AmigaOS4 pre-release guide

[Waccoon]

Downix:  A reminder, this is not the end, it is still but the beginning. A first public beta.

Indeed.  I know I'm nitpicking, here, but the documentation is definately not HTML compliant and has more than a few parsing errors.  It's good form for any IT company to produce clean HTML, especially for documentation.  I always seem to need a Windows box to read Linux install documentation.  ;-)

The rest of the installation seems OK, given that it's a developer release.  I'd be very surprised if the final has the same procedure.

Neko:  What a beautiful firmware upgrade procedure they have

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.

MikeyMike:  What firmware updates are notably "nice"?

I guess people still think BIOS updates are only for technically inclined geeks.  Most people never update their firmware, which is why many companies do it automatically.  Digital cameras, for example, will autoupdate their firmware.  I had a couple people bring dead cameras to the store, only to find out the firmware was corrupt.  When I try to fix them, it amazes me how horrible the update utilities are, and what terrible directions the companies provide.  No wonder people screw it up.  Contrary to popular belief, users are not complete idiots.  I really feel bad for people who don't know anything about computers.  Not a lot of progress has been made in the last 20 years, relatively speaking.

On Windows it is extremely rare to have a firmware update procedure that doesn't involve booting into DOS/a DOS disk. I don't know if Macs even "do firmware updates".

It never ceases to amaze me how horrible BIOS updates are on the PC.  Booting into DOS isn't the most difficult thing to do (unless you have a Win2K/XP CD, which doesn't boot to a prompt directly), but it is totally rediculous.  Why can't they just make a boot disk for you?  You always have to make your own boot disk and type in everything to start the flash program.  My dad just updated a BIOS on a friend's ASUS board, and the flashing utility didn't even use proper syntax at the command line.  There was no space between the flash switch and the ROM filename!  I thought it was just a typo in the manual. :-?

My dad owns an ABit board, and the flash updater that runs within Windows isn't too bad.  You do have to "install" the flash utility and reboot, though, because it has to be installed as a kernel driver to work.  It still makes me nervous to run the utility, especially since it downloads the BIOS right off the Internet and flashes it imediately without making a backup, first.  At least it asks for confirmation, first!

Macs have transparrent BIOS updates.  If you install MacOS9 on a pre-9 Mac, it will update the BIOS automatically.  I found that out the hard way .  I was wondering why our old Mac suddenly took four times longer to get through hardware checks, and the entrance screen suddenly looked different.  :-)

Then again, I've seen far, far worse BIOS patches.  I had to update an old Compaq, once, and the BIOS had a complete GUI designed to look like Windows 3.0, but worked ten times worse.  All the options basicly boiled down to, "Windows (auto) / Unix (hardware offset)".  Took me about an hour to replace the sickly, original hard drive with a "modern" three giger.  I forgot how long the actual BIOS update took.  I had no documentation, so it was almost an all-night project.

[Waccoon]

I have clear recollection of the responses to my article, where I wrote down, that the MorphOS CD starts with

boot /pci/cd boot.img

in the OpenFirmware prompt, that it's alien, and not Amiga at all. (On a side note I fear there will be no real Amigas anymore.)

The OS4 pre-release install guide seems fair enough to me, and I'm glad that the overall acceptance is better than my article's a year or more ago.

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.

But then, this might all change by the time OS4 final is ready, so all this arguing is useless, anyway.

DegeRandolf:  The guide talks about using Linux or an Amiga to make the floppy update disk. I wonder if it can be done under Windoze?

RAWrite is available for Windoze.  BeOS uses it with its installer, actually.  You can get almost anything Linux without a GUI for Windows... it just might not work very well or at all.  :-)

[Waccoon]

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.

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

I don't think BIOS updates within OS4 are a good idea...

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!

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

If you have to type something exacly like in the directions, why type at all?  It's not hard, just unnecessary.

I was playing Gran Tourismo 3 recently, and it just occured to be how badly designed this game is.  Asside from the pathetic phsysics model, the interface is infuriating.  If I want to enter a race and my current car doesn't meet race regulation, what do I do?  Well, what I want to do is switch my car to one that meets regulations.  Instead, I have to...

Get out of the reace menu, get out of competition mode, get out of league select, go home, go to the garage, find a car that is regulation compliant (by memory), select it, "get in", get out of garage, get our of home, then go to race/league/competition/race, and then enter the race again.

