Must admit, my first parse of the thread subject had me thinking of alternatives to abox and even completely alternate OSes like HaikuOS...

Speaking of memory above 1.5GB being used a ramdisk, how about a reintroduction of soft resets? Remember how classic Amigas could boot from a recoverable ramdisk? I think the device was called RAD: Even without booting from memory, it'd be nice to have a reset option that didn't go all the way back to open firmware.

> Remember how classic Amigas could boot from a recoverable ramdisk?
> I think the device was called RAD:

"System memory is no longer zeroed at startup, memory resident RAD can work again"
http://www.morphos-team.net/releasenotes/2.1

boot_wb,
Quote:

No chance seeing HotBorder inside any MorphOS official distribution. This is a ** hack **. The only proper way of seeing HotBorder features inside MorphOS is extending Intuition layer.

As a side note, HotBorder 1.2 is just released. It fixes qualifier for window dragging.

Wifi support and nvidia graphics support.

How about ASMP so that we could run a Linux variant on the second processor simultaneouly?

re: linux variant - an lbox to run in qbox...

Yes Arm is slower than PPC but it has a brighter future and is a lot cheaper!

Thanks. I will try Grunch.

wifi wifi wifi!

[ Edited by rebraist 05.02.2013 - 13:53 ]

> How about ASMP so that we could run a Linux variant on the
> second processor simultaneouly?

Running a whole modern operating system as a single MorphOS ABox task encapsulated on the slave core would be reaching too high for a start I think. Let's better start with something more easy like video decoding/encoding or dnetc :-)

> re: linux variant - an lbox to run in qbox...

Wouldn't that rather be an LBox running besides QBox, with both running on Quark?

@Andreas_Wolf ok, have it your way.

Outside of the MorphOS developer circle, how much is known about Quark and QBox? btw I confess, I thought Quark and QBox were the same thing.

> how much is known about Quark and QBox?

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=5317&forum=3&start=15
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7405&forum=3&start=5

And 2 infamous threads on the topic which several MorphOS Team members took part in:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6248&forum=3
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6319&forum=12

SoundSquare,
Quote:

(Indignant) I would say for retroAmigans there's AROS 68k. There's very little retro about proprietary PPC hardware and it suffers because of it. If talking about proprietary hardware, I'd much rather have an FPGAArcade Replay board running AROS than any PPC.

(Back on topic)
If the goal is to redecorate the OS in order to leave away the parts that don't make sense, there's already AROS ABI v1 for AMD64. It needs a lot of work though. Perhaps compatibility with Deadwood's Gallium3d drivers for x86 ABI v0 on AROS would be a good goal for jointly developing some of MorphOS 4.x in conjunction with the AROS team.

For starters: I was around when the first A1000 was launched, I used a pimped up 500 later a 1200 until work and school required me to go Intel. With pain in my soul, I saw how commercial organizations destroyed Amiga and cashed in on the brand and IP. So these things below are not written by someone that wants to troll but someone that really believes this needs to be done. I can imagine, people with strong idea's might oppose mine, thats great, but stay polite :)

The future of Morphos is unclear. Although, I did not do any reseach on the population of Amiga/Morphos users, I suspect most of them to be older. Younger people should get involved. We also need more developers. I don't know how many developers there are, but its really a small amount compared to Linux / Mac or Windows. If there are 10 hardcore developers of MorphOs ( I mean the Core OS) I applaude all of them, because its a hell of a job to develop and maintain code, handle users with wishes, while you also have your own private views on things that need to be done.

Besides some obvious things like a decent network stack and the ultimate transition to X64 (old hardware dies and dissapears) before that time, the group of potential developers can be bigger.

The MorphOS compiler is based on GCC? How about porting QT? A world of KDE apps then become available. I sometimes write small (10.000+ lines) simple programs in FreeBasic (it has pointers and objects, so yes, you can hang your self in the real c/c++ way) and that compiler is written in C and compiled with gcc. So why not port that? I would love to give that a shot, the FB developers are (I believe, not sure) willing enough to give some support, but I do need lots of support in the MorpHOS world. There are more languages on this planet and going c only keeps out other developers. I find c/c++ simply to ugly to work with.

You can bash M$ any way you like, but their visual studio has one advantage: You can create the bones of an application by drag and drop and then add the code that does the work. Apple also has such a thing. Why write a line of C code that describes a window while you can draw it on a canvas and add all the required components by drag and drop? Make programming easier, more modern, then writing c in vi (really syntax colors in textpad are not that big jump forwards). Eclipse?

