I guess "MorphOS" link in the first paragraph should point to morphos-team.net, not to morphos.de. The second one is redirected to the first now, but anyway...

Of course all these features and more are provided in MorphOS by Quark.

This is not true. MorphOS preemptive multitasking as we can see it now is provided by exec.library still, not by Quark. All the current MorphOS is basically a single Quark thread, as it is mentioned below in the text.

modern system like MorphOS, which is able to manage current 2D/3D GFX boards

It may be a bit misleading for "outside world" reader, who hardly considers R200 Radeons as "current" boards.

AmigaDOS commands (most of which are Unix-like)

A regular Linux user may be a bit surprised - there are no 'ls', 'rm' and most of typical unix-like commands. I would say that using the right direction of slashes in paths, does not make a shell Unix-like .

at the huge repository of free and shareware Amiga software, Aminet, that currently contains almost 79,000 software packages.

37000 of these packages are not software. For the rest maybe 10% of them are usable on MorphOS...

[ Edited by Krashan on 2009/11/1 12:27 ]

Quote:

That is why I wrote my last message, asking the team for direction, as we all know that there are at least a couple of team members that regularly read these forums and often post replies to questions about MOS.

I hope that they will relay to the rest of the MOSTeam the fact that many members here are not only willing to help promote MorphOS, but actually want to take actions to do so and would like some direction from the team, about how the team would like us to proceed and just as important, what the team does NOT want us to do as we are promoting MorphOS.

There is no reason we can't do this to help the team promote, with a minimal amount of direction, or guidelines from the MOSTeam members, as I do not want to take time away from their more important work of improving MorphOS code. The team should realize that all of us that have posted suggestions in this thread just want to help in what ever way we can to increase the number of MOS users and hopefully, developers too, who will write more apps and games for MOS. More users will lead to more registration fees for the team.

@Krashan

Thank you very much for your input. Except (at least for now) for the Aminet remark I've implemented it meanwhile. After all it's also a bit about advertising, and the following sentence makes clear that the number is about Amiga software in general, not specifically MorphOS stuff. But since you are absolutely correct about the "software packages", of course, I've at least changed this into "files".

@amigadave

Well, bigfoot's interview was already mentioned here, where he said that "the best way to help is probably to get the word out" and that this and other kinds of support (e.g. suggestions and bug reports) are appreciated - and right now we've got even a proof-reading of MTLOS by a Team member, thus I'd guess at least such kind of promotion they don't mind. ;-)

@all

As you've seen so far I just made removals and corrections mainly. Next weekend I'd also like to actually add some "new" stuff (i.e. what emerged since MorphOS 1.4.5) that is worth mentioning, thus any suggestions by everyday users are very much appreciated.

Personally I'll of course also study the MorphOS release notes since then carefully (didn't manage to do so today), but besides the OS itself maybe (certainly?!) there has also been some note-worthy third-party software published since then. Anything someone of you can think of?

I think the article is not bad,but a bit too long. I'd move teh description of the apps to a seperate doc. i once was preparing a several chapter doc. One for the system, one for the basic apps, one for hardware and one for programming (IIRC). I finished only the 1st one and hadn't released it back then (three years ago or so). It was written in English, maybe it would be worthwhile to dig it out again and update and improve it.
Anyway for some stuff I still reference to the current version "MorphOS im Detail" - which kind of copes with the current situation but is very historic, still too long (I should skip much of the hw part and straigten the historic view), too dry (o pics, but lightweight pdf) and the current version yet only available in German. Anyway if someone cares, here's the link: http://via.i-networx.de/docs/mid-German-2.4.pdf

> I am frankly surprised that none of the MOSTeam members have posted anything in
> this thread.

Not true, tokai and Henes posted on page 2, ASiegel on page 3. That's about 16% of the MorphOS team (and even 21% together with Krashan, who posted after your complaint), which is not that bad ;-)

> I guess "MorphOS" link in the first paragraph should point to morphos-team.net, not
> to morphos.de. The second one is redirected to the first now

Really? Doesn't seem so to me:

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.morphos.de
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.morphos-team.net

Quote:

Caught me again in my ignorance of which nicknames here belong to the MOSTeam and which do not. I do appreciate their contributions to this thread, but I would like more direct communications from the team and have them identify that the message is from a member of the MOSTeam, when they do contribute. Something along the lines of;

"As a team member", or "As a member of the MOSTeam". Then follow it with "my opinion is", this or that should or should not be done, and explain why. Or a simple, "I like that idea", or "I have talked with, or texted with other members of the team and we agree that" xyz should or should not be done, with a short reason why.

