My AmigaOne Adventure
By Steven Solie

My luck ran out. Shortly before submitting my last CAM article my AmigaOne decided it would no longer boot which I hope excuses me from providing screen shots last time. You can see the damage yourself in the gory picture.

[ Damaged AmigaOne Motherboard ]

To make a long story short, I now have a brand new AmigaOne-XE G4 motherboard. It arrived just in time for my very first public showing of AmigaOS 4.0 pre-beta at AMUC's (Amiga Users of Calgary) general meeting on November 19. AMUC has been in a holding pattern waiting for new Amiga computers for a long time now and those present were very curious. After so many broken promises, they were getting excited about seeing a brand new Amiga platform once again.

I'd like to take this opportunity to acknowledge my local Canadian dealer LiveWire Systems and their partner ACK Software Controls. Without Justin and Adam's help and compassion, I would not have a working system. Kudos!

With my personal sob story out of the way, let's get into running some software shall we.

First up, TFTPServer by Olaf Barthel. If you remember back, I was booting AmigaOS 4.0 using Kermit and it took several minutes via the serial port. With TFTPServer installed on my A3000T and the AmigaOne's built-in Ethernet port, I can now cold boot in about 80 seconds. A warm boot takes me about 20 seconds including starting up Envoy. These times were measured with a stop watch, debug on, 10Mbps Ethernet, no UDMA and no PPC native graphics.

Heinz Wrobel released Envoy in 1998 (according to the CD-ROM) and it has worked flawlessly for me ever since. I can now simply double click icons on almost any AmigaOS volume without thinking about it (too much). I've tried Envoy via Ethernet on a variety of systems including A2000/68000/2.1, A1200/68020/3.1, A3000/68030/3.5 and A3000T/68060/3.9 with no problems and minimal CPU usage. For me, it is clearly the best solution for moving data quickly and efficiently between two or more Amiga computers. I'm having some problems uploading data from the AmigaOne but I expect to have that issue resolved soon. I haven't yet tried the printer sharing.

[ Screenshot of Envoy ]

I installed PageStream on my AmigaOne straight off the SCSI CD-ROM in my A3000T via CacheCDFS with the CD-ROM mounted via Envoy. All I had to do was double click the install icon on my AmigaOne. Installation was successful but unfortunately, PageStream 4.1 68k won't run on the AmigaOne yet. I just recently spotted a fix that went into the kernel that looks like it may solve the problem so expect to hear about PageStream 4.1 68k successfully running soon.

I haven't used Maple V for any serious work since Maxwell's equations in school. It is still fun to play with so I thought I'd give it a go and see if any of my old worksheets would work. Good news is that they all work. You can see some loudspeaker design stuff I was playing with in the screen shot.

FinalCalc is a program I use almost daily for all sorts of tasks so it is important that it runs. Too bad it only half works so far. I was able to open up spreadsheets but for some reason the recalc task always crashes on me. This will definitely need fixing because I just can't live without a good spreadsheet.

[ Screenshot of FinalCalc ]

Databases have come and gone on the Amiga but SBase (previously SuperBase) has remained a solid performer. I have many databases setup including a music CD database which I took a screen shot of. It is looking just a bit dated on OS4 but it works. Hopefully the current owners, Mr. Hardware Computers, will create a native OS4 version for us. I've also used MySQL and MiniSQL but they are usually too large and complex for what I need day to day. SBase still serves a niche.

I also tried various networking tools such as YAM, AmiFTP, Jabberwocky, ChatBox, RC-FTPd, etc. and didn't encounter any problems with them. Other programs that I didn't have much luck with include ProVector, PerfectPaint and AWeb. These programs just refused to run for various reasons or were just too unstable to be useful. Fortunately, the Grim Reaper was able to trace the stack so it is just a matter of time before they will be running.

The kernel itself has progressed nicely. I've now installed my third AmigaOne kernel and I must say that each new version is more stable and perceptually faster than the previous one. In addition to the kernel itself, various other components have been updated and/or fixed each week. Progress has been swift and I've been trying to keep up as best I can. Not too shabby for two weeks worth elapsed time.