I wonder if someone can help me? I've recently tried and failed to install AROS Icaros Desktop and I haven't even got a copy of Aeros yet, because the server was being rebuilt or something like that. It's now scheduled to download within the next 2 hours.
I prefer the idea of Aeros because my original plan in 1999 was to run Linux to continue the same attitude as the Amiga, but then I found that Linux looked and felt too much like Windows, no matter which distro I used.
My laptop is a Toshiba Satellite C660D, with an AMD E-350 CPU (64bit, dual core 1.6Ghz), 2Gb RAM ("1.6Gb usable"?!), and a 320Gb hard drive. It came with Windoze 7 Home Premium. After my first failure to install AROS Icaros Desktop, I installed Ubuntu Linux 12.10, but had to give it only half the drive because it didn't tell me which partition was for Linux!
Whenever I try to install AROS Icaros Desktop, first of all under Windoze I click on a file I think is called called Win32-start.bat, which runs AROS Icaros Desktop under Qemu, but an error comes up in a console (i.e. MS-DOS) window saying that the accelerator program has failed. I clicked on the OWB browser icon, which then took 6 minutes to start up! When I click on the icon to install AROS, it takes over an hour no matter which options I select. I'm not able to select and save a keyboard layout or locale settings, then I just have to click on Cancel to get out of them. I read various messages for most of the time saying that AROS is copying and installing files, after being told that I've already set up AROS partitions. I have no idea where these partitions are. Finally, I get a message saying that AROS is running a post installation script, after a warning that it will seem like the installer has frozen. This never ends, or if it does I don't know how many hours I'm supposed to wait. I then cancel, or close the whole AROS Icaros Desktop Qemu window, then reboot to find that there's no sign of AROS at all!
Of course, I've had a warning that AROS has no guarantee that it won't corrupt data on its own or all partitions on my hard drive. How serious should I take this?
I've seen AmigaOS 4.1 IRL and I'm not very impressed, because most of the time people seem to use it for Internet access instead of for creating something. AmigaOS 4.1 Kickstart starts to boot with a text only screen and then an X shaped pointer appears, meaning there's a Linux/UNIX X Windows server. Of course, the Amiga OS/Workbench/AmigaDOS is descended from UNIX via Tripos, and Commodore announced that they were basing a new Amiga OS around Linux, so there's no reason it shouldn't use X Windows. Unfortunately, it demands specific custom hardware, or upgraded classic hardware in order to run. AFAIK there's no reason it couldn't run on a Power PC Mac, or a Power PC games console (e.g. PS3, XBox 360, or Wii), but UBoot checks for specific hardware to make people buy an expensive computer to run it on.
