SlimJim's Not-so-short First-Impressions Review of AmigaOS4(Pre)

[WilleKe]

Cheers - this mirrors virtually everything I experienced when I installed OS4 the other day.

Vaguely on-topic question - did you ever manage to get decent IDE transfer rates out of the A1 when you tried GNU/Linux on it? My machine tends to freeze repeatedly whenever it's managing large files (same with OS4, although I believe that's because the UDMA IDE driver doesn't come with the pre-release).

[WilleKe]

@SlimJim

Okay, thanks all the same I think the Linux/IDE thing is a known problem - I found people mentioning a problem that required them to disable DMA if the machine was to be vaguely stable.

I take it the UBoot firmware isn't finalized yet, either - it still seems a bit buggy... When you issue a reboot command from Linux, it tends to "forget" the environment variables unless you actually switch the machine off and on again. And then, apparently my onboard MAC address has changed of its own accord...

Since you mention it - dual boot is a bit awkward - you can have it boot into OS4 *or* Linux by default, but you have to halt it and issue a few commands (change the env variables etc.) at the prompt if you want to switch to the other OS.

[WilleKe]

@cecilia

I had heard something similar, but couldn't find any details off-hand. I've posted my experience of installing OS4 and Debian on [click click click, apparently some browsers mess up if you put in URLs - not Opera though ], for what it's worth. I'll see whether I can find any information on the "selection process" you mention :-)