MorphOS Still Being Toyed With For PowerPC

[uid313]

Out of curiosity are there any PowerPC machines a commoner (read dont cost an arm and a leg) can actually buy? Not old macs of course.

Maybe there are some old IBM IntelliStation.
Else there are POWER system-on-chips such as EfikaPPC, etc.
Maybe Freescale Semiconductor offers some system-on-a-chip with a POWER processor.

Or you can check if any member of Power.org offers POWER machines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power.org#Membership

[Chewi]

There are the new Amigas, namely the "Sams" which aren't mega expensive but are very slow by modern standards. Plenty fast enough for AmigaOS and probably MorphOS though. The Amiga X1000 is more powerful but also much more expensive... if you can even get your hands on one.

[Pallidus]

I actually have a bunch of powerpc laptops, g4 etc's

but fuck me if you think I'm going to install something that shuts down after 20 minutes of use

[Chewi]

but fuck me if you think I'm going to install something that shuts down after 20 minutes of use

It does? It is like a demo restriction or something?

[Pallidus]

yep... get this:


no live sessions so you have to install if you actually wanna try it out

but here's the kicker, use it for 20 mins and then it shuts the fuck down


want more?

buy it


the price?

I dunno dawg lemme see what I can do :trollface:

if you have a X or Y we can hook you up for XX€ if you have an amiga it's only X€

if you happen to have a powerbook g4 oh it's going to be 2x XX€ COZ THATS THE WAY WE ROLL

[davebraco]

@Pallidus
It doesn't shut down, it goes down to the speed of an original Amiga 500. It's a demo restriction. You can try and fully install MorphOS, then if you are interested in, there is a small utility to buy it (price depends of the age of the original support of the hardware, it's from 49 to 111,11€).

Like every AmigaOS, there is a live session, insert the CD boot on it.

@uid313
Some of the parts of MorphOS are opensource and available in the download section of the website, such as the main component of the desktop (called ambient). Some original linux opensource software have been ported to MorphOS (or AmigaOS 4/AROS) such as blender, gcc, mplayer, ioquake III, browser based on webkit, etc.

Unlike most of PC motherboards, BIOS of powerpc boards are opensource (apple included).

The original Commodore Workbench was POSIX compliant (MorphOS as others successors use pthreads.library or ixemul.library).

Owners of AmigaOne X1000 also received a guide to install and use nearly 10 different flavors of Linux. AmigaOne 500 manufacturers has dev-systems for guys interested in porting operating system to their board and there is an ongoing Haiku and ubuntu port. (A MorphOS port has been demonstrated one month ago.)

@89C51
There is a new prototype which is working on, based on freescale CPU. which will be cheaper than the AmigaOne X1000 and faster than the AmigaOne 500 (or Sam440/460). I think it will still includes the Xena "hot" programmable chips (xmos one) and the XORRO port.


I hope these elements will help you to better understand MorphOS.

[Pallidus]

so you can boot a live session from cd?


just downloaded the 211mb iso I'm going to boot it and try it... look for my review tomorrow

as for the pricing: it is stupid... you should sell it for 50€ a copy and be done with it instead of you pay x you pay y etc etc

[davebraco]

To be honest I didn't try version 3 myself (yet, still the 2.7, as in fact I'm an AmigaOS 4 user) but I was told you can still use a live session from the boot CD.

Check for hardware compatibility here before trying to boot the CD :
http://www.morphos-team.net/hardware

Well, about the price, If I remember well every version had the same price at start (at the release of version 2 it was 150€, then the price goes down to 111,11). Starting from version 3, hardware already supported by version 2 got a lower price to 79€. So currently only the newly powerbook version is at 111,11. (probably the iBook and PowerMacG5 version too). I don't know for the efika, maybe it's because hardware doesn't really support all the features of morphos 3 due to 128mo of ram.

The money they get from sales is mostly use to buy new hardware to dev (and so more hardware supported). So sure it sounds a bit weird but I don't think it's a bad pricing politic for a niche OS (at least users didn't disagree... )

[davebraco]

@Pallidus
To be honest I didn't try version 3 myself (yet, still the 2.7, as in fact I'm an AmigaOS 4 user) but I was told you can still use a live session from the boot CD.

Check for hardware compatibility here before trying to boot the CD :
http://www.morphos-team.net/hardware

Well, about the price, If I remember well every version had the same price at start (at the release of version 2 it was 150€, then the price goes down to 111,11). Starting from version 3, hardware already supported by version 2 got a lower price to 79€. So currently only the newly powerbook version is at 111,11. (probably the iBook and PowerMacG5 version too). I don't know for the efika, maybe it's because hardware doesn't really support all the features of morphos 3 due to 128mo of ram.

The money they get from sales is mostly use to buy new hardware to dev (and so more hardware supported). So sure it sounds a bit weird but I don't think it's a bad pricing politic for a niche OS (at least users didn't disagree... )

[droidhacker]

So why the harsh words on a project that is totally irrelevant to you in any way? Opensource is not an silver bullet or anything.

Um... ANDROID.

'nuff said.