Several years ago, I remember a thread where we made some attempt to group Amigans by their use patterns - Amigan's who still exclusively used an Amiga, those who had as a second computer an Amiga, those who only emulated the Amiga - and then there was me, the guy who doesn't own or use an Amiga at all (any longer).
Finally my day has arrived, because, with Icaros VirtualBox Edition, one can simply download the image, turn on the machine within VirtualBox and wa-la, boot to an Amiga-like OS, namely AROS.
I thought I'd give a quick review.
I downloaded Icaros 1.2, and I see there is a 1.2 to 1.2.2 updater and andn a 1.2.2 to 1.2.3 updater. Not planning on doing a lot of heavy use right off, I simply downloaded 1.2 and turned in on - with high hopes.
First, problems. The GRUB bootloader comes up, I try the default choice, I get to a red-arrow screen, but then the system crashes.
I then realize there is an XML file included with the download - that file cannot be loaded by Virtual Box. Wherever I downloaded the file, had the wrong config format for my recent version of Virtual Box.
But XML is human-readable, so I look through the settings and match it up - no go, still crashing.
Finally I go through several choices in the GRUB menu and finally realize that ATA=nodma configuration option will allow me to boot.
So - twiddling with boot settings is not a friendly experience, so whether everyone on every platform experiences this, I don't know - but for me, it was not a smooth experience.
Still - finally working out the issues, I booted to Aros, and it had some default programs and launcher bar.
It certainly reminded me of my days on the Amiga - and I was especially keen to try the Origyn Web Browser.
Unfortunately - the experience with that wasn't great either - just too darn slow.
Now I should mention my host OS is Red Hat Linux 5, running on a 3.0GHZ Opteron 256, dual processor, with 32GB of Ram. dual 500GB SATA drives and one 15K RPM SCSI boot drive.
3.0GHz Opteron 256 - is about 2 generations back. It's slow. Tons of RAM on this machine, but AROS doesn't need the ram anyway. No SSD drives - on top of DMA being turned off, means somewhat slow hard drives as well.
Still I expected for such a lightweight system, not to be dealing with such slowness, but it was slow all around.
But, I will say this - the VirtualBox install made it easier to test, than my experiences with Amiga's in the past. It was not the carefree install I expect when running a VirtualBox OS (indeed I've never had an issue with other os's) - but nevertheless it shows great promise.
Origyn Web Browser, shows great promise, but too slow for me to actually browse around with it. FireFox 4.0 beta 1, absolutely flies on this same machine.
But if I were running this on an SSD machine with an i7 processor - I will definately retest the speed.
all in all-I'm excited about AROS - looking good.
