Last July OSAlert hosted the first version of the article “MorphOS – The Lightning OS” by Fulvio Peruggi as an entry to the OS Contest. The article has now been updated and extended, making it an even better introduction to the MorphOS operating system for a reader who does not know anything about MorphOS, and can be found here. Italian, German, Russian, Spanish and French translations are available as well.
It’s VaporMan!
OpenMoko looks amazingly like PalmSource’s slipping PalmOSForLinux (now Access’ Access Linux Platform) except that it looks amazingly like Trolltech’s “green” phone except it looks amazingly like Maemo but with telephony. Add it to the stack of a dozen or so GNU/Linux telephony OSes floating around.
Er, actually it looks like whatever you want it to look like becuase it’s late and getting later.
“I’ll take vaporware for 100$, Alex”.
oops. posted the above in the wrong thread, thought it hadn’t shown up, posted it in a different wrong thread, but then found it here too late to edit.
sorry ’bout that.
It’s ok.
What a pity that this very friendly OS is not available on x86 architectures!!!
I have tried AROS (though the AROS philosophy is trying to reproduce the old environment with the old features with no new features) but I could not install it on my Gentoo box.
AROS is also available as a live CD that dosn’t need installing.
Edited 2007-01-17 22:51
Other than purchasing used hardware (ebay, etc.) there doesn’t appear to be any current hardware that you can purchase to run MorphOS.
The article mentions this
http://www.pegasosppc.com/efika.php
This is a system-on-a-chip freescale 400Mhz turnkey motherboard, but details are scarce about what it actually has and what driver support MorphOS provides.
What exactly does this OS do better than the alternatives? Is the biggest feature of MorphOS its API similarity to what AmigaDOS 3.0 was like? Is the primary appeal of MorphOs its ability to run “legacy amiga programs”. Out of curiosity, does MorphOS run Cygnus ED or dpaint (deluxe paint)?
It’s lacking 3D driver support, networking, or SMB. At 400Mhz this platform is not going to be useful for any sort of video decompression (no h.264 high profile or vc-1). So beyond running old amiga programs in the ABox, what do users do with MorphOS? Perhaps maybe, there features in the OS for supporting low latency multichannel audio, as the article mentions “near real time”?
Video 3D support was added just a few months ago for ATI 92xx cards. I’m not sure about other cards.
TCP/IP exists as a free add-on. It isn’t included on the MorphOS 1.4 CD image. It will be integrated into the 1.5 release which should be very soon. It does run CygnusED and Dpaint although I’ve heard several people claim that Dpaint IV has problems.
It also runs AmigaOS4 programs so it’s been a nice system to move forward with since no one but A1 users can actually run OS4.