One unified OS for the future?

[wawrzon]

@thor, heiroglyph
+1!

[wawrzon]

A PowerPC card for the A4000 is a good idea. Expect a $1000 price tag though.

good idea? it has been attempted lately. expect it not to happen, simple as that.

[wawrzon]

Can anyone give an unbiased pro/con list for current MorphOS and OS4 that doesn't involve hardware?

For example, MorphOS lacks a proper debugger and that's a show-stopper con for me.

I hear that you can use a debugger on OS4, but I can't personally attest to it.

i think on aros hosted you can use gdb. apparently even with the aros68k under emulation. but i dont have any experience with it yet.

[wawrzon]

ah, forgot the obvious link:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Aros/Platforms/68k_support
scroll down to gdb section.

[wawrzon]

Good! So please learn the needed coding, and start writing drivers for the hardware you own. I'm afraid even if everyone here (and I mean anyone reading this) will do the same, we won't see AROS supporting ALL available PC hardware anyway. There's too much hardware to support, and too little people writing drivers, so the best we can do is trying to support all common standard and then hope that specialistic code will be brought by somebody else. Maybe, why not, some from the people currently just complaining that AROS does not work on their PC, that they had to buy (cheap, often already used) components, and maybe at the same time dream about buying that blazing, rare and uncommon $3000 hardware needed to run other operating systems (to basically do the same things, btw).

i just thought about some possibility to improve the situation. one of the main issues is when the rtg hardware is not supported by gallium or any specific driver. it was discussed before but i think perhaps if the vesa driver was extended to accept screenmode change on the fly it could fill in the gap. is that possible at all? my interest in ths would be to have native aros driver for rtg cards in aris 68k esoecially for thise nit supported by p96drivers via uaegfx wrapper.

[wawrzon]

Ok, and why that? I.e. you are explaining the answer with the question. In particular, I want to understand the motivation why people buy into that.

lets face it. it must be a kind of complex that dates back to actual amiga days. in particular to its decline. amiga users were accustomed to their superiority and good laugh at others, especially ibm compatible fraction. as the advantage slowly disappeared and turned to the opposite the most so called reasonable users went with the opportunity. who was left behind and still constitutes most of what is supposed to be amiga scene are the die hard people, who never reconsider. they were already in the decline of amiga always hard pushed to find a justification for their choice and prove, how much better amiga is than the alternatives, even though it actually wasnt anymore. when amiga disappeared as an actual product they were forced to substitute for this in order to continue the procedere of bashing other platforms, because after all this emotional investment this must have been a point of no return. the actual product had to be to substituted with some hardware that just wasnt obviosly a plain pc but could be used as a reference for comparisons even though then could never be as favourable anymore. i must admit, i belong there somewhere in the middle field, the only excuse i have for my behaviour is, that im somewhat aware of the nonsense.

[wawrzon]

And when you dont like to tinker with it, what choices you have there? If you go to WinUAE you still have to update OS with patches and upgrades.

because either there is no entity beyond any doubt authorized to improve the system incorporating the most neccessary patches or there is deliberate intention not to allow for it. whatever the case, the chance to keep the system faithful to its genuine spirit and have it reasonably updated without the perspective of sacrificing the compatibility is improving aros68k. it is not presently in a state that is enough to fulfill these demands fully, i admit, but the prospect is there.

Old Amiga users are loud, too. It is built-in to Amiga users, I think But there are more 68k users than NG users combined, just more fragmented with different ideas and requirements.

they arent. in fact there is even a group refusing the fpga approach, but you will not hear of them too much. the loudest and most annoying fraction is actually the one that  dismisses amiga as an obsolete platform, but advocates ng as the true stuff and demands loyalty and support for their case. interestingly morphos and aros fans are seldom that insistant.

[wawrzon]

showme amigalike os thar would take advantageof all the i7 cores.

[wawrzon]

so this is an interesting and informative discussion out of the sudden?
funny enough i cant find anything new here. ive heard all these arguments over and over and everybody knows that its just talk. no action will follow and nothing will be influenced by this thread. its just what they call a valve to set some hot air that people gathered free and proceed as previous.

[wawrzon]

Would it be possible at all to develop a "modern" amiga-based OS without sacrificing not only binary but also source compatibility? If everything would have to be broken what sense would that make at all? And what software could then run on it (except 68k in UAE)?

exactly. if you have to sandbox 68kand start over from the very beginning, why try to create another os at all? what unique concepts of amiga could be reimplemented in that os, that wouldnt be present in another modern os or couldnt be derived from some linux distribution?

correct me if i am wrong, but i guess: none.

there is two edge cases here. aros may make sense as far as it carries over some amiga balast like unified memory space or messaging by passing pointers (?), but anything that would attempt to make it more modern in underlying sense, might make it non-sense in general. so the one and only future proof version of amiga is a 68k sandbox on whatever system of your choice.

[wawrzon]

Happy to correct you: datatypes, assigns, user interface.

doesnt sound like much.


biggest problems seems the linux-oid  file structure as you yourself notice.

certainly if there is no valid replacement for assign, such a program could be done after the previous problem has been solved.

with the interface you likely mean workbench. well, actually all contemporary guis share similar philosophy introduced by xerox, mac and amiga. they are bloated, as amiga would become if it survived, but bloated with additional and sometimes unnecessary functionality. actually aros wanderer strives to catch up with any of them as well as the genuine workbench, and this demonstrates the woes of reimplementation pretty well i guess.

and datatypes.. isnt there a similar system in any of the contemporary oses? libreries to open certain file formats? im not sure but i would expect that.. in fact the genuine amiga systems had another annoying flaw to open files with application stored in tooltypes, which could not be changed once for all if the host system was lacking the particular app, but had an alternative named or located elsewhere.