OS as it's not PPC based so that leaves AROS as the way to bring Amigas people can afford to market. They may need to be capable of switching OS between say AROS and Android to have wide appeal at first. Whilst the Amiga name is tied to PPC hardware it will continue to fade into obscurity.
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But why would anybody invest so much when the market is saturated with much much cheaper commodity hardware which would run AROS better?
It'd not be an investment, it'd be a donation.
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But why would anybody invest so much when the market is saturated with much much cheaper commodity hardware which would run AROS better?
It'd not be an investment, it'd be a donation.
please, not again this mantra.. wha does one need to explain just everything over and over.
you have an os4 system? if so, you are sure using some sort of rtg Card with it, maybe even some other pci Expansion commodity hardware. would you prefer all these hardware to be reinvented along with an incopmpatible bus system, let call ot "xorro" or "yorro". probably ypou would, maybe i would, but even your existing os4 system consists of said commodity chips just a little rearranged, which apparently does not bother you.
now, supporting existing commodity hardware is actually means to avoid investments in it, in order to be able to invest in software, which exactly might offer the said return. figures?
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Why the EFF are you people so obsessed with "SMP"
WE DONT EVEN HAVE A GOOD BROWSER HELLOO
we have several browsers, timberwolf works great on my sam, owb, netsurf, a bunch of qt based browsers also works just great.