kraszewski.jpg* Can you tell us a bit about yourself.Well, this pretty typical question gets pretty typical answer. I'm 39
years old, live in Bialystok, Poland. I work at local technical university
as a technican. Married, two children. Nothing special. I guess anyone
just skips it to read more interesting questions
, so let's go
and answer them.
* Tell us a bit about your computer history.Hmm, it started about 1987 as far as I remember. I had an opportunity to
use a Timex 2048 at school, also someone from my family has got an Atari
65 XE. At the same time I've read all about computers I could get. There
were some popular paper magazines in Poland like "Bajtek", "Iks" and some
other. I've mostly played on computers I had access to, but some day I
have impressed my family by writing a program in Atari Basic playing some
music. Unfortunately my parents could not afford a computer for me. Then
being in the last class of a college I've got some prize from the
school so I was able to buy an Atari 65 XE with XC12 tape recorder. It was
in 1992, so the stuff was a bit obsolete already, but well. Later I've
bought a floppy drive (it was more expensive than the computer itself).
I've started to program my Atari in Basic, but after some time I have
switched to 6502 assembler... I've learned to program the chipset: Antic,
Pokey, GTIA. In the meantime I've finished the college and entered
university. I've started to think about getting an Atari ST.
* When did you first get in touch with Amiga and later MorphOS?Fortunately some of my mates at university had relatively modern
computers. I visited some of them, trying PC/AT and Amiga 1200. I may say
I fell in love with Amiga. Of course A1200 was way too expensive for me
those days, but in 1994 I could buy a second hand Amiga 500. The first
program I've tried was ProTracker 1.1A. It took a few sleepless nights
. Anyway while I like to compose some awful music
, I'm mostly
programmer. My first program on Amiga has been written in Amiga Basic and
was some boring university problem. As I like low-level programming I
have learned 68000 assembler and got some books on Amiga chipset
programming. Two years later I've discovered C language, started to
learning the Amiga operating system, got a harrdisk and Kickstart 3.0,
experimented with Amiga E a bit. After working through 1997 holidays as a
construction worker, I could afford an Amiga 1200, followed quickly by
Blizzard 1230-IV... Let's skip a few years and we have 2002, I'm selling
my A4000 with CyberStormPPC, UW-SCSI hard disk and Prometheus, because
Pegasos I from Genesi is waiting for me at customs.
After being an AmigaOS 4 betatester for a few months (it was at times when
some future AmigaOS 4 components were still 68k, so I've tested them on
my A4000), I've been approached by Genesi via Jacek Piszczek. They had a
job proposal for me, which I've accepted. While still working on A4000
I've written a completely new sound.datatype for MorphOS and a set of
sub-datatypes. What is really funny I've written them as 68k code, then it
has been recompiled for MorphOS by Genesi. As they were satisfied with my
work, they decided to send me a Pegasos. Then since 2002 I'm one of
MorphOS developers.
* What do you do when your not working on MorphOS?I very like programming, so I often spend 14 or more hours a day with
computers. There are also usual family duties... My other activities are
biking and composing some music. I also like to read a good book,
especially on quantum physics or cosmology, but also criminal stories and
political fiction. I must admit however, my life is dominated by computers
and programming.
* What are your part in the MorphOS development?In the MorphOS Team there are no strict assignments. We identify needed
development, then during some discussions we decide who takes given task.
Of course all of us have areas of experience and interest. My area is
digital signal processing. Then it is no surprise that my main
contribution to MorphOS is Reggae - an object oriented media processing
framework. On the other hand I also did many smaller things unrelated to
Reggae.
* Can you give us some examples of things you have been involved in?Reggae is the big thing for me. The whole concept and most its classes are
mine. Lately Michal Zukowski added many image decoders and encoders.
Another big project is my Lua language port. Sounds easy, but it is not
just a plain port, I would call it system integration. It has MorphOS
native dynamic module loader, support for ARexx ports. I also plan to
implement MUI module, so Lua will become not only versatile scripting
language, but also easy to use general purpose language for less demanding
applications.
