The AmigaOne Experience
by Carl Moppett

By the time you read this article I will have been running OS4 Alpha on my 750FX based A1-XE for almost two months and boy what a two months it has been , but more about that in a bit.

Firstly I'm not sorry at all, or sad, to say goodbye to debian. However, I will take a moment to thank Ross, Rose, Justin, Bill, Olegil and the dealers. You have done a stirling job supporting the early bird linux community.

For those that made the trip to the OS4 UK tour in Bath, I'm sorry you didn't get to have much of a play with OS4 on my A1, I had got some nice things to demonstrate, but several problems needed overcoming with Peter Gordon's, aka Xeron, A1 before OS4 would boot on it. Suffice to say by the time I'd got that going it was time for me to leave. So I'll show you a few things here.

Well in development terms the kernel on my A1 is ancient, its approx. 3 months old and is still using an image file to boot. This is no longer required as many of you will have read on the various A1 support lists and forums. The latest version of uboot uses the boota command instead.

The kernel on my A1 still has full debug output, 68K graphics subsystem and support for only 1 IDE device in PIO1 mode, so please keep this is mind when reading the following.

For the first few weeks my A1's Harddisc spent more time hanging out of my A1200T than in did mounted in my A1. However, once I'd got RC-FTPd installed and roadshow configured it became much easier to transfer files via an AmFTP session than the constant drive swapping.

The grab below show an 83.5 MB file being received on my A1 using RC-FTPd.

[68K RC-FTPd 2.74 reaching in excess of 2 million cps]

A bit of OS4 a day helps everyone Work, Rest and Play.

Time to Work

Most of us want OS4 for home use, but OS4 must get into industry too. Couple this with pollution laws, "parking tax at work", soon to be introduced in the UK, and ever increasing commuting costs, we will see more and more people wanting to work from home. Here is a grab of my Workbench. It shows me accessing my work email via a secure server and also configuring a Xyplex termial server via a telnet session. It saved me a 150 mile callout journey in the early hours of one morning. The fact that this was also done via a wireless LAN means the home worker doesn't need cat5 cable all around the house and can therefore change their working environment to suit their mood. Nothing wrong with a bit of music while you work either, so long as you don't disturb the rest of the household.

[IBrowse, DCTelnet and Amplifier]

Time to Rest

The Amiga experience should be pleasurable no matter what your mood and when you feel like doing nothing else than having a laugh then that should be ok.

Amigaworld Radio, presented by MC Micky_C (Amigaworld.net moderator) on Monday nights (8pm to 10pm GMT) is such a place. Interactive radio via the Amigaworld.net IRC channel with general banter about anything, coupled with a good choice of tunes. For those that like there Football (Soccer for the American readers) talk, Micky is going to be hosting the "Soccer double doo" or "Football doodle doo", I don't think we quite decided on the name, on Saturday afternoons. Come on LCFC.

[IBrowse, AmIRC and Amplifier streaming AmigaWorld Radio under OS4.]

Time to Play

Not been able to find that elusive song as an mp3, but have it on tape? Got a favourite album on vinyl that you just can't find anywhere on CD? Still like collecting 12 inch's, but would like mp3 versions as well ?

For years, I've been thinking about converting my vinyl collection to mp3, but never really had the time or inclination to do anything about it. But you can and quickly!!!!! Being the curious type I was interested in the sound recording abilities of the Soundblaster Live PPC AHI driver, so I fired up AHI Record, rolled in the old hifi, and started recording a few of my favourite singles. While doing that I thought I'd see if I could start coverting these huge samples to mp3's and boy you can.

This screen shot shows AHI Record, sampling, while lame encodes the Annex track from the OS3.9 CD as an mp3. Note the grab from my 060 A1200T in the botton left of the screen, it shows the encoding time for Annex track being over 2 hours. The same track took about 2 mins with the quick OS4 port.

[TheMpegEncGui, Lame, OSpy, Multiview and AHI Record]

Quake the game that pushed the 060 to its limit, doesn't even make the A1 sweat. Don't forget this is with an old debug kernel and 68K graphic sub system. This grab speaks for itself.

Quake running on its own screen, with AHI Audio.

Amiga is Back for the Future This time its true

No excuse. Only we can make the A1 and OS4 a success. Happy coding and spread the word!

[ PC GCC for OS4, Notepad and AmigaAmp ]

Thank you Amiga, Hyperion and Eyetech.

Carl Moppett