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SubjectRe: Amiga and Linux, again
Date
Lou Grinzo said ...
>
> A little more detail has come out about Amiga's plans and Linux.
>
> http://www.amiga.de/diary/executive/tech_brief.html
>
> This is an interesting overview, heavy on the philosophy, but with
> enough tech. detail to be interesting.

It looks and smells like yet another attempt to invent yet another new
platform. I believe that all the former companies which bought and then
sold the Amiga technology layed out grandiose plans similar to Jim Collas
(President of Amiga). At this point in time the new architecture will
have *nothing* in common with the original Amigas, except the name. I
wouldn't considder this new platform even remotely Amiga-ish. I fail to
see how this will benefit the Amiga community at large, except to
introduce yet another multi-media super machine. It will, however,
benefit the Linux community ;-)

> One detail that caught my eye was near the bottom, where
> they list, under "Processor Subsystem":
>
> "Hardware assist for Linux kernel, Java VM, and classic Amiga
> emulation"

My market-speak interpreter tells me this could mean that Linux will be
ported to the hardware with new drivers to support the new wiz-bangs of
the platform, and that Linux will be the basis for the Java VM and
"classic Amiga" emulation. From the description, they are using X
Windows and OpenGL as the graphic substrate and building an Amiga
Workbench environment on top of it (possibly like NextStep).

Reguarding Amiga OE (Operating Environment):

Sounds like AmigaObjects will be Amiga answer to CORBA or DCOM. Need
more details to really evaluate it. What bothers me is the
infrastructure they are describing sounds like normal X applications
might not interact with the rest of the system all that well. The
Information Appliance slant kinda sounds like they are aiming at using
the Amiga as a central controller of a Smart House. It will be
interesting to see how well this turns out.

Reguarding the hardware specs:

Starting with 32Mb of memory, the machine will probably just barely be
usable (this would be like the original Amiga with only 256K of memory).
This machine looks pretty feature rich. A shame they are embedding IDE
controllers instead of SCSI (so much for their "leaving the PC legacy
baggage behind" statement). Only 2 PCI expansion slots (wholely
inadequate in my opinion)?? At least they are incorporating enough Video
features to at least match what the original Amiga was quite good at
(with the VideoToaster plugged in, that is). However, considdering all
that they are shoe-horning in, I'd expect this machine to be pretty
pricy.

Bottom line - It's a Linux based system with a different user
frontend/desktop.

> Hmm...?

Hmm, indeed.

--
Peter A. Castro (doctor@fruitbat.org) or (pcastro@us.oracle.com)

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