Articles

It may seem odd to bother with wireless networking on our next-generation Amigas; after all, they are -- at least for the moment -- all sedentary desktop systems. But wireless networking is still a very useful add-on, even if our machines don't see too much movement. For one thing most homes already have a wireless router, and having wireless capabilities on our Amigas mean being able to place it anywhere in the home or office we choose, without worrying about Ethernet cables.

When I first starting considering trying an Amiga NG system, the one question I had was: is there a good web browser?  More than any other application the web browser has become the primary tool for most users of personal computing devices today, especially in light of increasingly useful web-based applications. For the Amiga platform to succeed a good browsing experience is vital. Unfortunately for OS4 users the current crop of web browsers available is a bit of a mixed bag.

One of the biggest issues with using an Amiga NG system for me when I discovered the Amiga in 2010 was the lack of productivity applications -- or rather, the lack of productivity applications written in the modern era.  Maybe folks these days aren't in great need of the old-fashioned word processor, but I still prefer writing in such an environment.  On my little SAM I do occasionally fire up AbiWord in AmiCygnix when I need to edit a massive Word document, but the sluggish speed and non-native GUI means it isn't something I want to use on a regular basis.

How to organise your Amiga's OS: an alternative way 

An odd view about booting an Amiga

The steady flow over the years of OS4.0 and its upgrades upto and including 'OS4.0 Final 1', culminating in the appearence of 'OS4.1' halfway August 2008, combined with an utter lazyness on my part have led me to set up my Amiga a little bit different then usual.

Disclaimer: My Amiga is a bogstandard μA1, nothing fancy about it.

Before we begin

Before we begin it's important to make sure we have the following available:

Do you remember what made you buy an Amiga ? How did you come to coding ? What was your first program ?

I saw a real Amiga for the first time in 1986, after only having read about the new dream computer in magazines. Some friends got it and I visited them a lot to play and experiment with their A1000s.

It was the time of Defender of the Crown, Winter Games, Faery Tale and Test Drive. I was absolutely stunned and fascinated by this machine. I knew I must own one. And in the beginning of 1987 I bought an Amiga 1000, together with my brother.

Thursday 9th February & AmigaOS4 is well on it's way to completion. Hyperion release the 4th update to the Pre Release version & we get testing! This version is provided as an ISO file (This is a CD image) & as such, installation is al all in one Package. You boot from the CD, then install from the CD. If you are yet to partition your hard drive, head to further areas of IntuitionBase for a guide on setting up your hard drive (SFS Walkthrough).

After seeing numerous articles on Amigaworld on how to speed up OS4 I thought it was worth writing an article detailing the things discussed there. Hence, I preface this article by pointing out it is not all my own work - I have merely amalgamated it into one discrete package. I hope you find this useful.

Introduction

During the Amiga Classic era (1985-1994), I built a home recording studio using two Amigas and some sound equipment. This home studio started out very small and grew into a very complex system over the years. The goal of the system was to produce an Audio CD of original music, without disturbing the neighbours. It was a success. When It began, I knew nothing about music, MIDI, or audio recording. When it was done, I was a composer, a performer and a studio engineer.

This is a step by step guide to installing AmigaOS4 and GNU/Linux Debian on separate harddisks.

The following article is an account of observations and solutions to problems which arose during the build of a Micro AmigaOne computer. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. Any similarity to your real life experience is purely coincidental. All information in this document is believed to be accurate. The author accepts no responsibility for how you use it.

To begin: Things to watch out for:

It was somewhat of a struggle to get Personal Paint 7.1 running successfully on AmigaOS4.0-Pre. This paint application formerly ran on Amiga classic 68k hardware, but AmigaOS4 is targetted at AmigaOne PPC machines. This article endeavours to suggest how this might be accomplished...

- Why Make a Boot CD?

I find that a boot CD makes a good emergency recovery tool.   It is handy to have when the installation script of some OS3.x program, or my experimentation, corrupts OS4.   It is configured to provide easy access to the tools used to rebuild the OS4 libraries, datatypes, MUI, and etc.   This can be particularly important since the systems many of us run were not installed from a singe CD, but incrementally upgraded from OS4 pre-releases.

Carefully consider your reason(s) when planning the layout.

Synopsis

The economic well being of the Amiga market demands a system that is not in direct competition with the Wintel world. Running on Intel hardware will jeopardise the viability of OS4 by placing it into direct competition with Windows. Intel derived hardware raises issues of support costs and financial return for the vendor.

Background

A replacement platform for the AGA Amiga. The AmigaOne was developed outside the confines of Amiga Inc., yet has been approved by Amiga Inc.

OS4 Speaks Out...

This is a tutorial on adding text-to-speech capabilities to OS4. It is written with the AmigaOne in mind but may also apply to Amigas 1200/4000 except for NallePuh which doesn't run on Classic hardware at this time and isn't needed anyway.

Some useful applications for speech are:
- Providing informations to a user who's away from the monitor
- Reading electronic books or emails
- Listening to what's being said on IRC while browsing the web
- Speaking clocks, reminders, alarms, etc.

20050617 update:

This "how-to" is more or less a walkthrough made due to the high amount of questions regarding SFS posted on several forums and mailing lists. 

This walkthrough covers everything from editing the kicklayout to the usage of tools like Media ToolBox and it's divided into sections for easier reading.  

This is a step by step guide to installing AmigaOS4 and GNU/Linux Debian on the same harddisk.

After much debating as to which version of the AmigaOne to get I finally decided on a Micro A1-C, persuaded by actually being able to hold a uA1-C motherboard at the Big Bash in October- so small yet so nice! I ordered my board from Stellar Dreams shortly after the show and it arrived swiftly with OS4 and RAM. I also purchased a small case from Micro Direct which also arrived soon after ordering. 

A look at the board... 

1 - si680ide
=========
There seems to be some confusion about how to use a si680 board. Here are a few hints :

- make sure that in UBoot menu, under the PCI features item, interrupts are set at 9, 10, 11, 7 and all trigger methods are LEVEL (and not EDGE)

- make sure you use a kernel version >= 51.15

If you have an old C program from years ago, it is possible to re-write it for the AmigaOne and AmigaOS 4. Most of my experience is with SAS 6.5x and Storm C (which is based on GCC). Follow some of the tips below to get your software converted:

1. Header files

a) Clibs, Pragmas, Proto files

These header files contain mainly headers for the AmigaOS Shared Libraries etc. In some source code, you may get Clib and Pragma headers 
e.g.

Kickstart files on disk.

On a Classic Amiga, we had a ROM which contained the basic libraries: Exec, Dos, Intuition... The ROM made it possible to boot on a disk where no system is installed - Booting without Startup-Sequence, allowing you to use a basic Shell to do "first aid" on your system.