AmigaOS4 pre-release guide

[Rogue]

Considering that Amigans can have trouble unpacking a tar.gz or installing samba, updating the firmware looks tough

I'm sorry, but I don't get this. Why is the firmware upgrade difficult? The guide lists three possible ways to do it (CD, Floppy, TFTP). You can simply pick one of them which seems easy for you (and entering "fdcboot; bootm" doesn't take too much brainpower in my book).

The most complicated part is the tftpboot, but then, if you are able to set up a tftp server on your machine, the rest should be easy for you, too.

Pressing the "o" and "k" keys is just a security measure to enforce people to actually read what it says.

Besides, you get a real nice progress bar when erasing/reflashing your ROM  :-)

At least it's well described.

Indeed. Carl did an excellent job there.

it still looks messy and horrible to me.

I'm open for suggestions on how to improve this. However, as I pointed out above, I don't see anything problematic about entering "fdcboot; bootm" on a command prompt. It certainly doesn't look more horrible to me than "boot /pci/ide/disk@0,0:0 up050404". I don't think that it is unreasonable to expect a user to type in a few letters verbatim.

[Rogue]

Ugh. Please tell me this is because of the "beta" nature of the OS. I mean, what the hell is the "ide reset" command doing in there? I haven't seen firmware like that since my OS/2 days.

I would be surprised to see any PC bios offering a command prompt in the first place. The "ide reset" command is only there to ensure that the CD is recognized if you inserted it after the first reset.  Again, I don't see the problem with entering "fdcboot; bootm" from a prompt.

[Rogue]

That would have been so cool as the ASUS flash utility would only load from a floppy, which I didn't build my system with.

That is why our firmware update offers three possibilities (CD, Floppy and network; theoretically you can also transfer the floppy image to a harddisk, but then...)

[Rogue]

It's not hard, just fussy. Instead of writing a tiny utility in the CDs bootblock (like early startup options) to do a variety of things, you have to do it all yourself. Even I could hack up something in no time at all.

I don't get this. What is so hard about entering

fdcboot; bootm

or

diskboot 50000 1:0; bootm

or

setenv serverip a.b.c.d
tftpboot

?? Any of these lines will boot from a media, either floppy, CD-ROM or network. What "tiny utilitiy" do you want to put in what CD's "bootblock" (we're talking about an El-Torito boot image here anyway, no "bootblock")?

[Rogue]

But as a previous poster suggested, when seen from the POV of a current AmigaOS 3.x user, there is something distinctly "alien" about it. In order to move forward to modern hardware, it is unfortunate that we must simultaneously move backward to these kinds of interfaces

I don't really see the difference. Last time I updated my CyberstormPPC flashrom, things looked very similar, I had to boot into initial CLI and enter a command from there. I don't think that the exact characters that you type matter very much.

This makes the firmware update on an AmigaOne (or a pegasos, for the matter) very similar to a classic Amiga in my opinion. Given the fact that the install guide is very detailed on what you have to do and type, I don't see it as a complete problem.

Finally, if you never had a blizzard or cyberstorm on your classic, the concept of "updating the firmware" is completely alien to you anyway because previously you had to either open your case and put in another ROM chip, or send it off to a dealer and have it replaced.

Over the long-term, I hope Hyperion and Eyetech will work to address issues like this.

Ideally this can be updated via Workbench, but that requires an installed OS 4 system. Problem is that the older firmware cannot boot the OS 4 CD. Unfortunately U-Boot does not support multiple El-Torito boot images.

But if you ask around for AmigaOne owners that actually did an update before, they will most likely confirm that the update is painless.

Here are a few replacement procedures off the top of my head

1) is potentially dangerous IMO, since it requires users to actually read on-screen text. The current updater will require you to type 'o' and 'k' to overwrite your flashrom only to force people to actually read it. I think that a flashrom update shouldn't be too comfortable because it is mostly a rare condition and should not be able to happen accidentially.

2) would be an option, but updating your firmware is essentially a hardware-dependent thing that isn't going to be integrated into the OS itself. The early boot menu on e.g. the CyberStorm would not have this option.

3) will probably be the way it will be in future updates and/or the final release CD. However, it requires that the firmware is able to use the AmigaOS install CD, and that is only true for later versions of the firmware, so for the time being it is a chicken and egg situation that can only be resolved in this way.

The Earlybird systems where specifically aimed at developers, technically inclined people, and former and present Amiga users

[Rogue]

Gee wiz, I wonder how PCs manage to boot at all! Oh, right. They use bootloaders...

PCs use El-Torito boot images. "They use bootloaders" seems to be a bit of an understatement, since there needs to be a definition of what file to actually boot. And CD don't have boot blocks.

The problem is that UBoot doesn't have an update feature, but you are required to update through the firmware (as opposed to just writing data at a hard-coded hardware offset). That's a "safer" way of doing it, since the flashing utility is essentiall in the BIOS, instead of a seperate program like it is on the PC. Given that any PC program can hack my BIOS, I think I prefer the UBoot method. Still, it can't be THAT hard to write a simple Early Startup screen. After all, they did that over a decade ago on the "real" Amigas!

Anyone with half a brain can reprogram a flashrom. There is nothing magic about it. The firmware updater is an external program. If we had relied on U-Boot's build in capabilities, you would need to

- unlock the flashrom manually
- load the flashrom update into memory somwhere
(manually)
- copy the update into the flashrom (you guessed it, manually)
- lock the flashrom

I prefer an external program, and I'd prefer a program that makes a few sanity checks first.

Any OS that wants to go up against Windows and MacOS *must* be interface savvy. That's why I have so many nagging doubts about Linux, OS4, and just about everyone else who gets "squashed" by Microsoft

No one can go up against Windows and MacOS. Not at this stage. Neither is AmigaOS trying to do that, and I don't think that MorphOS is trying, either.

They just skim and see "o" and "k".

You must have read the text to see that you need to press those two letters. If there would have been a prominent "Press SPACE to continue" *then* people may complain, but as it is now, you need to read the text to find out that you actually need to press those keys. If you chose to skip the rest, you're beyond my help :-)