MorphOS noob. School me!

[Heiroglyph]

I got an amazing deal on a dual 2GHz G5 with 3GB RAM and a monitor, so I'm checking out MorphOS for the first time.

I know next to nothing about MorphOS (long time Classic Amiga user though), but I hope to give some constructive feedback from the perspective of a noob while I learn.

I got it installed and poked around, but that's about it. I did google to find out that OWB was a web browser (not obvious at all) and even managed to play YouTube videos, which surprised the hell out of me!

I have a million and one questions and see next to nothing on their website about what to do after you get it installed and paid for.

What can I expect to run on the system? I've heard some system friendly Amiga 68k software works, but that's about all I know.

What are some common things that I will want to install?

When it installed, it made one 2GB and one 127GB partition. Can I use the rest of the drive safely?

Is Samba available and how horrific is the setup? (I had it working as both client and server back in the 90's, but I'm too old for that anymore)

Whatcha got for my new adventure?

[Heiroglyph]

I'm on the same boat, noob with MorphOS.  Looks good, but a lot to learn.

Yeah, I'm super impressed with the presentation so far.

The install was smooth and simple, but I removed the Mac hard drive just out of paranoia. I guess I'll need to figure out dual booting at some point.

Thanks for the links

[Heiroglyph]

If you need some hints and tips, please tell me. I don't really know anymore what is new and unusual for a classic user. If there is something I can write about on my blog, I will. It is geared torwards new and inexperienced users like myself

Kimmok: Those links are a really good starting point, thanks. I even bumped into Yasu's blog and spent a long time there. Good stuff! I definitely need to subscribe.

Rob: UAE is definitely on my list. I didn't realize there was a JIT yet.

danwood: Is Chrysalis Pack a newer version of Pack Ultimate that I've seen mentioned elsewhere or something different?

Once I get a pretty good setup configured I can't wait to get the SDK installed and start developing on it.  I think I might be able to ditch the Windows/WinUAE setup I've been working with previously plus test the 68k Amiga executable directly on MorphOS.

This may be a little off topic, but I never realized how much like Amithlon MorphOS can be. It's not x86, but other than that, it seems like it will fill the same gap for me.

I'm sure I'll have plenty of questions later tonight when I can get back in front of it.

Oh, nobody answered the question about how much of my hard drive I can use. What are the limitations?

[Heiroglyph]

Here is an iso to download.

http://www.morphos-team.net/downloads

Thanks, but I installed it before I posted.

Now I'm just testing the waters before I decide to register it or not.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to though.

[Heiroglyph]

I'm not really sure what you mean by "use the redt of the drive safely". FFS is really stable and you can make as many partitions as you like. FFS can handle up to 127 GB.

The smallest SATA drive I found in my pile of parts was 250GB and the installer defaulted to a 2GB and a 127GB partition, leaving the rest unused.

I know that on real Amigas, you can lose data if you exceed the limitations of the controller, driver or filesystem so I left it at that.

Can I add another partition without losing data?

What filesystems work best with MorphOS?

Can I use a larger drive and if so, how big can it handle?

What are the limitations on the size of files? I work in video, so I've got single video files my home NAS that are over 40GB each and might want to play one some day.

I would recommend though that you make your system drive a little bigger. Like 10 GB just in case. I myself have 50 GB, but that's because I like to have my programs in my SYS drive. It let the HDD not having to jump around all the time.

2GB did seem a little small, but it suggested 2GB unless you knew what you were doing. I didn't

Pach Chrysalis is the same as Pack Ultimate. I like it a lot, even if it's not always reliable. But you also need to get Grunch. It's probably the most important program for MorphOS there is

Grunch is that package manager you mentioned in your blog, right? That did seem like a nice thing to have.

How is it not always reliable?

Thanks,
John

[Heiroglyph]

Unless you are splicing many low to medium resolution videos together, I am guessing that those 40GB+ video files are HD, or Blu-Ray ripped files, which to my knowledge, can't be played on MorphOS yet.  In fact, I don't think the PPC MacOSX can play Blu-Ray iso files either.

If you find out something different, then let me know.  I have been working on archiving all of my movies over the last year and I am interested in figuring out the best setup for storage and playback possibilities, without buying any expensive new hardware.

I don't do ripped isos, but I have a lot of HD and SD video in other formats. Mostly h.264 and mpeg2 in various containers (mov, m2ts, mp4, mpg, mkv).

I haven't looked into what's available for playback yet, but I assumed there was a player for for those, if not a simple editor.

Congrats on getting your G5 PowerMac and enjoy your learning period on MorphOS.  I personally think it is the best Amiga inspired alternative, unless you are only interested in playing old 68k games, then you are better off just using the real thing, or if you no longer have a Classic Amiga, using UAE.

Thanks, it seems fun so far, but I'm starting to wonder if there's anything for me to contribute. The ecosystem seems pretty damn good so far. I'm more of a developer than a user. When I use a computer, it's usually to browse and write code.

