OS4 on the pegasos

[bhoggett]

KennyR wrote:
nVidia support even on Linux is poor, and doesn't support 3D. Only the binary drivers nVidia release themselves for Windows (and which are notoriously buggy) have 3D support.

Rubbish.

nVidia themselves release Linux drivers, and actively update them. These have full 3D support, as you'd expect, but because they're not open source they're not included with most freely available distributions. Most boxed retail distros will include them, at least for x86. This has been the case for years now.

In fact, it is ATI drivers that are a problem on Linux, because they have to be reverse engineered, and any information ATI release is reputed to be inaccurate and incomplete.

ATI cards are currently technically superior in many ways, but unless you have a platform officially and directly supported by ATI - meaning they release the drivers themselves - you're no better off than with an nVidia card. Both ATI and nVidia cards run seriously hot and need a fairly effective cooling system, particularly the newest models.

If you run Windows, your choice should be made by reading all the reviews and the technical specifications of each card. The fastest is not always the most advanced, etc.

If you run anything but Windows, your choice is limited by who does the drivers for your OS. The technical abilities and speed of the card are secondary.
 

Not true. A1 is basically only sold for OS4.

Again wrong. The A1 was built to satisfy Eyetech's need for a custom system their industrial customers could not purchase from anywhere else, therefore allowing for high profit margins per unit to be maintained. They previously used old Amiga systems for this, but understandably were going to have problems as the supply slowly dwindled.

The OS4 tie-in is so that those systems can be sold to the consumer market too, with Eyetech looking for the same exclusive angle they have with their industrial niche.

Pegasos is cheaper, meant for a much bigger market, and OS's for it don't need workarounds for problems with the Articia chip. You just port it and go.

Balls. Pegasos ports still need workarounds, even if not for the Articia chip. Otherwise all those ports that have been almost done for over a year would be available for download.

A1 on the other hand is badly priced for these markets and has problems just running Linux. No-one wants to adapt their kernel to run on an expensive PPC board when they can do it for half the price with no workarounds on a Peg.

Both Peg and A1 are overpriced and overhyped. One rates as distinctly mediocre hardware, while the other borders on being downright poor. In both cases the operating systems are raw and unfinished.

To those guys considering which system to buy, I'd have this advice: come back in five years. By then one or both systems will have matured into something worth buying if you're that way inclined, or they will have died and been buried for good. Buying one at the moment is like throwing your life saving down a wishing well in the hope that it will make you win the big lottery prize.

[bhoggett]

Dan wrote:
Mini-ITX in the industrial market :lol:
That´s a very small marketshare. PC104 is the formfactor that rules that market even if smaller boards and those a little bit bigger like the size of a 3,5"diskdrive have taken a big share of the market.
Secondly where is Linux(or BSD) going on the A1? Nowhere.

Just to clarify: I'm not saying Eyetech are targetting the entire industrial market with the A1. Eyetech's main income has, for many years now, come mainly from selling Amiga based systems essentially as embedded devices to a small but loyal and established set of customers. Eyetech have been looking after those customers and those customers like to stay with Eyetech. However, with no more A1200s bieng built for many years now, and old machines gradually failing, Eyetech's supply of bases for their systems must have been dwindling away, even counting the refurbs. Hence the A1: a custom board no one else is selling (as far as the Eyetech customers are concerned) and whose price cannot be compared on a straight basis with similar x86 efforts because "it's not the same".

Aside from that, I agree with what you're saying.

[bhoggett]

Mr_Capehill wrote:

Maybe so, but I think that many Pegasos and A1 owners have been quite happy with their computers.

Yes, but those Pegasos and A1 owners are fanatical geeks.
 :-D

I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but it's true that all of them emerged from the hardcore Amiga users who would only let go of their Amiga passion when it was prised from their cold dead fingers. That's 3-4 thousand people though, not millions.

That hardcore entity is limited and in all honesty most who were going to go with an A1 or Peg have done so already. The chances of the market growing from that source are nil.

So the only significant way to consider the situation is from the outsider's point of view, and not from that of the people who threw their money at the new systems just because they were there, long before any of them really knew what they were getting. (In fact, I'd say most still don't know what they've really invested in)

[bhoggett]

KennyR wrote:
The point is they're still BINARIES, not source or any kind of API documentation.

So? You said there was no decent support for nVidia cards, and no 3D drivers. Nothing about them having to be open source. You were wrong.

The drivers exist - in binary form - but they're good drivers, they're free (as in beer) and they fully support the card features.

Go to nVidia and ask for hardware documentation and you'll be politely told to f*ck off. Welcome to the world of open x86 hardware.

I don't recall anyone saying it was any different. The gfx card race is really cut-throat and neither ATI or nVidia are willing to spill the beans.

The only ATI drivers that are open source are the reverse engineered ones, which ATI have not supported in any way. ATI do not support Linux and it shows because the ATI drivers for Linux are often plaugued with problems.

The suggestion that one company is evil and closed while the other is open and helpful is laughable.