Maybe I am asking for too much to think that the team talks with each other on a fairly often basis and that they share opinions and views about what is being discussed here on these forums. And if that is the case, it is okay. I would not think any less of them, as I know that the work they are doing and have done takes many hours to complete and they hopefully also have lives to participate in, outside of anything to do with MorphOS and computers.

It would be useful to those of us who want to help and want to support the team and other MorphOS users, if we knew how the team deals with promoting MorphOS and if the team wants to have any input on how the users promote MorphOS in the future. That question should not take up too much of their time, as it is not my intent to slow them down, or make it any harder for them to do the work they already do. I just want to help and would like to give the team the first opportunity to suggest what kind of help they would most appreciate, and that they feel would be most beneficial, before going off in a direction with a few other members here and then finding out later that the team dislikes what we are doing for any reason. Everyone here knows that I am still a newbie when it comes to knowledge of MorphOS, but now that I have it running on my MacMini, I plan to learn much faster through using it every day. I hope that most also know what I have done to show MorphOS at the last two AmiWest Shows and realize that I sincerely want to help MorphOS succeed and to grow stronger with more users and developers. (also that I write too much some times)

> Caught me again in my ignorance of which nicknames here belong to the
> MOSTeam and which do not.

For a start, have a look at "Ambient" -> "about MorphOS" -> "Credits". Additionally, try the easter egg #2 for the nicknames. But beware, some of the nicknames here on MorphZone are different from their usual ones, e.g. cyfm is pega-1 here, as you might know by now ;-)

Thanks Andreas, I have checked for their real names but did not know that there was any easter eggs that showed their nick names.

I did get a PMail from one of the team members as a reply to a message I sent him and he confirmed a few things that I already suspected. He stressed that he was expressing only his opinion, and not that of the whole team, but I also think that most, or many of the other team members think the same way when it comes to promoting MorphOS. What he said was that great care should be taken when trying to promote MorphOS outside the greater Amiga community. Unless someone is really interested in using or playing around with alternative OSes, they are not likely to be a good candidate to promote MorphOS to, until it has matured a little longer and more good software is written for it.

As always, it is hard to attract new developers to any new OS, and without those same developers, it is hard to get a sufficient amount of good software written for your OS.

But with all of that said, I still believe that if done properly, we can attract some new people to use, play around with, and even to write some code for our MorphOS.

Without his permission I will not reveal who it was from the team that wrote to me, and it really doesn't matter who it was, as the same information could have easily come from any of them.

So I still encourage all of you to do all you can to promote MorphOS, specially to current and former Amiga users. If you have any programming skills, then please write something new for MOS2.x, or join with others who are already writing code to help them complete their projects.

I for one am still interested in reading about what others think can be done to promote MOS in the future and hope that this thread will continue to grow with more ideas.

Really? Doesn't seem so to me:

At least contents is the same.

@amigadave

If a MorphOS Team member posts something for the team then this posts are clearly marked as such (see the recent thread about MorphOS for PowerUP registration status).

Else all posts by the MorphOS Team members here in public forums are primarily to see as posts by individuals and express their very own opinion (which may or may not the opinion of other team members, too).

Senex : could you start a new theard for the update of this article ?

Fulvio Peruggi contacted me some times ago for updating this article. Until now, I was not able to find time to do this.

I will reread the article and make suggestion soon (but in the new thread).

@amigadave

Quote:

1. Use MorphOS
2. Do something cool/interesting/fun
3. Write a program/script/short article/tutorial/how-to/review/note or grab a screenshot
4. Post it to MorphZone/Aminet/Your blog/Facebook/My Space/Twitter
5. Go to 1.

Enjoy!

@Daff, Good idea.

@koan, I like that 5 step process, I'll have to try it out for myself in the near future.

@amigadave

I think you misunderstand: it's not something to "try". You should be doing that process every day. It's a way of life.

Another way is to participate in these forums.

It's nice to have an active community

Indeed. It's significant to see how "powerdeveloper.org" has dropped to a minimum activity, right after Genesi's decision to go ARM, while "morph.zone" has raised.

Well, I'd like to promote it but, for the way I'd like to promote it, it's almost impossible in this current state. Bear with me for a moment.

