What is the status of the Q-Box? I've hunted around but it doesn't seem like it exists yet. Is it ever going to?

I'm trying to look at the whole package. I like the hardware and Morphos seems interesting. But most of what I read talks about A-box.

Sorry to break it to you but A-box ain't gonna do it. Don't get me wrong, I like Amiga. I could see at the time it was superior but ended up with a wintel. At the time it was pretty hot... 386 20mhz. With a turbo switch. But that was a LONG LONG time ago! So (blasphemy ahead) forget the Amiga.

So maybe I'll get a Pegasos and run linux. But
I have to say I'm smitten with the UI. Gotta have it!

Ambient is just stunning. And if it's as responsive as what I've read....

So what's the deal with Q-Box?

Whats wrong with the ABox ?
You CAN run amiga software, but
you dont have to. Nearly every day new
software comes up written/ported for MorphOS.
And MorphOS is the responsive part you seem
to look for ... Just because it's somehow
compatible to amiga it does not make MOS old or
slow.

When you just want to run Linux you're stuck with
another bloated OS like windows. MorphOS is the right
choice. And MorphOS needs the ABox (atm) ... :D

Explain to me why Linux is bloated? You can disable nearly all features and end up with an extremely small kernel.

ABox does not support memory protection.
You can not create kernel threads in ABox (?). New threads run as user-level processes in ABox.
ABox is an AmigaOS API wrapper whereas QBox will be the real MorphOS API.

The reason applications are so fast in MorphOS is mostly related to the fact that these applications were written to run on m68k. I don't see why larger applications would run significantly faster on MorphOS than any other OS. GCC for instance runs significantly slower in MorphOS than it does in Linux.

Hi guys !

Well, Linux is nice, as MorphOS as well. Im more and more myself are using a combination of MorphOS and Linux.

And on Pegasos as well..

Gunne

mplayer runs too more faster on MorphOS than on Linux...

The ABox is a very nice API to work with and allows a lot
of flexibility. MorphOS is significantly quicker at booting,
loading apps, gui refreshing etc. than most other operating
systems I have used. The ABox already has seen a noticable
improvement in terms of internal modernization and features
available compared with classic Amiga systems.

I think the point to having MorphOS is to have something
different that can provide an attractive, efficient and
blazing fast "single user/home computing" alternative to
Linux, Windows, MacOS etc. and MorphOS is achieving this
already in my opinion. But you can always use both if you
need/want to anyway. :)

I'm afraid that I need control over memory protection for my software. I intend to port it when QBox is done, as I assume this is one of the features that will be available from QBox. But until then I will only be able to develop a Linux version. Since the software is far from complete so far it's not that much of a problem yet. But I'm still interested in knowing when we can expect a working QBox, which is what this thread is about. (It was starting to get off-topic).
I'm not saying that ABox is bad, it just lacks the control that I need.

Judging by the speed of MOS development to date, I think the time
until we see anything related to the Q-Box will be measured in years.
After all, from what I have read MOS 1.5 is nowhere near ready for
release yet.

Although this is PURE speculation on my part...

--Aaron

Hey thanks for all the feedback everyone.

From what I see I like Morphos, I'm thinking about the apps. No disparagement to Amiga, I almost bought one back in the day. I just don't see it as the future for Morph though. Trying to look ahead. See what's coming. Seems liike Qbox is going to be the "native" MorphOS. Do I have that right?

So what's all this box stuff anyway? Does that mean that guest OS's can each run in their own box w/Morph supervising the whole show?

I'd love to ditch wintel. I'll probably end up w/linux. Maybe go w/Pegasos-it seems like it's better engineering.

Quote:
That's right, but since MOS is done by Amiga programmers, who actually like Amiga-style API-s, and Amiga way of thinking, i don't expect that it will be very different from current (Amiga-originated) API-s.

It will drop backward compatibility to implement features which cannot be done with standard Amiga API, like memory protection, better threading, using 2GB+ files, longer filenames(?), and so on. I expect there will be a lot of things which will remain the same (eg. MUI, CGFX, AHI, way to load libraries/devices, general style of the API eg. using Tags, SYSV ABI, etc.).

About this "box stuff", this is not like a virtual machine on most OS-es used to provide backward compatibility (eg. V86 mode on x86) but simply a sign, which API-kit an application uses. If you use ABox API, you can't use advanced MOS features, and if you (will) use QBox API, you'll drop backward compatibility. So you can't use this feature to run other OS-es in a virtual environment. It's just about the API an application use. Much like you can use Win3.1 API-s on Win2003 (bad example i know ) but better use the newer ones.

From the user point of view, the slow transition from the ABox API to QBox API is invisible, this is somewhat only programmers need to care about.

However, this is pure speculation on my side.