Awareness by classic Amiga users about modern Amiga's?

[Karlos]

@EyeAm

I've been using linux now for several years. It's highly robust. If it corrupted your data it's more likely down to faulty hardware or a faulty user. My machine at work, for example, was up for over 1 year.

This wasn't a server, this was a desktop machine. That's 1 full year, running an X server (the least stable part of any linux distro), disk and network IO, sound playback. All without crashes, without lockups. I haven't had that level of stability from any other system. It rebooted it after a year because our office had a power outage, so I took the opportunity to upgrade it too.

Linux has, however, become rather bloated.

Amiga OS does have a kernel. In the strictest sense, it most certainly does. It still leaves modules tied to it from the System. You very well cannot change those on-the-fly now, can you? No.

Yes you can. Check the Includes&Autodocs for exec.library/SetFunction(). Disk based libraries can easily be replaced at runtime. Simply replace the .library file. If they aren't currently open by any process, an avail flush call will purge any resident version from memory. The next time it is opened, the new version will be loaded.

[Karlos]

EyeAm wrote:
Okay, Astral.  :-)


EDIT: just can't leave without the Linux reply (to two above posts by others): It was definitely LINUX's fault, an upgrade of their software (and their upgrader sucks, more specifically).  :lol:  There, I'm done.

Which one? rpm? yum? apt-get? You obviously haven't a clue what you are talking about with regards to linux. What did you do, pull out a pen drive without properly unmounting it? User error. Maybe you should have set it up not to write cache removable media.

Was it your hard disk that went wonky? You don't know how to use fsck or replay the journal? Well, the OS can't really help that, other than by giving you extensive documentation on how to deal with such issues. How many other OS will let you unmount a drive at runtime, check it and even manually edit the disk's inodes if the disk has truly become damaged? Not many.

[Karlos]

Crumb wrote:

IMHO all that bunch of redundant programs that do the same are a problem because it shows lack of a properly accepted standard.

It's an open platform. You can't have it both ways: If a standard existed and someone didn't like it, they'd just create an alternative. Which is exactly what happened. My point is that EyeAm obviously doesn't know what he's talking about with respect to linux package managers. Whichever one you use, they all work reasonably well. How difficult is it to install software under linux with a repository based package manager? For example:

sudo apt-get install

Or if the shell is too scary, there are many graphical interfaces.

It's mindnumbingly easy. It's the easiest software install ever conceived. You don't have to do anything. It goes away, downloads the package, sorts out any dependencies, installs it, configures it and unless it is something very low level, your package is immediately ready to use.

One could make the same argument against the Amiga UI system. MUI/Zune, ClassAct/Reaction, Triton, et al. They all came about because people weren't entirely satisfied with the stock gadtools interface. Yet, we all recognise that each has something to offer and as amiga users we generally don't complain about having so many interface sets installed.

In the example of the pen drive the write cache should be disabled as default and advanced users should activate it to get extra speed. Most of users prefer to plug and unplug their pendrives when they want... if many users don't expect having to unmount anything it shows that certain Linux distros may lack user friendliness.

Again, it is all fully documented. Not reading the documentation is user error, IMNSHO. I never claimed linux was particularly user-friendly, I claimed it was robust.

I guess any unix clone like linux will allow that. I think AmigaOS/MorphOS allows unmounting drives in a more or less legal way (at least with 3rd party commands) and you could edit any part of the disk (no memory protection, you know).

Actually, not that many I've seen. MacOSX claims to be unix based, but many moons ago when my then employers OSX server based filesystem failed, it was just impossible to do anything with it. That story is on this very site in an old thread somewhere. It was a complete disaster.

I'm not sure about QNX or BeOS but they'll probably allow it too. I guess the only one that may not allow it is Windows

Other than a few third party binary level disk editors, I'm not aware of any such tools for AmigaOS. Back in the day, I recovered a corrupted RDB, by hand, with AZap. It worked but it was very time consuming and a lot of guesswork was involved.

By comparison, the inode editing facilities for linux are built-in and have a degree of sanity checking that stop you from making any data corruption much worse since you are editing the fields in the inode structure, not simply editing a hex representation of a sector as I had to do with AZap.

[Karlos]

Linux people hate AmigaOS because it ain't come for free, face it. Besides it's too easy to administer it so ain't worth bothering since they might not be called such EXPERTS then (this is pretty much a joke...)

Rubbish. I use linux at work and at home and there is no OS I like better than AmigaOS. My point is that linux is used professionally in places where any existing version of AmigaOS would never be considered because it is robust.

