Guest post by The journey that started 18 months ago to create a next generation Amiga on commodity hardware has now reached its first major milestone by becoming a completely driver native Aros system powered by the energy efficient Intel Atom processor. This has been achieved with the supply of hardware and in some cases financial rewards to key developers in the Aros world. The plan with the following steps has been to create a base reference platform for Aros and the Amiga community to build on and support.
Step 1: Network driver development by Nick ^aEURoeKalamatee^aEUR Andrews, free to all.
Step 2: HDAudio by Davy Wentzler owned by Cluster UK ltd, free to end users.
Step 3: Catweasel driver development for Aros by Ian Gledhill, free to all.
Step 4: Intel GMA device developed by Michal Schulz and again free to all.
This work would not have been possible without the amazing team of developers working on Aros whose names are long and well respected but room does not allow all their names to appear. Please visit Aros.org for more details. Also a notable mention must go to Paolo Besser and the IcAros distribution that is supplied with all iMica systems.
In between this work other developments have been supported, more news on these later. However, we have also been experimenting with hardware configurations for the best type of iMica system, but it has become clear that one thing was important to all; it must be SILENT.
So now we announce the final iMica Atom system that we believe will achieve all the needs of the Amiga and Aros fan using low cost commodity hardware in a small and SILENT package.
Silent iMica Video
Introduction to Intel GMA driver and why iMica exists
Demonstration of Atom based iMica systems running Aros and new native drivers
This unit is not only power efficient and low cost, but can also be mounted behind the monitor to create a space efficient working area and no wires in front of the monitor when using a wireless keyboard and mouse. However, with its great looks and slim design it is doubtful you will want to hide it away.
This is not the end, this is just Stage 1.
Stage 2, optional case upgrade to hold, PCI Catweasel MK4, Slim DVD and Amiga/Mac/PC compatible floppy disk drive unit. This will be available to all iMica Atom customers.
Stage 3, Well we will tell you about that when we have something to show, but it will make the investment in the iMica Atom system a good investment, and might just inspire old Amiga users to get really excited about next generation Amiga’s including those with other Amiga OS flavours.
My thanks to all of the Aros and Amiga developers who have supported me over the last 18 months.
Stephen Jones
MD Cluster UK Software Ltd
Cluster UK Software Ltd:
Cluster UK was setup as a software development company with an interest in parallel processing machines. At the moment development that has funded iMica has been from Document management system and local government web based technologies. Please visit web-labs for more details on our software developments.
Aros (Aros Research Operating System):
The AROS Research Operating System is a lightweight, efficient and flexible desktop operating system, designed to help you make the most of your computer. It’s an independent, portable and free project, aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS 3.1 at the API level (like Wine, unlike UAE), while improving on it in many areas. The source code is available under an open source license, which allows anyone to freely improve upon it.
IcAros Desktop:
IcAros Desktop is a pre-configured operating environment aimed to be a complete distribution of the open source AROS operating system: a independent, free and multi-platform re-implementation of AmigaOS 3.1 API. IcAros Desktop brings back all the fun of computing with a lightweight, fast and efficient operating system, providing all necessary utilities and many free games. IcAros Desktop is the evolution of VmwAROS, formerly the leading distribution of the AROS operating system.
Flash is disabled in all my Opera installs, whether on Mac or Windows so there are some blank areas on the page.
But, I congratulate the team and all developers for the efforts.
One thing I don’t understand though is this: why are project like Aros and Haiku forced to reimplement what has now (code-wise) fallen into the deepest cracks of “forgettable land”? Don’t get me wrong, I’m just waiting for Haiku to provide a WPA Wifi support and I’ll be switching. My question is: “why can’t today’s devs/projects/companies continue with the original source code?” Even for the assembly language parts, it seems easier to adapt than to rewrite from scratch. Had the rewriting been a decision, it would have been useful to know the internals of the old OS’es and save the reverse engineering efforts for other more useful purposes. Is it that the right owners are reluctant to release the code?
BTW, who holds the rights for BeOS and AmigaOS? Legally, are those projects safe? Aren’t the right owners going to sit tight now and suddenly come back to life at the slightest possibility of moneymaking?
Your questions require a long reply, but in short, as far as I know:
– Amiga Inc. owns the rights on AmigaOS
– Access Co. owns the rights on BeOS
– as they have owners, they can’t be legally distributed without authorization
– without the source code, you won’t go that far anyway
– the source code is protected as well
– AROS and Haiku are now close to the feature level or better than the original products, so who cares?
– I presume the owners CAN attack these replacements, but I doubt it’s worth the time, money, and reputation drop
AmigaOS is owned by Hyperion actually.
To the best of my knowledge, Amiga Inc. still owns the rights of the Amiga brand.
The dispute has ended last year, with a settlement granting Hyperion Entertainement CVBA the exclusive rights on the AmigaOS trademark and the right to use related trakemarks and logos.
