Roadshow for 68K -Needs your support!

[olsen]

If by troll you mean someone who bothers to criticize the "progress" made in mentioned systems, then sure, I'm quite content. Hardly a day go by without me trolling.

Call me thick, but trolling usually involves baiting and watching for the resulting hullabaloo to tear a discussion apart. In its most benign form it can be a mild prank. At the other end of the spectrum it's a contagious he-said-she-said form of clusterbombing a community. Guaranteed to tarnish your karma if you follow it to the deep end.

For sure, criticism looks different. If you intend to make a point and be taken seriously, any form of pranks or trolling is guaranteed to undermine your credibility. Do it often enough and your chances become slimmer to ever become a contributing voice to the discussion. If what you really wanted was to make yourself heard, it will only become the more frustrating if you're being labeled a troll and get ignored. Don't mix your signals...

[olsen]

And thanks to the political nonsense, people with slighly other vision than "the officials" will never bother to involve themselves either. This is one of the reasons so many developers have fled.

If your daily work and commitment to a project involves making a contribution that implies a certain amount of risk-taking, it entitles you to take part in making decisions which you may not have to justify to anybody else. You should explain them, if you can, considering their impact on the existing community. I personally believe you have a duty to explain yourself, if not just to clear up any misconceptions your actions may leave.

But if your involvement does not even extend to the same degree of risk-taking then your criticism will not have the same degree of impact. It's as simple as that. This can be frustrating for sure. If you do not get involved in the game, you can't play.

I've noticed that the Friedens are getting fed up as well, with some luck OS4 is soon dead in water, and Hyperion launches some commercial desktop for Linux or whatever, as OS5, based on Qt it seems. And it too will fail, but who gives a damn...

If you think ill of the people who you merely disagree with, it will cloud your judgment. If you publicly wish them ill, it will reduce your standing in the public eye. This is the path best not taken.

You can disagree with anybody, but your chances to successfully understand what they are trying to achieve, and your chances to influence their decision making will be slim if you view them disagreeing with you in such a dismal light.

[olsen]

About the missing GUI, I would happily use the stack without, provided basic documentation for the configuration files is present. (I am sure they will be).

The documentation for the OS4 Roadshow is in decent shape, but I think I should do better.

Regarding the distribution media, personally I would prefer a download. However, with this method I can foresee some users asking you for a re-download later on though.

That calls for a certain, more refined infrastructure, and registration. Without the registration, there would be no re-downloads, of course.

Provided that NAT functionality is possible, 50 euro would not make me think twice, but I agree with other post'ers, that a low price certainly may invite to buy.

Well... 50€ is likely far too much for what Roadshow offers right now. The NAT is part of the IP filter package. It works, but it requires a certain amount of preparation and understanding to get it going. Sample scripts are provided for setting up the filter and the NAT. I've successfully used my A3000UX as a firewall/gateway for the rest of my wired LAN.

For the support load on the author, I would like to point tothe, in my view, back then, very well working solution which the MiamiDx author used, the MiamiDx mailing list, where users helped users. Perhaps this, the idea of users helping users being the base support method, could possibly leave you in a more relaxed position.

You'd have to have a dedicated forum for that. Hm... I have little experience with setting something like that up. Any suggestions?

I still have a system running 24/7/365, with uptimes passing the 200 days mark, and would still very much like to try out Roadshow as the main router for my lan, for an interesting comparison to MiamiDx in the same setup.

That may indeed turn out to be very interesting. I do not recall running Roadshow for such prolonged periods of time. AmigaOS is a single user, desktop operating system after all, isn't it? I rarely left my Amiga turned on for more than 24 hours. The cooling fans and the SCSI disk drive are just too loud.

A side note; I feel you should have semi-included AmigaNOS in your list of tcp/ip implementations, however I know that it is mainly for radio amateur use and not for use by the masses. I used it with an AX25 modem on my A1000, and it was great fun improving functionality and make it compile on latest sas/c version.

I'm sorry, AmigaNOS did not come to my mind. I never used it, but I darkly remember that it had been around for a long time while the Amiga TCP/IP solutions were just taking baby steps.

Oh My God, Another Stack

And I thought it was full of stars ;-)

[kolla]

I'd hate to break your martyr complex, but people don't get classed as trolls for being criticial - they get classed as trolls for being rude, obnoxious, inflamatory, and generally socially inept (intentionally or not)...  Which is a long way of saying if someone act's like a jerk then they'll get labelled as one.

Excuse me, but you obviously have no idea what trolling is - try a dictionary or the jargon file.

[Trev]

Excuse me, but you obviously have no idea what trolling is - try a dictionary or the jargon file.

It's a mixed metaphor and an excellent example of the degradation of the English language and communication in general.

[kolla]

I thought you were against wasting of effort by having multiple Amiga-like systems?

No - pay attention, I do not mind having multiple Amiga-like systems - how does sharing code contradict having multiple systems?

Cos forking would make the situation worse, not better.

Why? Forking would make more options to pick from, that's a good thing.

You come across as very bitter.

Because I dont put smileys all over the place?

Has life been that bad to you?  (i.e. You can't build anything good yourself, so you try to destroy others' efforts instead?)

Life is good to me, don't worry. And exactly what am I destroying?
Wanna try my Gentoo/m68k distro? It's all open source, runs on Amigas, is IPv6 enabled and all, just don't expect any support! :roflmao:

[kolla]

@olsen
At leat you know what trolling is

Don't mix your signals...