When I saw the video in jPV's article about MorphOS in its fully customized and fully tuned glory on this site, I was really excited and sold. Several other screenshots I saw on the web also looked amazing. I promptly bought a Mac Mini and happily started to experiment.

However, the path to reach that customized and "just works" state seem to require a lot of low-level work, Googling, finding many unintuitive and obscure settings to adjust or turn on/off, installing scary packages from shady-looking web sites, patching core GUI libraries and, of course, numerous and numerous system reboots. That is perfectly fine for people who have time and like tinkering on the low level while reminding themselves that most of that stuff used to be worse or impossible on Amiga. It's also OK for people who take pride in their heavily customized system on the level that is impossible to achieve with other OSes.

However, what I think it would be really useful, is to have another, bigger, distribution of MorphOS which would include all those things which are now missing but are de-facto expected from someone who is considering switching from another OS and paying 150 euros on top of that. Here are some examples which I stumbled upon:

- all the latest MUI stuff should be snapshotted from sourceforge and automatically included. We are not anymore dealing with 20MB HDDs. User should not be bothered with low-level GUI elements and widgets. They should simply work.
- all the latest other libraries (arexxx.library or whatever it is -- I don't want to know!) should be snapshotted from sourceforge and included and preinstalled
- youtube videos should be playable in web browser
- SSL should be supported from scratch
- windows should behave in de-facto expected way: have the move offscreen, have them remember their position... let users later discover the powerful customizations but don't scare them away first
- there has to be a simple way of invoking the most common programs (browser, email, console, image viewer, sound player) from some dock and it should be pre-configured in that way so it's visible and approachable immediately
- several top-games should be preinstalled and ready to be shown
- libraries needed by those games also (last night I had to install several libraries before I was able to run some (excellent) games!)
- i am sure there are more things...

This should be achieved as a parallel effort to the original "core" CD. Let the installation script finish and then let another post-install script go and customize and install the other stuff. I know there might be an issue with distribution rights, etc, but I am just thinking out loud. And if this seems too much, I always say "shoot for the moon" and then see what happens.

In other words, the current original CD is just the bare minimum. While I respect the minimalism, I think what we need now is a more bloated (if you want to call it that way) but much more usable for someone who wants to try it out. It's easy to delete stuff you don't need later, right? And especially easy if there is no trash can

BUT! My REAL point is this: If I had a such CD, I would be able to go to many of friends and their friends, relatives, kids... who I am sure have Mac Mini G4 sitting somewhere and collecting dust (because it's simply slow under OS X), boot from it and show them MorphOS in "all that heavenly glory" ((c) Bruce Lee) and try to convince them that it's something worth looking and, eventually, purchasing. Unfortunately, I cannot do that right now unless I physically carry my Mini (which is still in a relatively lame state even after several hours of tinkering) with me. I cannot afford installing MorphOS from scratch and then spending non-trivial time and effort customizing it for them since it would just scare them away.

I think, for the promoting purposes, having such CD would help a lot.

Quote:

Sourceforge releases are way too unstable to be snapshotted constantly. (The software should not use sf.net MUI classes anymore either (MUI4 offers most features they need...) but since we dont have control over software developers we have to live with that...)

Quote:

I agree... problem here is that Amiga users are quite conservative. And when most of users (including the MorphOS Team) are used to certain practices it is difficult to change it.

Even Ambient (the desktop) is following some stupid Workbench practices I wouldnt want to see anymore...

I guess solution would be introducing some default prefs sets.

Quote:

Noted

Quote:

Not so much once you know about the expected softwares. I guess the most difficult point for a newbie is to know about the available softwares.

Quote:

MorphOS is not Linux. It shouldn't be officially distributed with third party softwares/libraries for which no support is possible. Only softwares under the full control of the OS developpers have to be included in the official distribution. Anything else would lead to a real mess in support and overall quality.

Additionaly, I guess there are some software license issues too.

Quote:

Most 3rd party MUI libraries are expected by specific softwares that automatically install them during the installation process.

Quote:

ARexx scripting is not even supported by MorphOS (you must own AmigaOS 3.x to add Arexx scripting support to MorphOS). Then, why theses libraries should be included? Moreover, they are 68k-only.

Quote:

How?

Quote:

None of the included native softwares require it.

Quote:

I fully disagree this point. The normal behavious is "no-offscreen" and "remember when I want". I really hate when the windows recall they position from the last usage! That just makes no sense: if I made a mess while working, I don't want to get this mess back the next time I'll use my computer. The windows should open the default position I asked them to, nothing else.

