MorphOS 2.0 Released

[Darrin]

Excellent news!  I'll be home in 3 weeks and it will be time to blow the dust off my Efika and put it to use.

I've never used MorphOS so it will be interesting to see what my first impressions are.  I apreciate the time-limited demo.  How long will it work?

The installation seems easy enough:  put the install image on a USB flash drive (FAT formatted I assume) and shove it in the Efika.  I have various 2.5" IDE drives on shelves and I'll probably use a 10GB or 20GB one for testing which raises the question as to how to partition and format them.  I guess after typing "boot scsi:0 morphos-2.0-efikainstall.img" I'll be able to access some sort of "HD Toolbox".  Do I need a 4GB FFS "System" partition or can I just have one big 10GB or 20GB partition?

[Darrin]

zylesea wrote:
@ Darrin

The time-out is 30 min. It's enough to get a good impression. Since the rebbot time is quite fast it is okay to get first impressions of the system and play a bit around. But still it is annoying enough to make you either register soon, or give up.
Btw.: It works cool on my Efika.  

Thanks Zylesea.

Only 30 mins?  I was expecting a week at least in order to test some software properly.  Hell, if I installed it and then my wife phoned me then that could be the end of my demo!  :-D

Ah well, I'm going to buy it anyway so no big deal.

[Darrin]

You might have got that wrong: after 30 minutes, the OS slows down. After rebooting, you have again 30 minutes. Thus in theory, also MorphOS 2.0 is still free, if one really can't afford the price - he has just to organize his work accordingly.

Oh right.  That's a smart idea and allows people to test software at full speed for 30 minutes after (re)booting.  To be honest, all I want to do before buying it is to see if it installs OK and runs the software OK.

Big question here, what's the Amiga classic software support like?  Does it run them off Ambient or through something like UAE?  Any support for running games from ADF files?  OCS/ECS/AGA support?

Cheers.

[Darrin]

gazgod wrote:
The support for workbench friendly apps is excellent in Morphos. I've been using my peg 2 with morphos 1.4.5 as my primary Amiga for 2 years plus. I used to run miami tcp and the 68k prism2 drivers on it for example. For games and custom chip dependent apps you need UAE. The only 68k app I've used on 2.0 so far is Dirwork 2 and it worked flawlessly as with the previous version.

Gaz

Cheers.

So things like Wordsworth should be OK, but I'll need to run UAE for MorphOS to run stuff that needs the full chipset.

OK, so I take it there is a UAE for MorphOS?  How does it compare to WinUAE/Cloanto's package?

[Darrin]

downix wrote:
Must.... resist.... buying... new.... system... and... upsetting... wife.....

My wife dropped a big hint to me just before I went to work about my computer habbit which is why I'm going to eBay some of my Amigas.

Since Christmas I've added a Minimig, C128 with MMC Replay, an A4000 and a new HP Pavilion 9700 laptop.  In fairness to me, I did give her my old HP 8000 laptop as a peace offering.  :-)

[Darrin]

wlfrancis wrote:
Also where is the best place to buy the OS?

I was wondering this when I first spotted the news until I figured out that you can just download it off the MorphOS website and then get an activation code online.  Easy.  :-D

[Darrin]

Senex wrote:

Indeed. Since I don't use WW myself, I don't remember any possible limitations regarding it. With regard to FW97, one is limited to open it on 8 bit screens, though, because otherwise the paper is black instead of white. Other than that, it still runs fine on MorphOS (screenshot).

E-UAE ist not as advanced as WinUAE - especially the JIT compiler is missing. Furthermore, it has not been updated since more than a year.

E-UAE homepage

Latest MorphOS binary

Cheers.  So this is the latest MorphOS version:  2005-09-21 MorphOS/PPC binary.

Oh well, perhaps with MorphOS 2.0 and a few more users available then development might pick up again.

[Darrin]

Senex wrote:
No - see the 2nd link I provided above. :-)

Doh!  Cheers - bookmarked ready for when I get home.  :-D

[Darrin]

Firedawg wrote:

For those who have not installed MorphOS 2.0 yet, remember that you will have to download the 130mb OS image file during the OS install phase, the 11mb is just the installer.  

You must complete your install under the 30 minute demo time limit, or it will stop you in your tracks.  Just boot up and get to installing (downloading) immediately.

Mike

Thanks for that tip.  I hope that flakey cable connection of mine holds out for the 30 mins as it's been giving me hell for the last few months and the cable company seem uninterested/unable to fix it.

[Darrin]

Golem!dk wrote:
It should be possible to download the iso beforehand, put it on your usb flash drive and simply point the installer at it. No need to worry about the timeout waiting for it to download then (dunno how much the timeout would actually slow down the installation procedure).

Ah, good!  I have a couple of 2GB memory sticks so one of them should do the job nicely.