WHEW!  Why should I be forced to spend 40 seconds to go to the garage when the game could instead show a list of cars that meet race regulations, and let me switch on the spot?  Why so much interface clutter?  It becomes very obvious after a few hours of navigating interfaces that the designers made sure the game looked very pretty, but is very frustrating to play.  I don't know why this game is so damn popular, and why every racing game is trying to clone the Gran Tourismo "feel".  Viper Racing on the PC is way, way more fun, even though you only have one car you can drive.

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.  Most operating systems are made by strict engineers and are very painful to use.  Even BeOS drove me nuts with its ambiguous error messages, badly designed windows, and crummy Start Menu clone.  The more I learn about Interface design, the more I realize that most people who are trying to compete against Windows are pretty much killing themselves.

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

Interface designers know damn well that forcing people to read text doesn't work.  People never read long texts no matter what.  They just skim and see "o" and "k".  It's no more effective than having, "If you don't agree that this website is harmful and will give you lepracy, click 'No, I don't agree' to enter this website".  How many people are fooled by that every day?  My weblogs can tell you.  :-)

Unless you're my father.  He's so careful about everything it takes him 2-3 hourse to re-install Windows, 30 minutes to run FDisk, and about 2 minutes alone to realize that "large disk support" means FAT32.  On the other hand, when I'm helping my uncle on the phone, he will push buttons before I can even ask him, "What does the screen say, now?"  :-)

[Waccoon]

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.

Only for CDs, I believe.  PCs are designed to boot CDs by emulating a floppy drive.  What difference does it make if a computer doesn't support multiple boot images?  The only image you HAVE to load is the bootloader.

Do memory cards and ZIP drives work differently than CDs?  I would presume they work more like hard drives.

It's just complicated since nobody thought the CD would be good for anything but storage, so nobody put effort into making a good all-purpose interface for booting, burning...  CD-ROMs are the work of the devil.  You'd think the people who make firmware for non-PC platforms would put their foot down and fix some of this mess.  If the AmigaOne can't boot directly off a CD, well, that's a big usability issue.

Anyone with half a brain can reprogram a flashrom. There is nothing magic about it.

There is if you've never heard of a BIOS or firmware before.  Most of my customers haven't, which is why they always have trouble using the products I am forced to sell them.

This is the 21st century.  Haven't we gone beyond typing at command prompts, yet?  Linux offers all sorts of TUI interfaces.  Programmers just don't know how to use them, or really just don't care -- no matter how much their customers might.

This is why I also tend to lean towards commercial software over free, open-source apps.  Nobody overlooks the importance of user interfaces more than non-commercial developers.  But, that's a different topic...

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

How do you load that external program without a bootloader?  Why not make the bootloader that external program?  Why not build a booloader into the firmware (assuming the hardware people aren't cheap.  There's a reason why most PC BIOSes are programmed in assembly).

No one can go up against Windows and MacOS. Not at this stage.

If not "this stage", then WHEN?!  People have been {bleep}ing that Microsoft has been a monopoly for a decade!  When will the market be ready for a serious competitor?  Five years from now?  Five years ago?  People can do something now or they can wait forever and never do anything.  I don't think anybody really understands why Amiga, BeOS, Atari, and everyone else went under.  Microsoft used to be a small fry, too, at one stage.

You must have read the text to see that you need to press those two letters.

You'd be surprised how much you can see without reading.  If a single frame of a movie flashes before your eyes for 1/30th of a second, you can probably recognize more than you realize, such as a character's shirt color, or whether there was a car or a boat in the background.

The longer the text, the less people will read, because unlike geeks, normal people can't bother spending a few hours figuring out every little engineering glitch and oversight.  Concise, well-designed products tend to be the most sucessful in the marketplace, if branding isn't a huge influence (IBM vs HomeGrownComputers, Inc).  How many people actually skim a 50-page UELA, let alone read it?  People don't have time for that stuff, and will rather just take their chances with evil disclaimers than waste time reading labyrinthine legal crap.

The real point, though, is that making people type "OK" isn't going to make them understand the instructions any better.  All developers should make an effort to describe what's going to happen, and just use safer methods.  Concepts like "safe saving" are rare in the industry, and others like "complete on reset" seem to be exclusive only to Windows.  It amazes me how many Operating Systems still have a "maintenance" mode, and are incapable of changing properties of files that are currently open.  That's what queues are for!