New production run of DENEB

[Darrin]

It's great to hear that you guys sold out your first production run.  I'm so glad that I took the plunge and bought a Deneb as it's the most exciting bit of kit to hit the Classic market for a long time.  It really opens up the expansion possibilites of the "big-box" Amigas and it quickly pays for itself by allowing the use of cheap PC ethernet adapters and external CD/DVD+RW drives, plus the ability to quickly swap data between different computers using a USB pen drive.

I hope this next run sells out quickly for you too.

I'm looking forward to seeing what future products you have in store.

[Darrin]

@ Mike,

Can I just make a couple of suggestions to make installation easier for users?

In the Deneb install draw, try including the following files:

Installer - latest version required to install software
LHA - for unpacking untilities such as MUI from Aminet
MUI - required for Poseidon prefs to work

It was a pain in the backside to try and track these files down initially, download them on the PC and then find a away to transfer them to the Amiga (USB wasn't working without them and my personal PCs don't have floppy drives - luckily my kids' do).

[Darrin]

@ Trev,

It really shouldn't be.  MUI archived using LHA is relatively small, Installer isn't even worth LHAing and LHA isn't going to fill the Flash ROM either.  ;-)

[Darrin]

@ Mike,

Ah, so if I had FAT95 installed then I would have been able to use the USB pen drive to copy over MUI and Installer.  Of course, without it I had to find a way to get Installer onto my clean OS3.1 setup.

Now I keep those files on a couple of floppy disks along side my OS3.9 emergency boot disk.  :-D

[Darrin]

Chris wrote:

I don't want to argue here with you, but please consider this:

The available space for the rescue flashrom is 1.5 MB (1536 KB). The disk image is 1456 KB, the flashdisk mounter uses 2 KB and the boot loader and index psge use 3 KB. The disk image is 99% full (Poseidon, Luciferin and DenebTools) and has a mere 9 KB free space.

The installer is a standard part of the workbench distribution -- it is necessary for 95% of all harddisk installable tools and assumed to be available as standard commandos like List etc.

The DenebInstall image does come with "LhEX" that is used as fallback to unpack the lha archives for installation whenever C:LHA is not found.

With fat95 and LhEX on the installer disk, nothing stops you from using an usb stick to transfer MUI from your PC to your Amiga via USB.

The MUI 3.8 user archive is 1 MB in size alone. It would never have fit inside the DenebInstaller disk.

No MUI application comes with this archive included.

I'll take that as a "no!" then.   :lol:

That fair enough as I wasn't aware of those points.  My experience of the initial install was that the Installer file on my OS3.0 and OS3.1 disks wouldn't work so I had to track down a newer version on Aminet and find a way to transfer it to the Amiga.  I didn't start to use the Deneb at that point as I wasn't aware that it was "ready to go" without first completing the software installation and doing an initial configuration.  Then I hit the MUI problem and the "how the hell do I unarchive this from OS3.1" problem... In hindsight, I should have installed OS.9 first and then started to configure the Deneb.

Thanks for the explaination.  :-)