I'm not, you can find news postings by me in 1996 or so where I'm saying more or less the same things as now - that's where the trolling comes in, people are just tired of me constantly pointing out the elephants that they want to ignore.

[buzz]

Wanna try my Gentoo/m68k distro? It's all open source, runs on Amigas, is IPv6 enabled and all, just don't expect any support! :roflmao:

Did you build it on cheezy ? ;-) (I'm assuming its binaries right? no way I'm compiling x.org / kde on my amiga )

[kolla]

But if your involvement does not even extend to the same degree of risk-taking then your criticism will not have the same degree of impact. It's as simple as that. This can be frustrating for sure. If you do not get involved in the game, you can't play.

Again speaking as if programming for Amiga today is some sort of profession - there is no game for crying out loud, that's just a stupid illusion, and only fools take risks here, meaning, by your logic, fools criticism should count most? That explains alot then :hammer:

If you think ill of the people who you merely disagree with, it will cloud your judgment. If you publicly wish them ill, it will reduce your standing in the public eye. This is the path best not taken.

I don't want anyone ill, did I give that impression?

You can disagree with anybody, but your chances to successfully understand what they are trying to achieve, and your chances to influence their decision making will be slim if you view them disagreeing with you in such a dismal light.

It's typically quite obvious what "they" are trying to achieve. And I'm sorry, but I have a life outside of "Amiga" where I have no problem communicating with people, I'm also involved in various software projects (all open source btw. - fancy stuff) where there's also no problem communicating. In my experience it's really only in the amiga community there are so many problems, since in other communities (open source ones) one can easily split out a fork or start a different distro or whatever. That's just so much better.

And still we have OS4 and MorphOS advocates that fly the "Linux suxx!!1" banner, it's quite hilarious.

[kolla]

Did you build it on cheezy ? ;-) (I'm assuming its binaries right? no way I'm compiling x.org / kde on my amiga )

Haha, no - it was mostly buildt on my A1200, but eventually I moved it to a PC running Aranym (atari emulator) where I build all the stuff now. Also, don't worry about x.org - there's no X11 in my distro

Cheezy has received a mTec 68020i card btw. one of these days as I get the spirit (and find some room), I'll set it up and enjoy the upgrade

[Jose]

Haven't read the whole thread(!) but I'd buy it too, not just for the stack but to show support for the time Olaf takes answering all the questions at utilitybase. Unfortunately utilitybase can be somewhat dangerous to acess with an x86 machine nowdays though:)

[olsen]

In case you are interested, here are some speed test figures, which can also be found in the http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=54698 thread. I just finished the A1200HD and A600HD tests, so let's have a look:

Ariadne I, Roadshow 4.69, A3000T (040, 40 MHz)
891 KBytes/s

Ariadne II, Roadshow 4.69, A3000T (040, 40 MHz)
845 KBytes/s

A2065, Roadshow 4.69, A3000T (040, 40 MHz)
781 KBytes/s

Ariadne I, Roadshow 4.69, A3000UX (060, 50 MHz)
891 KBytes/s

Ariadne I, Miami 3.2b SANA-II, A3000UX (060, 50 MHz)
669 KBytes/s

Ariadne I, Miami 3.2b MNI, A3000UX (060, 50 MHz)
882 KBytes/s

Ariadne I, Miami Deluxe 1.0c SANA-II, A3000UX (060, 50 MHz)
633 KBytes/s

Ariadne I, Miami Deluxe 1.0c MNI, A3000UX (060, 50 MHz)
860 KBytes/s

Ariadne I, AmiTCP/IP Genesis 4.6, A3000UX (060, 50 MHz)
812 KBytes/s

Ariadne I, Roadshow 4.71, A3000UX (060, 50 MHz)
916 KBytes/s

Ariadne I, Roadshow 4.162, A3000UX (060, 50 MHz)
941 KBytes/s

Ariadne I, Roadshow 4.205, A3000T (040, 40 MHz)
977 KBytes/s

As you can see, Roadshow goes about as fast as the 10 MBit/s Ethernet hardware will permit. None of the alternatives (Miami, AmiTCP) come as close to the hardware limit as Roadshow does.

Now for the downer:

PCMCIA NE2000 card with cnet.device 1.9, Roadshow 4.294, A1200HD (14 MHz 68EC020; 4 MBytes of fast memory)
480 KByte/s

PCMCIA NE2000 card with cnet.device 1.9, Roadshow 4.294, A600HD (7 MHz 68000; 2 MBytes of chip memory, no fast memory)
134 KByte/s

As you can see, the A600HD is about as fast as molasses going up a hill in January, on crutches. But it shows that the stack works under low memory conditions on the lowest of the low end configurations. This is barely faster than sneakernet...

[buzz]

I think that speed is pretty impressive for an a600! (and for the other machines). I used to have my a500 connected via PLIP and that is much slower (and before that SLIP.. eek)

[Christian Johansson]

Impressive speeds indeed. I'm also willing to pay €10-15 for it.

[rzookol]

@Olaf

Very nice results. I see that an EAB topic is a bit more technical I wonder how many KB/s i can get using my 3com pcmcia lan card.

btw. How about making a new driver specification (SANA3) for all amigalike systems?.  Morphos and OS4 have already drivers for 1 gbit NICs so i it could be useful.

[Vulture]

Great results on pcmcia! I get those speeds (and often lower) on my A1200 w 060@80 via MiamiDX!