There are open implementations of Java, its missing.

I personally would love to run MorphOs all day long, if I had a decent spreadsheet, text editor, torrent downloader, NZB downloader, par2 repair, unrar etc and SAMBA for connecting to M$ based systems. I live in email but any mail client that does not offer a comparable functionality as Outlook is not usefull for me, because all my meetings are registered in Outlooks agenda and synced to hotmail and gmail, so I can have them in any system.

The architecture of the Amiga operating system is what kept it alive, but somethings are missing. Using scout to kill a task that doesn't respond anymore? The multitasking of Amiga OS, was great, task management was a crime. A simpleUnix like Kill -9 [PID] that simply removed the entry from the tasklist / freed up allocated memory / released all handle's would be nice.

At the risc of war: Both Morphos and Amiga OS are commercial products, fighting in the same niche. How about working together instead of against each other. You don't need to compete on everything, build a common kernel, with drivers and hardware support. Build on that kernel what you want and how you want. It works in the Linux world, so why not in the Amiga world. In my Windows PC I run WinUAE with Scalos. Why not work together there? Since DOPus Magelan code is available, there is a chance for creating a new desktop environment.

I know the Amiga's didn't do right mouse button clicks, MagicMenu added that. Ambient has it in a limited way, if MysticView is the application with focus, I expect to right-click with my mouse and to see the menu of MysticView but that doesn't happen if I do that somewhere on the desktop. It was something I got with MagicMenu.

And so, I could go on, but I bored you enough: in short, better development tools, better end-users tools for day-2-day use, adoption of some modern GUI concepts.

Cheers

MorphOS could need some minor improvements in Ambient imo, but i think after the G5 Port the Devs should focus on bringing some badly needed software to MorphOS like OpenOffice, VPN Client, a nice and fully equipped soundplayer (equalizer and sound enhancement) and other things.
I think after that they could integrate multiprocessing in the way Andreas_Wolf was talking about (video encoding/decoding), if thats possible in ABox.

Regarding Ambient, i'd like to see a string gadget in the browser mode, where i can enter the path to a file directly and a search string.
Ambient settings integrated in the system settings.
system friendly HotBorder functionality
real Screen Dragging
2GB Ram support for 32bit machines
a few more eyecandy 3d effects (i.e. open/close window) :)

@Cego

>Ambient settings integrated in the system settings.

Ambient is an application and therefore it has (and should keep) it's own preferences.

Even more so as Ambient-prefs has 1000 options (I didn't count them) and is likely to get even more (actually it allready got more thanks to an unnamed Klingon Klown).

i dont look at ambient as a standalone programm. it is the desktop environment of morphos and therefore it should be accessable through system settings. it is just confusing to have 4 different settings hidden in the menu. a lot of morphos newbies complained about it, that they had to search a while to find it.

As a bit of blue sky thinking, Maybe move the MUI settings into the generic setting bit too?


Dunno how you'd set up the specific Ambient MUI settings though.

i mean, all the original amiga prefs were also seprate programms, but you still moved them all together into one preferences programm. i dont see a problem there. at least MUI settings could be integrated into the corresponding settings programm. and make ambient settings available as an icon or put them both (ambient and system prefs) as sbar icons into the titlebar.

@cego

Press / to enable string input mode in ambient listers.


As for individual settings from icons like AmigaOS, it's actually doable.

For system preferences, you would create a script for each preference entry (i.e mossys:prefs/preferences mossys:prefs/mprefs/screenmode.mprefs), and for ambient, you would write a script like rx "address AMBIENT; settings"

I think it's a good point, that Ambient settings can be missed if user doesn't find pull down menus at first place. It would be a good idea to have Ambient prefs icon by default in Prefs drawer. Like there is system and mui preferences already.

@Fab

is there a way to make this as default? i think this is way more handy than the path buttons.

oh and another suggestion, maybe you could fix up german keyboard mapping for powerbook. The @ button is mapped on Q, but on the german keyboard layout of the powerbook it is on the L letter.

oh and external display support with different resolutions.

> 2GB Ram support for 32bit machines

If the current 31-bit restriction got lifted it would be 3.5 GiB instead of the 1.5 it's now.

Andreas_Wolf,
Quote:
It cannot be lifted (safely). I tried that years ago and it just broke too many things.