Dear MOS users. I made a new installation of MOS 1.4.5 with all the updates installed, and the latest MUI version. But I have a problem with the "List" view of a folder. When I select to change the view from icons to list, then the window is flashing very fast, like it tries to make the change, but it never changes and it sticks there. The snoopdos doesn't show anything wrong.

Do you have any clue what is going on? What should I check?

Try to download the latest 'nightly build'.....

Regards Tom

I prefer not to install a nightly build. Also, the previous installation I had didn't have such a problem. I don't want to make a new installation again. So, do you have any clue how to trace the problem and solve it? Could this be a problem of fonts? A MUI problem? A configuration problem or what?

Thank you all for your time.

I fixed this very fast flashing on friend's MorphOS 1.4.5. I think it was because of HD with uncleared MBR. Try this command, no data will be lost:

hdwrite ide.device <UNIT> C:reboot 0

<UNIT> replace with unit number of your flashing harddrive, usually 0.

BTW. I recommend you to install latest Ambient build. It's stable and has very nice improvements compared with Ambient 1.41 SE included in MorphOS 1.4.5:

- localization
- filetypes recognition
- file search
- list view with small icons
- toolbar
- new settings (f.e. shortcuts)
- My MorphOS icon (all devices, assigns)
- DO command
- optimalizations
- etc.


[ Edited by luky-amiga on 2007/8/17 18:59 ]

Ambient included in 1.4.5 is really outdated and you wouldn't loose anything by installing a recent version. The only thing is that newer ambient needs MUI4 as well.

And MUI4 makes Voyager not working correctly and slowdowns NList applications a lot because of the constant error debug output.
Just so he is warned and can make a choice :-)

I have already installed the v1.43 of Ambient. What I said before is that I prefer not to install one of the nightly builds that are not stable enough yet. Anyway. The problem is that the window flashing and the not changing to a list view still exists. Do you know where should I check first?

Finally I found out that the problem was at the latest MUI beta version. I installed the previous one and everything worked just fine. I'll keep this one and then I will see if there are more incompatibilities. Thanks anyway for your time.

I have both latest mui/ambient nightly and they work fine...

This is because list.mui from latest MUI beta has a new feature: horizontal scrollers.

Older ambient had to tweak something to make vertical scroller disappear with first MUI4.0alpha that was buggy in this regard, but this tweak doesn't behave very well with latest MUI version. Newer ambient have just removed this 4.0alpha workaround and thus work well with latest MUI beta.

And BTW, nightlies aren't more unstable than old 1.43 snapshot, it's rather the contrary.

I was using an older older version of Ambient 1.43 (19 November 2006). Feature-wise, it was a BIG leap from the horrible Ambient 1.41 and i was surprised when i saw that it actually consumes less CPU and the increase in memory consumption was very small!
After i installed the latest MUI biuld, i was forced to update to a newer Ambient 1.43 (14 July 2007) due to the mentioned problem above.
My impression on this newer Ambient is that although it seems like a rather small apdate, it consume more CPU on complete idling (About 1% more, according to statline, which is ridiculous for a >=G3 but it might be considerable for a 603) and it consumes about 8-9MB more ram (iirc) with the same settings.
I don't think that it has any stability problems.


[ Edited by AmigaMancer on 2007/8/18 15:09 ]

AFAIR, the only thing ambient does during idle is a periodic thread (once a minute or so) that checks for available space on partitions *if* 'prefs/icons/drive info' option is enabled. There's also a lowmem handler freeing memory when requested, but it shouldn't have much impact.

About memory usage it's surprising, because it has rather been decreased thanks to a few optimisations, particularly in icon view.

*cough*... Ok, this is a bit embarrassing..

@fab
After reading your post, i re-installed the previous version to double-check my observations.
Forget the crap i wrote about the memory consumption. It is about the same in both 1.43 versions. Sorry about this.
I will have to insist about the CPU consumption, though. I have confirmed that the latest version consumes 1% more. According to StatLine anyway. I don't know what causing it. I don't have any active tasks runnign or anything and device gauges are disabled. Oh, well... it's not a big deal.


[ Edited by AmigaMancer on 2007/8/18 15:45 ]