I'm looking for a way to close the Ambient screen or quit from it completely, (permanently or not) right before or after the execution of a big program, to free some memory. Is this possible?

Should be. Depends on how many applications are Lock'ing the screen though.

To quit Ambient itself:
SetENV AMBIENTQUITHACK 1 SAVE
(might work first after a reboot; not sure right now)

Then you just go to Ambient's "Ambient" menu and choose "Quit" (will not pop up a requester anymore; so be careful. )

If you need to do it from a script/ shell: "Break PORT AMBIENT" should do the trick. Maybe also requires a "WaitForPort AMBIENT LOOP 10 DISAPPEAR" if you immediately want to launch your application afterwards.

There is not "quit" option in the Ambient menu. There is "shut down" which still pops a requester after i set the enviroment variable and rebooted.
The options that the requester gives are "shutdown" which does nothing, "reboot" which freezes my Amiga and cancel.

"Break PORT AMBIENT" also brings this requester.

Try http://aminet.net/package/util/cli/CloseWorkBench

CloseWorkbench works. Thanks.

Next time mention which Ambient do you use. Sounds like you're using some old Ambient from PowerUP 1.4 release.

Setting this env variable does not bring any Quit option on Ambient 1.43 (10/10/2009)

@Tokai
Quote:
Ambient 1.43 (Thursday 31 January 2008)
I can't download a newer version from morphosambient.sourceforge.net because all nighty build links aren't working anymore. They lead to the "Czech PowerPC User Group" site instead of a tgz file.

Quote:
Yes. That's why i opened the thread in the PowerUP forum.

Ah right, didn't noticed that. Aww. Well, morphzone usability strikes back.


BTW. nightly builds were just straight compiles from CVS. So if you have a SDK installed you should be able to build an Ambient yourself rather easily. Basically you just enter "make". Two issues could arrive: first you need a properly build png2c (ixemul version) and second if you don't have a compiler with AltiVec support you might need to disable Ambient's AltiVec support in the makefiles and the config.h's (for Ambient and it's sub-libraries). But that's easy, too.

Don't think anyone else will bother making new MorphOS 1.4 compatible builds (at least I don't ). So better do it yourself. It's really not that hard, just might sound scary!

@Motosampy:

Right, it seems that this feature needs to be explicitly compiled in. I remembered wrongly that we had it enabled by default at some point.

See line 98 and following:
http://morphosambient.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/morphosambient/ambient/main.c?view=markup

> I can't download a newer version from morphosambient.sourceforge.net
> because all nighty build links aren't working anymore.

You can get a version from March 2009 from geit's home server:

ftp://ambient:ambient@geitathome.dyndns.org/betas/Ambient/MorphOS_1.4.5_only/

Cool. Thank you all.