Amithlon Computer

[bhoggett]

Just to add to what's been said already:

VIA Eden is NOT supported. The "experimental kernel" should not have been released to the public and AFAIK the VIA Eden kernels have not been made to work at all yet.

3com network cards are NOT supported. Support for networking is only through RTL8029 based cards (these are 10Mbit) or RTL8139 with OpenPCI (though this seems to have  various limitations at the moment). Other NE2000 compatible PCI cards may work, but there's no guarantee.

Best GFX card support is for GeForce (up to 3) and Matrox cards. There is an updated ATi kernel available too, but this is not tested by the author.

[bhoggett]

@Effy

As for GeForce2, be sure to get a real GeForce2 and not like I did, a mega fast gfx card BASED on the GeForce2 chipset, Hercules Prophet II 64 Mb. Didn't work at all, only got one screenmode you get with every gfx card that is not supported. Now I use a real Geforce II MX 400 PCI and it works great !!!

...eh?

I have a GeForce2 based Hercules Prophet II card and it has always worked perfectly. It's the chipset that matters, not the card manufacturer.

(however, care should be taken that the card is based on a GeForce2 chipset. Hercules also released cards with Kyro chipsets, and those are only supported in VESA mode I think.)

[bhoggett]

OK, more points on Amithlon:

- 1 GB of RAM is the limit. Trawling through the Amithlon lists would reveal the technical reason for this, but Bernie confirmed that 1 GB is it.

- You can set up Amithlon to boot from [1] a FAT32 partition as well as a FAT partition or any bootable Linux filesystem.

[1] i.e. this means the place where the kernel and image files reside, not the boot partition for AmigaOS itself. AmigaOS should only be installed on Amiga filesystems (FFS, PFS, SFS), otherwise you are asking for major problems.

- Nearly all GeForce2 cards are "GeForce2 based" cards made by other manufacturers. However, the chipset is either GeForce2 series or it isn't. If you use a GeForce2 based card and only get one screen mode, the kernel is falling back to VESA mode for some reason. The chipset is definitely supported however, and should give you full access to screenmodes and 2D hardware acceleration.

- The licensing issue remains. The Amithlon publishers are still selling it by all accounts, but not everyone whose material is being used is being paid the royalties they are due. Those parties consider the product illegal and its continued sale an act of software piracy.  Since the matter is unlikely to reach the courts any time soon due to the costs being higher than any possible compensation, the decision of whether to buy or not must reside with each person's individual conscience

[bhoggett]

@Effy

Boot times vary considerably with the system configuration. Things like SCSI cards and lots of disks and partitions will increase this, while slimming it down will reduce it.

A system dedicated to Amithlon only and without any unnecessary peripherals will boot pretty sharpish.