Sam440 - first impressions

[gazgod]

Well today my Sam and OS4.1 arrived from Amigakit safe and sound.

Thought I'd let you know my first impressions.

I chose to build my sam up in a ITX case, I chose this one from LINitx:- http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11124, The reasons I chose it were it had space for a 3.5" hard disk and that save me buying one for the Sam as I already had a 250Gb one on hand and it came had room for a pci card and came with riser (more on this later). Also in the case I fitted a slot loading DVD Rom drive with suitable SATA adapter. I would heartily recommend LINitx as a supplier, I have used them a number of times and never had any issues with them.

Unpacking and fitting into the case:-
I had already installed the discs into the case as I’d had an ITX PC board in it until Sam arrived. So it was just a matter of installing the board in the case and cabling it up. The Sam currently doesn’t come with an IO back plate but I have been assured by Amigakit they will forward one to me when they arrive from Acube, which means I’ll have to strip the machine down again when it arrives, though at £450 I would expect this to be included at time of purchase.
The mounting holes lined up with my case perfectly, as they should being the ITX standard but nice to see.
The ATX power header is a right angled one which makes the attachment of the power cable when the board is mounted rather difficult.
The internal USB header is only 8 pin and not the 9 pin keyed type found on most pc’s so some care has to be taken attaching front panel connectors (note the 9th pin should hang off the connector to the rear of the Sam).
The PCI riser would not fit as it is keyed to the 5 volt type of card and the Sam only excepts 3 volt cards, not a fault of the Acube or the case manufacturers but damn annoying as the supplied riser is dog legged back to fit the case so standard riser will not fit, so no wifi for my Sam for now.
All the other cables were easy enough except for the lack of polarity information for the power and HD leds but this is on a par with most pc board manufacturers, as always I made a best guess and was wrong so quickly shut the Sam down and reversed them.

The PSU supplied with the case is rated at 80w and is running my Sam, hard disk and DVD rom with no problems.

Once the machine was assembled I powered it up and inserted the OS4.1 cd and the installation process started booting. The installation is process is exactly the same as OS4.1 on the Amiga one.

Upon the successful completion of the install the hard disc tried to boot and failed dumping me to a uboot prompt after about an hour of swearing and messing about I realised that this was caused by a PEBCAK error (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard). I had forgotten to check the bootable box on DH0. DOH!!!

Once I rectified this the hard disk booted straight away and prompted me to set up screen mode, sound card and internet connection. All of which went well except I can’t get a display larger than 1280 x 1024 at the moment (my monitor will do 1920 x 1200), but I’ll play with that later.

More on how OS4.1 performs later, I want to go and play with it now.

Gaz

[gazgod]

One thing I didn't mention is that I've completely failed to get a USB to PS2 converter to work with it so far, i have 3 different ones here which I use to get different machine to work with my PS2 KVM's and even my old faithful ones that work with macs, my efika and even sun usb boxes (as long as you boot them with a sun keyboard and then swap) fail to be recognise in any of the Sam's USB ports.   :pissed:

Gaz

[gazgod]

paolone wrote:

Upon the successful completion of the install the hard disc tried to boot and failed dumping me to a uboot prompt after about an hour of swearing and messing about I realised that this was caused by a PEBCAK error (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard). I had forgotten to check the bootable box on DH0. DOH!!!

Hi, I'm using AmigaOS 4.1 on my SAM too, and I had similar installation problems. However, I don't think this is a "PEBCAK" issue, 'cos it's quite disturbing that a system installer, in year 2008, forgets to set the system partition as "bootable": yes, it's the installer that should do this, not the user.

For istance, I had not your exact problem but I got stuck at reboot many times, because I didn't read the manual (ehm) and I didn't place the bootblock at the beginning of the drive. Another time, however, I think that in yera 2008 it should be installer's duty, not user's.

