@Henes
Quote:

Yes, but I want to use MOS ... if it's stable with a 9200SE, I'll try that. I've already purchased a used one on eBay for a couple of bucks, let's see if that brings any improvement when it arrives. (BTW, is the MOS license coupled to the gfx card? Or just the mainboard? I'll contact MOS support if the key needs to be retargeted)

Quote:

Quote:

Thank you!

BTW, I just noticed with horror that MOS thinks my ATI 9250 card is a "9200 PRO" card. Perhaps that's the reason for the crashes. Now I can see why it works with a real 9200 card.

Quote:

thank you for this ppositive answer, i'm looking forward to the update before i decide to register. Thanks for taking care of it and for the hard work.

Quote:

i noticed the same.

From my point of view, MorphOS 2.0 on Efika is definitely a beta version, not the final product..

It tends to hang without apparent reason approximately every 10 mintutes.. Especially when moving windows, playing with Prefs, changing lister mode (icon->list etc.).

For me it shouldn't be treated as a final version. It should be called 2.0beta and they shouldn't be asking money for it (as long as it's unstable as it is now).

As much as I like it (it's really decent OS) I am a bit dissapointed as an Efika user. My Debian which was installed before was rock solid stable (but also slow as hell), and it was fully functional free OS.

Can't speak for the rest - maybe Pegasos users are more lucky and get less crashes than Efika user, I don't know. I know Efika version is still in it's beta stage...

Quote:

From what I'm hearing, I really think this has to do with the graphics card driver. I was using mine for hours, went to bed, woke up and it was still running fine. Of course, this is with a Voodoo3 card. I recently picked up a Radeon 9250 (before everyone started reporting problems with that card). It should arrive in my postbox today, so if the efika starts hanging after installing it, then it must be the card.

Quote:

It might be the case, but maybe it's something else, maybe some memory issues? I really don't know.

My card is Gigabyte Radeon 9200SE/128MB/AGP (R92S128T).

And, when I leave the system running, it's all fine. Problems arise when I play with Ambient GUI and icons and stuff.

[ Edited by skipp604 on 2008/7/5 14:09 ]

I just went back to 2D layers, and it's more stable now!

addition: yesterday I only had a run of luck, sorry for my poste

Another problem just manifested itself..

No matter how hard I try, MOS2.0 ignores my S:User-Startup script. I've put a simple alias there, but when the Ambient is loaded, there's no alias set.

Can someone confirm that?

I also tried to put the user-startup file into MOSSYS:S, but results are the same.

Why doesn't that work?

Quote:

I had the same problem myself (only tried with a few aliases though). I solved it by putting the aliases in the shell-startup, and now it works.

@skipp604
I commented out the last two lines from "MOSSYS:S/startup-sequence" (LoadWB and EndCLI) and put an echo command in "S:User-Startup", and everything worked as expected (the scripts were run, Ambient wasn't loaded).

I noticed another hanging/freezing bug with this, however: If Ambient is not loaded, after a while, the machine hangs for a moment, then resumes, then hangs periodically as if in slow motion, then resumes, then freezes completely. It happened only once, I changed the startup-sequence back as fast as I could on the next reboot.

Could've been the screen saver. I disabled it, and I'm further investigating the issue!

[ Edited by voyager2007 on 2008/7/6 10:47 ]

OK, I found out a couple of new quirks:
1. The Efika installer has difficulties recognizing devices on an external USB hub sometimes. The ORDER of devices matters. I have a 4-port hub. If the mouse is the last device, it isn't recognized. With the order Keyboard, Mouse, USB-Stick, CD-ROM, the installer boots up correctly every time.
2. The partition editor freezes the machine if more than 12 partitions are specified, i.e. if the minimum width of the partition bar would exceed the screen width. Application and/or window management bug.

To accomodate old Amiga apps, I'm going to reinstall with 1.5 GB OFS partitions (would also pacify OF, which has trouble listing big partitions). For now, I'll start with the old-fashioned 2 partition scheme (System and Work). Let's see if this works and/or brings any improvement. Well, the installer doesn't offer to format the OFS partitions. Let's see if it does after a reboot. Nope, it doesn't. However, it works with FFS. OFS partitions aren't mountable at all. That's sad because OFS provides extra redundancy.

BTW, the system ran astonishingly stable when Ambient was not running (and the screen saver was off).

Additional stable points with partitions < 2 GB. Now Ambient hasn't crashed in a while for me.

3. Sputnik needs an update. In-memory caches should have an upper limit, to avoid using up all available memory. Also, on-disk caches should be used for images and other large stuff. A mixed in-memory/on-disk cache system would be ideal. I know, Sputnik is far from being complete, but it's still usable. A better caching mechanism would improve its usability.


[ Edited by voyager2007 on 2008/7/6 12:41 ]

I want to install my Efika, and I have a Voodoo4. Only one question... the voodoo fits both ways in the PCI_slot ... do insert it with it's backplane in the same direction as the Efika connectors or to the front ... last option sounds stupid buth I just want to be sure ...

Be careful with installing the card in the PCI slot, I remember there was something about it in the Efika manual. Is it really a PCI card, or an AGP card? For AGP cards, be sure to use the angular AGP adapter. Plugging it in the wrong way can damage both the card and the Efika.

The manual says on page 2 to make sure that the video connector of the graphics card points in the same direction as the other external connectors.


[ Edited by voyager2007 on 2008/7/6 14:04 ]

RTFM would have been a good answer to me ... thanks for the hint

The most stupid thing I noticed so far is the demo-timeout on the installer!

Here's why.