One more about Linux hostility since this is a part of the thread already - I'm always happy to be able to share my opinion... Robust? Perhaps. Does great work where employed? Perhaps. But it is definitely NOT a desktop system by all means of definition of a desktop system. Linux ruined or ate my data many times and I blamed myself, right.

If you are using a KDE4 based window manager you should blame yourself for any loss of data caused by X going down. You have the choice to use a robust window manager such as fvwm, but you opted for KDE. Even gnome is more stable. If you are using KDE4/plasma with all the desktop effects and other gubbins then you are probably using proprietry drivers which taint the kernel also, introducing instabilities.

Since all of these are your choice, then you can't blame the kernel for failing as a result of choosing to use an immature and buggy desktop.

Now, I'm not a kernel puritan, my machine at home is using proprietry nvidia drivers but I understand that by doing so, I may have compromised the stability of my kernel. That said, it has never crashed or locked up, even under very heavy load.

[Karlos]

warpdesign wrote:

Now, I'm not a kernel puritan, my machine at home is using proprietry nvidia drivers but I understand that by doing so, I may have compromised the stability of my kernel. That said, it has never crashed or locked up, even under very heavy load.

That is new to me: why would open-source drivers be more stable than closed source ones ?
I mean: they may or may not be better... but what would make them better everytime.
Look: if I decide to develop a driver, releasing the sources won't make it any better...

Simple. Proprietry drivers may well be written by people that know the specific hardware inside out but don't really know the host's graphics system too well. The bugfix listings that come up for nvidia's drivers alone demonstrate that. Windows drivers come first and are ported to linux.

There's no real reason why graphics drivers need to be kernel modules and most well written open source ones aren't. Those offered by nvidia and AMD, however, are.

[Karlos]

That's a typical example of posting that is in spite of discussing the issue, cutting out some ambiguous and pretty off-topic phrases to make fun of the author. You're here to talk about Amiga or to pull legs of people not liking to have Linux on their hardware, cellphone, wife, you know what I mean? Ask yourself this question please.

Jeesh, don't take it so personally. I am simply addressing a few falsehoods put about by some people here:

1) That "linux people" hate AmigaOS. It's complete rubbish, I know more people with Amiga backgrounds that prefer to use linux on their x86 boxes than any other x86 OS. Despite obvious differences, the two OS have a great deal in common in the way they are organised and thought out.

2) That linux is "crap" based on the mishaps of people that haven't used it properly and have managed to lose data. The fact is, data is safer under linux than most other mainstream operating systems. It's one reason why it is so popular as a server OS (economically, being free is an even bigger incentive, of course). Even using a desktop distribution, I've never lost data on linux yet. In contrast, I've lost data on my Amiga more than once.

At no point whatsoever did I say or imply that linux is "user friendly" or that it is the OS everybody should use.
It's fine not to like linux, at times it can be a complete pig, but the criticisms that were levelled against it weren't accurate. Operating Systems are, by and large, tools. For serious work, you use what gets the job done. For some its Windows, for others MacOS, for others its linux.

AmigaOS's principal attraction IMO, is that it's actually fun to use and fun to write code for.

[Karlos]

freqmax wrote:

Karlos, Nasty thought.. maybe one could design a "kernel sandbox" for 3vil NVidia/ATI drivers? , ie fake that they are in kernel land when they are infact not :-D

It's an interesting idea. I strongly suspect that the drivers don't need to be in kernel space - after all most of the open-source one's don't. It would seem more likely that the drivers are ported from windows, where root access may be required to implement a particular feature that might not be supported under linux and tus they inherit this dependency. Of course being closed source there's just no way of knowing.

On the whole, I've not had any major problems with the nvidia drivers (currently using 180.44), but there's no way of knowing how robust they are. Running in kernel space, if they crash, they could bring down the whole OS. How's that for Amiga like? :-D

[Karlos]

In theory. How well the "dependencies are sorted" depends on the person writing the package. That is not 100% reliable. A 100k dependency ( within a total of 10 MB of dependencies) that wasn't updated when installing a 700k SNES emulator meant that I could no longer boot. So much for "robustness"

Again, this isn't really a criticism of the package manager, though is it?

I could write a bad install script for AmigaOS that could format your hard disk without even asking you. Is that the fault of the installer mechanism?

Most Amiga software installs from commercial software were self contained: you might need a 3rd party library but that was rare. Hell in many cases you just drag the folder onto the hard drive..

This is shifting the goalpost. Now you are comparing commercial and free software, not the mechanism of installation.