In a nutshell: this is neither MS/DOS nor Linux, it's AmigaOS. User should be able to install it flawlessly, close the installer and reboot the system without any glitch. I can do this even with AROS, why the costy AmigaOS 4.1 doesn't allow this?

I agree with you completely. IMHO uboot is a pile that should be scrapped as soon as possible, why does a computer require 3 layers of boot strapping (uboot, sdl and bootable partition) to boot the os? When there is open firware out the that does the job more efficiently and with less problems for the user. Uboot was a kludge to stop the people buying development boards instead of the "genuine" (read as licenced) A1's and should of been consigned to the nice idea but sh1t bin of computing history a long time ago.

If open firmware was used all you need to do is mark a partition as bootable, then you can boot any partition you require at the OF prompt, no messing about with sdl bootblocks. This is true of all OF based machines I've used even apple which have a long history of been quite contrary with there implementation of "standards".

Gaz

[gazgod]

After a bit more playing I've get the screen modes sorted, the extra resolution are bracketed in the Radeon info file, so I now have workbench running in 1920 X 1200.  :-D

The only browser I've installed so far is OWB, the reason for installing it was so I could download installer 43.3 from the aminet. The browser looked good, but defaulted to amigans.net and i can't find a way to change it to A.org  :-? When i got into the aminet and found the file i wanted i clicked on it and all the browser did was display a text view of the lha file. I couldn't find a way to save the file so eventually gave up and downloaded it on another computer and passed it to the Sam with a USB stick.

Fat32 USB sticks are recognised without installing any additional software, I've successfully used an 8 gig stick.

As for what I'm going to use this machine for, its a toy like all my Amigas, I cannot in all honesty use an Amiga as a professional platform (I am a programmer but in 4GL database languages). Though I am currently trying to remember C and learn the specifics of coding for the Amiga.
Any advise on os4 development environments and tutorials will be gratefully received.

Gaz

[gazgod]

Matt_H wrote:
Check the icon's ToolTypes.

Thanks that sorted out the home page  :-)

(this post is from OWB running on a Sam440 with OS4.1)

[gazgod]

Framiga wrote:


just curious! theres no Installer in AOS4.1?

In 4.0 is in SYS:Utilities/

I've just checked and there is, why is it there and not c:installer which most 68k programs look for?

Should I copy it to c:installer instead of 43.3?

Sorry I'm a OS4 noob and making it up as I go along.

Gaz



Gaz

[gazgod]

@robert17

If you'd read my first post you'd know, but then reading aint one of your strengths  ;-)

@all

Got a bit further into my explorations:-

Web browsers - OS4.1 comes with Ibrowse and OWB already installed, I didn't think to look in the utilities directory. DOH

Usb to PS2 - after playing with these some more I found that my old faithful adapter works as long as only the keyboard OR the mouse is installed. Never seen this behaviour before on any platform, so It looks like i can have the Sam on my KVM switch if I use 2 adapters, one for the mouse and one for the keyboard. I will try this when my wife is not around so I can steal my spare adapter off her mac. Not an ideal solution but if it works.

I've found the Sam a very stable system, on all day at the moment with no issues. No fans in the case and the lack of a back plate means I can put my hand in the back to test the temperature of the heat sinks, and they are warm but it no problems to hold my hand on them.

Gaz

[gazgod]

taunusand wrote:
"Criticism is required in order to evolve." Of course, I agree, you are right

As do I, that's why I thought I'd post my impressions here.
I am not one of the red camp zealots, if anything my tent is firmly pitched in the blue camp owning a peg II (2 until recently) and an efika, though I'm no zealot just slightly mad :crazy:. Until I bought the Sam I'd had very little exposure to OS4 apart from installing it a couple of times for the chairman of our user group. I did buy OS4 for classic but I had troubles booting it and didn't get round to playing too much with it as I've had kind of a hectic year. But I thought I'd give Sam a go and that anyone here who's undecided as whether to buy or not may benefit from my experiences.

Gaz