I have a 40GB HDD with my Efika. Previously there was Linux installed on it and I'm sure some Windows, too. I want it wiped out completely, low-level formatted and then partitioned.

First of all, there's no Low-Level Format option, as we've once seen in programs like HDToolBox and HDInstTools. That was VERY useful when we needed clean install with garbage of the previous filesystems wiped out. Now, where's that option? It's a 2.5" HDD, so to put it in a PC I would need an adapter for a few quid and my time to find it (it's not that common). I could do that ofcourse, but what's the point? That option was in Amiga HD install programs before and now it's gone for some reason.

Another thing, as I mentioned in the very beginning is the demo-timeout set on the Installer. Now that's just plain stupid. First of all, I want to format the whole drive (possibly with the verify option) using the native MorphOS filesystem. Now, there's no way I can do that with slow IDE interface of Efika before the demo timeout requester. It's 40GB for f... sakes. And after a while it just freezes the system. What's the point? I'm not gonna use the Installer as a normal system, then WHY the demo restrictions on it?! It's just the the INSTALLER!

Sorry, I'm really pissed off....

I'm happy to report that I have replaced the Voodo3 with a Radeon 9250 and have not had any serious issues as a result. I've been running with 3d the entire time as well. No frequent crashes or hung system like some others have been reporting. However, with the r9250 I can consistently cause the system to hang every time by issuing the pciscan command..

@skipp604
Quote:

You don't really need low-level formatting. It has been discouraged on PCs since 1991 or so ... the reason is that modern hard drives come with a factory preset low-level formatting that must not be modified. The low-level formatting contains data that is necessary to calibrate the drive mechanics, seek info and other things.

You can simply delete all partitions and repartition. You can even change the format of the "disk label" (RDB, MBR, etc.) which contains the partition information. So, you could delete all partitions, then change to RDB, then add new partitions, and finally click save.

Formatting a 40 GB drive shouldn't take long. For mine, it took just a few seconds.

If you plan to use old Amiga apps that attempt to read disk information, you should keep the size of your partitions small, < 2 GB (because of signed 32-bit arithmetics used by some programs).

If you start out with two small partitions of 1.5 GB, formatting will be quick and you won't see the timeout dialog.

(p.s. you can run the disk partitioning tool again after you've installed MOS.)



[ Edited by voyager2007 on 2008/7/6 16:00 ]

Thanks for your suggestions. But you see, I don't want twenty small partitions just because of the compatibility issues. I want one big one, I should be allowed to do that in a MODERN operating system that came out in 2008! Besides, there's no mention about any limitations as to size of the partition in the readme file nor the FAQ section on the MOS site. I shouldn't be worrying about compatibility with the old apps, as the system should handle the reads and writes from and to the disk. So that shouldn't even be an issue!

You said it took you just a few seconds. That's true, but only for QUICK format. I want to format the drive fully (as in non-quick) and even turn the verify option on to see if the drive's OK. And that's just impossible with the current installer.

My point is, I want to prepare the whole system just the way I like it in the Instaler step. Why should I be worried by the annoying requester, slow down, and finally the total freeze, when I'm preparing the drive and thinking how it suits best my needs. In my opinion the Instaler shouldn't have the limit as the real OS has. And I think many will agree with me.

@skipp604

Some old applications calculate the free disk space, for instance, the wrong way: by multiplying the sector size with the number of sectors (of free space, for instance). This can lead to a 32-bit integer overflow. This cannot be handled by the OS, since it's a bug in the application.

But if you don't run such applications that have these bugs, you won't run into problems.

I've run MOS 2.0 myself with a 40 GB sized partition. I only partitioned it down into small partitions because I intend to use some Amiga software that is over 20 years old, when hard disk space was measured in megabytes, not gigabytes!

BTW, have you tried copying your key file into the DEVS: folder when you're in the installation environment? (don't know if that works, that depends on when the file is checked, if it's only during booting or later as well)

Quote:

I don't think it was a quick format (in the Windows sense). The drive receives a FORMAT command and automatically formats the sectors accordingly. Normally, the file system should handle bad blocks automatically (as in reformatting and rewriting a bad block). You're insofar safe with Amiga filing systems (FFS,SFS) as these checksum their blocks (unlike FAT).

Update on my MOS2 on Efika: It died. No matter if I attempt to run the installer environment or the full MOS, it hangs in an early boot stage with a black screen (or with the white-on-black memory display screen in the installation environment loader). I had the machine turned off for a day or two. I suspect it's the hard drive, but I'm able to list its contents from the OF. No idea what that could be.

Considering the relatively small size of the Efika owner community, maybe we all should have been betatesting it.

Then you could have priced it inversely proportional to the number of bugs we submitted :)

Quote:

someone from the morphos team reported that this kind of behaviour got corrected by changing the motherboard battery.
correct me if i'm wrong.

@ voyager2007

I had a similar problem during the installation of MorphOS 2.0 on my Efika. HDConfig crashed after I set the partitions, so a trashed RDB was written on the hard disk and blocked all further attempts to (re)install from "morphos-2.0-efikainstall.img" because, as you say,

> it hangs in an early boot stage with a black screen
> (or with the white-on-black memory display screen in
> the installation environment loader)

I solved the problem launching the Debian Linux installer di_efika (available at http:www.efika.de/download/) and going on until the partition tool was run. I used it to delete the trashed RDB and write a MBR on the hard disk. Then I stopped the Linux installation and booted successfully from "morphos-2.0-efikainstall.img", and this time HDConfig worked fine...

Of course this will work only if your problem actually is a trashed RDB...

[ Edited by DoctorMorbius_FP on 2008/7/29 21:39 ]