Quote:

I agree, why not a default panel like under AmigaOS.

Quote:

Expect license problems.

Quote:

Some people made some extra software packages (on Meta-MorphOS french web site) but I don't know about their quality since I never used them.

Quote:

Once your installation is done, you just have to pack anything that is not in MOSSYS: in a archive and you just have your "expansion package".


[ Edited by Jeckel on 2010/1/13 9:46 ]

Quote:

Just burn your current system including all the bells and whistles but excluding your personal data and copies of commercial software to a CD. Boot off that cd at the friend's computers and there you go. A full installation to go.
You can put in on a usb stick, too, but AFAIK you cannot cold boot from an usb stick.

But I see some of your points and they are of course valid, but things are difficult and availability of resources limit the pace of MorphOS development. It developed quite well in recent time. And I also think that MorphOS should stay clean and lean (but a few settings should be changed by default, as well as all MOSSYS: files should get the -wd protection bits to avoid random chamges in there.

Once there was a nice 3rd party essentials package. I think that is rather the way to go. With just one download and one big installation script you get most of the usually required 3rd party stuff then.

[ Edited by Zylesea on 2010/1/13 12:31 ]

Quote:

Nothing on the CD requires those libraries. The libs / classes there change often and they'd most likely be obsolete at the time we would finish testing for a new release. Those classes and libs often do not meet our internal standards, therefore we do not want them to be part of our OS. Adding them would practically mean forking them and us putting a LOT of time into fixing / improving them. We simply don't have the time for that.

Quote:

And they most likely will be once the flash plugin goes out of a beta stage. At the time we released MorphOS 2.4 the flash plugin wasn't really in a state in which we could bundle it with the OS.

Quote:

Well... there's a SSH frontend bundled with the system. No system component needs those libraries. OWB handles it internally. Until we have the time to write our own email application or integrate an existing one there is no need to bundle this with the OS imo. One of our rules is that we don't bundle software we have no control of and don't bundle software that doesn't meet our quality standards or does not follow the GUI / usability guidelines. Now, we'd love to put some work into adapting SimpleMail or YAM, but we haven't got the time to do that currently. I'm not sure users would appreciate us delaying PowerMac and PowerBook support because we've spent all our time on improving 3rd party software.

Quote:

Well... some 'Amiga user' / 'OSX/Windows user' presets could probably make sense when installing the system :)

Quote:

Which games exactly ? I doubt we could bundle them due to licensing issues. You probably do not know, but MorphOS was once bundled with an extra CD containing several commercial applications and games. Sadly, the MorphOS Team doesn't have the license for these.

We're working on adding more stuff to the MorphOS ISO, but this is a slow process that requires a lot of work and testing. Expect some new goodies on the 2.5 ISO though ;)

"there has to be a simple way of invoking the most common programs (browser, email, console, image viewer, sound player) from some dock [...]"

There is a simple way already, just add an Ambient panel from screenbar menu.

"I agree, why not a default panel like under AmigaOS."

There is no panel (besides 3rd party programs) in AmigaOS 3.1 at all. But ok, probably newer version has a panel on in default settings.

I assume that newbies need a manual with basics, something like AmigaOS 1.3 manuals (i don't have newer ones :)).

"windows should behave in de-facto expected way: have the move offscreen, have them remember their position... [...]"

Offscreen is one of the function I enabled first after a fresh install of MorphOS. So I agree.
But "remember position" is not a good idea (see Jeckel post).

BTW, I think the iconify button must be added by default. MUI have lots of nice features for windows gadget but the default MorphOS setup have only two options (zoom and depth).

Quote:

Aye. In my opinion, the "Welcome to MorphOS" should be some kind of presentation to the system, and thus be very, very much more complete. Thatt's the kind of huuuuuge task that none of the programmers in the Team will appeal to do, not to mention their very tight time resources.
It's the kind of goodie you add to a system when it's so complete and finished that you don't have anything else to do, and thus employ your time in making welcome applications. So, perhaps it's even more unlikely than MorphOS for x86...

Moreover... Regular people (those for which these goodies are targeted) never read explanations at all! How many people press "F1" ("help") on their Windows boxes? How many of them realize the biblic proportions of the effort to make those help functions that they ignore?

Computers are, usually, superior to people (because they are made by superior people).