I don't believe that for a second. A1 was designed (and later replaced by TeronCX) for one purpose, and one purpose only - to run OS4.

So the A1 was designed specifically for an OS which would only exist years later, right? DOH!!!

I'm afraid you're plain wrong. It is true that had Hyperion not picked up the AOS4 mantle when they did Eyetech would have allowed the A1 project to rot away, but to suggest that the A1's creation was motivated solely by AOS4 is a joke.

Since when?? Workarounds for hardware? You're kidding, right? When someone makes a UDMA IDE driver on another PPC system, it should work on Pegasos, right? Well, maybe with a few tweaks. Not with the massive changes that Articia enforces just to get around the PCI bus locking alone! And that's not even going into the workaround for the cache integrity bugs!

A "tweak" to one person is a "workaround" to another one. As long as special mofications are needed, of any sort, that's a workaround to me. Scale is irrelevant.

Most hardware is overhyped and/or bad. I'm fed up off all these sh1tty PC motherboard with huge design flaws being sold off as packaged PCs, for instance.

Sure, but they're being sold at a fifth of the price of a Pegasos board, or even less, and you don't have to buy them. You can choose another model, and yet get exactly the same compatibility with the rest of your system. Conversely, the alternative to a Pegasos board is...
...another Pegasos board. Not exactly a breadth of choice, then.

[bhoggett]

KennyR wrote:

Good if you define "good" as being "incompatible and buggy as hell", that is.

Not in my experience, that's for sure. As far as I'm concerned, they work every time, except maybe with the very latest bleeding edge kernels.

There are any number of ways to install these drivers. You can download pre-packaged binaries for your distro, or you can use the driver package directly from nVidia. If it finds an unsupported kernel, it can recompile the kernel for you with the module support needed.

"incompatible and buggy as hell" is sheer FUD in my experience. I haven't found anything it caused crashes with, and I've always been able to install the drivers on my system.

The complaints of Linux users about these drivers are constant.

So are complaints about all sorts of things, not least the ATI drivers and even Linux not being exactly like Windows.

Change kernel, you have to wait for update.

Not always. See above.

Choose any CPU but x86, too bad.

Well, if you do choose anything except x86 for running Linux, you need your head examining anyway. :-P

This goes totally against the Linux mindset.

Some of the Linux mindset. Not everyone who uses Linux believes everything and anything must be open source or else it is unacceptable.

Binary only support from nVidia is far better than no support at all from nVidia. It's better no support at all from ATI, that for sure (And no, ATI do not disclose proper information for people to write drivers with. That's why the ATI drivers are reverse-engineered rather than written from specs.)

Anyway, anything to do with open source is totally against the Amiga mindset, so what's your point?  :-P

And your implying that if one doesn't use these big companies for a computing solution then the result must be crap by default is equally laughable.

Wha? I never said anything of the sort. You said nVidia were rubbish and used some made up FUD to justify your stance, and I just pointed out that you weren't telling the truth. That's all there is to it.

You are trapped in this world where only the cutting edge is any good,

I never said that. On the other hand, nine times out of ten "cutting edge" is better than "almost obsolete". "Almost obsolete" may still have plenty of merit, but I wouldn't advise anyone to pay more for it than they would have to for "cutting edge". Get it?

which is really not better than some who believe anything x86 is inherently evil just by existing. Or is it that you simply believe that supporting any hardware other than that you currently own is a waste of time?

No, I don't believe that. What I believe is that all hardware should be judged by the same set of criteria, and should be compared directly against the competitions. I do NOT believe anyone should pay more for something - or support it - for no other reason except that it is not mainstream.
 

YES! It was! Hardware designs for the A1 were being processed years before a single line of code were being written for OS4. How have you missed that?

And then, when it was decided that the Escena A1 was vapor, and Eyetech offered the TeronCX (the board that mostly closely matched what Escena A1 would have been), OS4 was still only just a bare skeleton. So I'm not wrong, it's just you who who seem to be rather ill-informed. Which is surprising considering how long you've been hanging around the forums, even if it is only to push one subject always only.

A1 was meant for OS4, and isn't priced or supported or publicised for anything else. Who'd even pay Amiga Inc.'s brand tax for a board that wasn't intended to run OS4?

The A1 exists because Eyetech need it. NOT because Amiga Inc or Hyperion or anyone else needed special hardware for AOS4. That's the point I'm making.

I don't see the difference with the Peg anyway. The Peg exists because "modern" hardware was needed for MOS. No one in their right mind really believes people will buy millions of Pegs to run Linux or BSD on them.

Oh, really. The difference is that one will be totally unstable and lose data, the other that it will be inefficient. How is that insignificant? Don't mix semantics with practicalities, Bill.

I would reply by advising you not to mix platform advocacy with the truth, because they rarely go together. I have yet to see tests done under objective laboratory conditions that prove anything one way or another. As far as I know, both the Peg and the A1 have unresolved (or at least unexplained) issues.