[Heiroglyph]

OP, are you into games at all? I love the games by: Cherry Darling (Voxel Bird and Ace of Hearts). Voxel Bird is completely free (Flappy Bird style game but in 3d).

http://www.cherry-darling.net/

Also, if you want to use basic screen dragging, you can use Dragon. Lucy is for Transparent Windows.

http://amigazeux.net/dragon/req.php

http://amigazeux.org/index.php?module=News&type=user&func=display&sid=74

I'm not that into games, but Dragon is interesting.


So I tried to install the Pack Chrysalis 3.7.1 on two different clean installs, but I get errors at startup.

Error 6 in line 124: Unterminated comment
Command returned 10/6

I don't see anything that tells me what has the error and I see nothing I could have done to cause it.

Any ideas or should I just write that pack off as crapware?

Edit: Ok, so I found crabum.rexx in the wbstartup folder and removing it makes that error go away.  I don't see anything noticable in line 127 though...

Edit 2: There WAS a missing ' a few lines up though.  Adding that seems to have fixed the issue.

[Heiroglyph]

Wow, OWB even works with my google drive!

Not only can I get my files like rexxsyslib.library, but there's a good chance I could use this OS on a daily basis.

[Heiroglyph]

Yeah, this is pretty cool.

I went ahead and registed since the timeout was becoming a problem.  Now I'm just waiting on a key file.

I'm still not sold on this keyboard, and although the pack is pretty cool, it installed a BUNCH of extra stuff that I'll never take the time to figure out. I may reinstall yet again.

So is there a google drive client yet?

Edit: I must be tired. This post is all over the map lol

[Heiroglyph]

sound sounds weird (no pun intended).

Yeah, no pun intended, huh? :lol:

If I'm going to forget the pack, besides Grunch, what are your must have additions?

I wasn't a fan of that shortcut bar at the bottom, but would like something for easy access to commonly used apps. That one just didn't react in a way that I found comfortable, even after changing some settings.

Also, the MorphOS SDK looks really complete and even has what appears to be a decent editor included.

Is there any benefit to picking up something like CubicIDE or is that even the best option?

I'm planning to write things for both MorphOS and Amiga 68k if that matters and I prefer vbcc over gcc where possible.

[Heiroglyph]

Do you mean "shortcut bar" from Chrysalis? Anyway, you have Panels in Ambient settings and you can configure your own bars with those.

I'm not sure what to call it, but Chrysalis added a bar at the bottom with shortcuts on it.

I didn't like it visible full time, so I tried various settings for zipping out from the side.

It just never felt correct, like it waited too long or was too picky about where the mouse had to be in order to open it.

[Heiroglyph]

Doesn't matter if it's Chrysalis or Ambient panels: I prefer menus It's a habit from my MagicMenu using days.

I just need quick access without them covering up maximized windows. It doesn't matter where they come from.

[Heiroglyph]

I think Scribble from the SDK is at least on par with Cubic for writing C/C++. Cubic is very customizable though and has many nice features, too. But it also has some odd things (it's not MUI, uses a non ASL-File requester) and actually using all the configuration options is quite some work. Nevertheless I still like Cubic and use it pretty much. But I wouldn't miss it much if wiped out from my hdd since Scribble got released (bought Cubic ages ago when there was no MorphOS included editor), hence am using it more out of a habbit. Also I am not doing that much in C++ but more with Hollywood and for that Cubic has a brilliant plug in which Scribble hasn't.

Thanks for the input on Cubic IDE.

One of my ideas originally was to make a scintilla based code editor, then I found Scribble.

It's not bad a all.  The style looks a bit like a toy, but functionally it's not bad at all.

I've never had a good experience installing Cubic either. It always has a problem on UAE for me and today I tried the demo on MorphOS and it still had problems with the SDK. (can't remember what, I just decided it wasn't worth fixing)

[Heiroglyph]

Just a strange question but I always wondered by morphos, aros and os4 never looked into a tsr or driver for each classic amiga chip.

These drivers would or could emulate the classic sound and video chips and so on and redirect things to the main drivers. In this way software that bangs the classic hardware would work...

Always seem strange to me to need uae or whatever on these platforms. I can run that on windows...

I think that Puhderbaer is a small subset of this. It intercepts Paula accesses and redirects them to AHI.  It's CPU intensive for one thing and that's just audio.

I think the bigger reason they don't is that they are of the mindset that OS legal applications are fine because they are extending the OS as Commodore would have.

If you try to be almost an emulator, you have a lot of unhappy people when it doesn't work. It's safer to not be an emulator and be good at what you do focus on.

I don't think there is a technical reason you couldn't do it, but it could get messy and complicated real fast.

[Heiroglyph]

One of powerful Scribble features is code indexing, available for C and C++. Scribble analyses the project code with the "ctags" tool, then provides calltips and autocompletion for functions and structures, not only for the system API, but for the project itself. While it is an obvious feature of professional IDEs, Cubic IDE lacks it, as far as I know.

So far I'm pretty impressed with scribble.

I'm not sure how well it will work for larger projects with multiple makefiles, but individually it's much better than expected.