Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on June 15, 2006 02:48 AM
It seems to me that many of these alternative OSs are attempts to "bring back" the Amiga's OS. Syllable clearly states this, and Haiku is based on BeOS which was the self-proclaimed successor to the Amiga. In this vein I would like to mention AROS, the Amiga Research Operating System, available from <a href="http://www.aros.org/" title="aros.org">http://www.aros.org/</a aros.org> under the GPL. It aims at binary compatibility with AmigaOS3.1 on the m68k architecture, and on x86 it runs very quickly. At the moment it is not natively installable on x86, so I have had little experience with installing the few applications available. To run it on x86 there is a LiveCD which is mainly for demo purposes, and also a nested version which runs natively inside Linux. Also on this topic, and since the mention of SkyOS shows that this is not a FLOSS only topic, there is obviously the official AmigaOS which is now (sort of) at version 4 and you can get info on it from <a href="http://os4.hyperion-entertainment.biz/" title="hyperion-e...inment.biz">http://os4.hyperion-entertainment.biz/</a hyperion-e...inment.biz> but note that it needs custom hardware to run (the availability of which is hit-and-miss) Finally I couldn't mention AmigaOS without MorphOS or risk starting a flame war. MorphOS/Pegasos project was created before AmigaOS4/AmigaONE was available and (maybe accidentaly) created a split in the Amiga community. The split is between AmigaOS4 which promises more and has the "official Amiga" idea helping it, and the MorphOS which is similar, but has lower expectations and seems to meet them quite well. MorphOS (the most up-to-date site I can find on it is <a href="http://www.morphos-news.de/" title="morphos-news.de">http://www.morphos-news.de/</a morphos-news.de> ) requires custom hardware as well, but the Pegasos platform it runs on is in a relatively stable position (to me it seems the best supported PPC desktop system since Apple have left that market) You may only be interested in AROS if you are an x86 user, but if you don't have any dependance on an x86 system (ie. you don't use Windows) then you may consider buying an alternative system as your next computer, considering that the AmigaONE (I think currently only available second hand) runs Debian quite well with a little patching, and the Pegasos is a respectable system with support for Linux, the BSDs, QNX, Haiku and others and is well worth a look (although their customer support may be a little lacking if Sabrina Online is anything to go by<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:)
A few more
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on June 15, 2006 02:48 AMIn this vein I would like to mention AROS, the Amiga Research Operating System, available from <a href="http://www.aros.org/" title="aros.org">http://www.aros.org/</a aros.org> under the GPL. It aims at binary compatibility with AmigaOS3.1 on the m68k architecture, and on x86 it runs very quickly. At the moment it is not natively installable on x86, so I have had little experience with installing the few applications available. To run it on x86 there is a LiveCD which is mainly for demo purposes, and also a nested version which runs natively inside Linux.
Also on this topic, and since the mention of SkyOS shows that this is not a FLOSS only topic, there is obviously the official AmigaOS which is now (sort of) at version 4 and you can get info on it from <a href="http://os4.hyperion-entertainment.biz/" title="hyperion-e...inment.biz">http://os4.hyperion-entertainment.biz/</a hyperion-e...inment.biz> but note that it needs custom hardware to run (the availability of which is hit-and-miss)
Finally I couldn't mention AmigaOS without MorphOS or risk starting a flame war. MorphOS/Pegasos project was created before AmigaOS4/AmigaONE was available and (maybe accidentaly) created a split in the Amiga community. The split is between AmigaOS4 which promises more and has the "official Amiga" idea helping it, and the MorphOS which is similar, but has lower expectations and seems to meet them quite well. MorphOS (the most up-to-date site I can find on it is <a href="http://www.morphos-news.de/" title="morphos-news.de">http://www.morphos-news.de/</a morphos-news.de> ) requires custom hardware as well, but the Pegasos platform it runs on is in a relatively stable position (to me it seems the best supported PPC desktop system since Apple have left that market)
You may only be interested in AROS if you are an x86 user, but if you don't have any dependance on an x86 system (ie. you don't use Windows) then you may consider buying an alternative system as your next computer, considering that the AmigaONE (I think currently only available second hand) runs Debian quite well with a little patching, and the Pegasos is a respectable system with support for Linux, the BSDs, QNX, Haiku and others and is well worth a look (although their customer support may be a little lacking if Sabrina Online is anything to go by<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:)
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