Hi there,
some recent expressions of a user calling Poseidon a steaming pile of sh*t (because he couldn't get the update working on his machine) made me think, if it really was so a good idea to release an intermediate version of Poseidon for MorphOS. I know, some of you got Poseidon working on their machines and are not as pissed off as wealthy and successful Mr. Jasper K. Abraxxis.
I will explain some of the problems and their potential reasons:
a) USB.mprefs crashes on some machines.
This seems to affect a lot of users, but unfortunately, not mine or the beta testers that tested it. I suppose (!) this is due to an old version of the prefs framework program that loads USB.mprefs with not enough stack or something similar. Could be fixed, if I knew exactly what happens. But I'm unable to reproduce it here and the stack traces did not give the information needed.
Maybe it could be fixed by simply using the Preferences program of MOS1.5.
b) The boot image problem. Poseidon 2.2 is loaded from the MorphOS 1.4.5 image. This causes some evil problems I did not think of when I released V3.2. If USB mass storage devices are connected while booting, they will be mounted by Poseidon V2.2, causing the massstorage.class to be in use and making it unable to be expunged to be replaced by the new version for V3.2. Moreover, once you saved the mass storage class prefs with V3.x, this causes the old class to crash once IPrefs loads the new prefs from disk (due to the larger prefs stuff overwriting memory). To make it short: All these attempts to replace the old version of Poseidon from the boot image are going to cause a mess somehow or the other -- unless you really have no USB devices connected during booting. Either that or you're using a boot.img that contains no Poseidon stuff -- which is currently not available.
c) IPrefs of V1.4.5 restarts the stack whenever the file ENV:Sys/poseidon.prefs changes. This causes disconnecting/reconnecting sounds to be played, PoPo requesters to reappear etc. This sucks. Can only be fixed by using a MOS V1.5 IPrefs command.
d) uhciusb.device /is/ buggy. There's nothing to argue about. This causes less USB devices to work that do their job flawlessly on the classic amiga systems with Algor, Highway or Subway USB cards. New ehci/ohci drivers are part of MOS 1.5, that might work better and with higher speed. Unfortunately, MOS 1.5 is not available yet.
My conclusion is that Poseidon V3.2 cannot run nicely on a MOS V1.4.x system. I am very sorry for this. Now, I think it was a mistake releasing the MorphOS version prior to MOS V1.5.
I am therefore considering retracting Poseidon V3.x for MorphOS until MorphOS V1.5 is released. And no, I don't know when MOS V1.5 is going to see the light of day. I've got not the faintest idea when that's going to happen, if at all.
What are your opinions? What should I make of this situation that agitates some users to insult me and my work?
Bye...
Chris Hodges