Looking at minor things - I've for example implemented bugraport.library,
largely contibuted to charsets.library (including a shell command
ConvertText), wrote an extensive, updated documentation for
utility.library and so on. There are also a few things in progress.
* What is the biggest challenge you have been facing when developing MorphOS?Lack of free time. Fortunately bounties give me some freedom, as I can
reject some part-time work and code for MorphOS instead. I guess, you've
asked for programming challenges however. In fact there are none. Of
course there are problems to solve, but it is everyday programmer's
bread, so I see nothing challenging in it.
* Are you working on some features that we will se in MorphOS in the future?You can expect more Reggae classes and functionality. I also plan to add
MUI module (and maybe Reggae module) to Lua.
* What are the biggest challenges MorphOS is facing?Size of the community and low number of experienced programmers. While
number of users increases slowly, most of them are people choosing MorphOS
as their "return to Amiga" after years. Young users having no Amiga
background are rarity (but they still come). Of course users are
attracted by software, and when we exclude MorphOS Team members, there are
only a few people able to write high quality software for MorphOS. Porting
crappy SDL games is not the way...
* In the event of an architecture change, what would you prefer and why?I have no preference in fact. There are two serious candidates for now,
x86_64 and ARM. Both have advantages and disadvantages. While ARM is
trendy now and may be considered more elegant from an engineer point of
view, Intel platform provides more computing power and seems to be more
open when we talk about available hardware documentation. Most popular ARM
devices are totally closed in this regard (Apple and Samsung devices).
Another chance is emerging market of "community computers" like Raspberry
Pi. The Pi however is a bit underpowered and still it is not fully open in
terms of hadrware specifications. I assume however more community driven
projects will appear, and this may be an advantage for ARM.
It may also happen that PowerPC vendors will try to go similar way. I've
read some announcements of "$200 PowerPC platform". If it gains some
momentum it may happen that we will stay on PowerPC for now.
* What future if any do you see for the PPC platform? Well, it is rather hard to predict. Seems that Freescale given up with
consumer electronics and personal computer market, emphasizing industrial
and IT applications. Unfortunately it may mean that no affordable
hardware, which may be used as a personal computer, will be avaliable in
the future. On the other hand there are project like this:
http://www.servergy.com/products/p-cubed/
If it comes into reality, it may be nice platform for MorphOS.
* Why should anyone chose MorphOS over any other OS? This is wrong question. In fact MorphOS is not a system for anyone. I
would not recommend it for a regular Windows user for example. I would
recommend MorphOS to two categories of people:
1. People with Amiga experience and background, wanting to have "modern
Amiga". MorphOS works on wide range of affordable hardware including
laptops, this hardware is much more powerful, also MorphOS can be just
everyday system with its up-to-date webbrowser and other nice software.
2. People who want simple yet useful operating system to play with.
MorphOS is lean and straightforward. It gives full control to the user,
and because of its simplicity, one can simply know "what's going on" with
the computer. MorphOS is also easy to program with its modular API, and
gives a feeling of programing "close to the metal" for those, who like it.
On the other hand it provides well known GCC toolchain and also known
high-level languages like Python or Lua. MorphOS has also friendly
community
.
* What future do you see for MorphOS? A steady growth. It will never become a mainstream system (who wants it
anyway?
), but its niche will grow, userbase and software base will
increase slowly but systematically.
* What would you like to see in MorphOS in the future? Well, I have a few dreams, which may (or may not) turn into plans. They
are technically possible, but may never happen due to lack of free time.
1. Full Unicode support. While large parts of it are in place already,
some key elements are still missing.
2. Using additional processors/cores as co-processors (so-called
assymetric multiprocessing). This is the only way MorphOS can go multicore
without breaking backward compatibility.
3. Replacing AHI with a modern audio subsystem. AHI has some serious
design flaws and should stay only as a compatibility layer.
* Is there anything you would like to say to the MorphOS community? Be active. User feedback is one of the strongest driving force for
developers. And Happy New Year 2013 for everyone
.
Regards
--
Grzegorz Kraszewski