Amiga Inc. owns the Amiga trademark, but Hyperion (and several other entities) are the owners of AmigaOS 4.x and newer (perhaps with some parts still owned by Amiga Inc. but these are covered by the grant of various exclusive rights).
What exactly is the point of this? It just seems to be where Linux was years ago.
And the point of linux?
What exactly is the point of this comment? It just seems like the comments people wrote on Linux stories years ago.
Because there is people who don’t like Linux, go figure.
Because while the Amiga as we used to know, as a combination of hardware and software might be considered “dead”, Amiga as a philosophy of workflow and management of the computer resources, file hierarchy and user interface still represent a valuable and valid alternative to the actual windows/osx/linux way of doing computing: the amiga os internals are quite easy to understand even to a less savvy computer person and the CLI commands (see the many libs: devs: system: folders well organised and that allow to replace libraries and kernel pieces quite easily) are not convoluted as the ones in a unix shell; the possibility to customise its own bootable disc adding just what you need simply with dopus, an image burning software and editing the startup-sequence is a level of ease of customisation that is still quite unreached in the modern systems and the low system memory footprint allow much better performance even in less recent machines: AROS has all the papers ready to be the next tinkerers toy OS given a right amount of promotion and grassroots marketing
Using Haiku-OS there is no way that I would want to go back to to Amiga-OS but even now 25 years after the Amiga came out there are features it had/has that are still missing from modern OSs including Haiku.
The virtual drive/driver support of the Amiga is a dream compared to other systems. Just mount a FONTS: drive and it works. Piping to devices SPEAK: PRINTER: PAR: SER: CON: makes more sense that how it is often done on other systems and I really miss ANSI graphics in the CLI, it make formatting of the outputs a lot better.
The library system versioning approach of the Amiga still seems to be a better one than what we use today also.
In all I think there is still a number of useful ideas that the Amiga-OS had that we could really use today.
Wasn’t 10 years ago about the 3rd year of Linux on the desktop?
Why do people go onto a site called OS News then complain about news about an OS?
That is the way the things should be done guys!! Amazing job!!
Show to the Amiga people how the things get built with passion!
Now, if they can get a working nVidia driver, then switch to an ION platform, everything would be perfect.
While it’s great that they have a driver for the Intel IGP, it’s certainly no graphics powerhorse.
Of course, getting anything out of nVidia to make a driver will be like pulling teeth, so this may never happen. But one can dream…
Either way, congrats to the devs on this meaningful milestone!!!
The good news is that AROS very recently gained Nouveau for accelerated 2D & 3D on NVidia cards, so it’s got the best the FOSS world has to offer.
Bugs are currently being squashed and there’s a bounty on Power2People.org for anyone who feels like donating.
This for me marks the turning point of AROS becoming a “real” alternative OS. Very exciting stuff!
Question for anyone who knows: How easy is it to develop apps that work on AROS and AmigaOS (and perhaps MorphOS too)? And/or how many apps are there that are released these days for multiple Amiga derivatives at once?
Usually Amigans use C and C++ and there are lots of Cross Compiling scripts facilities that make almost easy to create programs for multiple Amiga derivatives, but it also exists the problem that you must adjust the program according to the GUI and the OS version you are using (MUI 3 for AmigaOS 3.9, MUI 4 for MorphOS, Reaction for AmigaOS 3.9 and 4.X and Zune for AROS) depending on the AmigaOS-like system you intend to target.
For automated programming There is Hollywood Suite that runs native on AmigaOS, MorphOS, Aros and Windows, depending on the version you choose to purchase.
(As long as Hollywood has a reasonable price you can also decide to buy multiple licenses, and run it either on Amiga, Aros or Windows.)
It is a visual environment capable to create compiled programs (complete with a GUI) that run on all these systems: AmigaOS 3.x 680xx systems, WarpOS (AmigaOS 3.x running on accelerated PPC processor cards), AmigaOS 4.x PPC, MorphOS PPC, Aros Intel X86, Windows X86, MacOS X PPC, MacOS X X86.
Just click the compile button and Hollywood will ask you the target Operating System you want to run the program you just created.
http://www.airsoftsoftwair.de/en/prod_hollywood.html
With just a few clicks, you can create multiple versions of your program with no effort or any knowledge of the target OS… Amazing, isn’t it?
And any version of your program will be aimed directly, ready to run, at any of the Operating System I just mentioned.
Edited 2010-06-01 12:55 UTC
Wow that Hollywood thing does look pretty cool. Thanks for the tip and for clearing everything up!
Did anyone notice that last video? He had AROS smoothly running three DVD quality videos at the same time on a netbook. ON… A… NETBOOK !!!!!
You forgot to mention a crappy Intel GPU based netbook. That efficiency (not the hardware btw) reminds me of the original Amigas back in the 80’s.
How much does it cost, what are the detailed hardware specifications, when will we be able to buy it?
The Silent iMica starts from ^Alb199. I will put this up on my website in the coming days.