| News | Features | Interviews |
| Blog | Contact | Editorials |
| MorphOS: Amiga operating system meets PowerPC Macs |
| By Thom Holwerda, submitted by Dan Knight on 2012-07-31 22:52:31 |
| Low End Mac's Sebastian Patten takes a look at MorphOS 3. "MorphOS is for Amiga users. Period. And it's for those Macintosh users who like to experiment and experience a new operating system on their PowerPC Macs. That's where I see myself, and I had a lot of fun playing around with MorphOS on my eMac. It is not a full OS X replacement, but it can come close to it, depending on your computer needs." |
|
| Comment by Drumhellar |
| By Drumhellar on 2012-07-31 23:28:17 |
|
> Much has been written about Linux on PowerPC Macs. To some, it is a reliable alternative; to others, just a crippled port of the x86 original. I've never heard that before. |
 - Score: 2 |
| RE: Comment by Drumhellar |
| By zizban on 2012-08-01 02:07:34 |
| Last I tried PowerPC Linux a few years ago, it did seem like an after thought to me. It was hard to find binaries, compiling could be a challenge, etc. Debian's support was pretty good and Yellow Dog, of course, but beyond that it was hit or miss. |
| - Score: 4 |
| not a linux problem. |
| By sergio on 2012-08-01 05:24:09 |
|
Those issues are distribution-specific and not a linux problem. PPC is supported by linux officially, no porting required. It works perfect. Desktop distributions are dropping PPC because there's no desktop computers using PPC anymore... so the quality of the ppc distributions is low. |
| - Score: 3 |
| Comment by MOS6510 |
| By MOS6510 on 2012-08-01 06:40:01 |
|
The reason I haven't tried MorphOS is that it's rather pricey and if my eMac breaks down I will need to search for another one which will probably be relatively costly as well. The audience is limited, so I wonder if it's a good choice to limit the limited audience by price and hardware. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Comment by MOS6510 |
| By Johann Chua on 2012-08-01 07:49:46 |
| Mac mini G4s are pretty cheap nowadays. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Comment by MOS6510 |
| By MOS6510 on 2012-08-01 07:54:19 |
|
A quick search finds 2, 250 and 300 euro. MorphOS is around 70 IIRC. So thats between 300 and 400 euro for, what I consider, a hobby OS. Add a few euro and I have a/the new iPad. If I can score a really cheap Mini I might give it a go. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: Comment by MOS6510 |
| By p-OS on 2012-08-01 11:22:25 |
|
Just looked at ebay. The cheapest offer for a Mac Mini G4 1.25 was 80 € incl. 1 year warranty. MorphOS can be fully used and installed without a keyfile . in "Demo mode" it is fully functional, but limited to half an hour per session (then you have to reboot)., before speed is limited. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Comment by MOS6510 |
| By ncafferkey on 2012-08-01 12:15:24 |
|
> The audience is limited, so I wonder if it's a good choice to limit the limited audience by price and hardware. I don't know what you mean about limiting the hardware. There's no artificial limiting of what hardware MorphOS runs on, it's just that developer man-power constrains the amount of drivers etc. that can be written. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[2]: Comment by MOS6510 |
| By MOS6510 on 2012-08-01 12:28:34 |
|
By opting for PPC the audience is limited. More people have a spare X86 system than a PPC one. The hardware itself isn't limited, but the number of people that have PPC is. |
| - Score: 3 |
| Comment by kurkosdr |
| By kurkosdr on 2012-08-01 13:40:17 |
|
"Those issues are distribution-specific and not a linux problem." When it's time to count advantages and features, if something is found in one distro, it becomes an advantage of "linux" as a whole. When it's time to count problems, it's "distribution-specific". |
| - Score: 2 |
| News | Features | Interviews |
| Blog | Contact | Editorials |