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What Happned to the LINUX Thread ?page  1 2 3 

Cunn Pole

Posts 29
11 Oct 2017 13:56


Nixus Minimax wrote:

  As long as there is no 080 ASIC, none of this seems even remotely realistic.

Maybe for the Vampire 4, but it's not like we haven't waited a long time for this. Give it another few years and hardware revisions and we may be there.


Martin Soerensen

Posts 232
11 Oct 2017 15:40


Cunn Pole wrote:
Nixus Minimax wrote:

As long as there is no 080 ASIC, none of this seems even remotely realistic.

Maybe for the Vampire 4, but it's not like we haven't waited a long time for this. Give it another few years and hardware revisions and we may be there.

Even if we wait a couple of years, it's not like a few million Euros will suddenly appear which is what would be required to design an ASIC and put it into production.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
11 Oct 2017 15:44


Maybe the genuine MS-OFFICE will be better than Free OFFICE?
 
If we have tweaked the Core to have the required speed to run Linux Office, then PC-TASK will also be so fast that you can Windows 10 fluently too.


Vojin Vidanovic

Posts 770
11 Oct 2017 15:47


Thierry Atheist wrote:

 
Vojin Vidanovic wrote:
Note that whole Linux story could be easily forgotten IF we had some kind of office and browser in development.

    Hi Vojin,
   
    What's missing? (The highlighted text.)
 

 
  Advanced text editor better then years unadapted Amiga Writter, some decent spreadsheet that can do basic Excels. Apache Office or Libre offer even database, DTP, math and Vector gfx editor.
 
  If I would be too demanding a nice video and audio editor in Amiga tradition, since I cant say we dont have decent video players. Some Scala multimedia+Power Point presentation tool if I must, and old bitch of a near Webkit based browser would end the list for years to come.
 
  Same old plague from end of Amiga days, that made us uncompetative in bussiness and end user usage, beside gaming and 3D blossom.
 
  For most of it, I do see Linux as fastest solution and Vampire starting to offer better levels of performance. Or building one by one goal, bounty of backporting such apps, or doing similar ones.
 
  I do understand m68k Linux is a mess. uCLinux offers best kernel, something near 2.6. Mac kernels also seem to go higher with 4.1 kernel backported EXTERNAL LINK   
  Some of it might have to wait at all for Motorola compatibile MMU in Vamps, as I am sure that would make thing easier. Beside that, as mentioned, 080 optimized kernel and video driver for SAGA seem to be hardest parts beside assembling and testing new distro.
 
  If one day we could jump to 3.x that would be marvelous. Lightweight GUI like Gnome Classic, XFCE/LXDE at best
  or even lower ones is expected. A lot of things can be backported from last Debian.
 
  I dont believe lightweight Linux packed with several apps and its dependencies has to be something that is unviable until ASIC. Surely is more suitable to levels of Vamp v4 performance then v2.
 
 
Martin Soerensen wrote:

  Even if we wait a couple of years, it's not like a few million Euros will suddenly appear which is what would be required to design an ASIC and put it into production.
 

 
  Not only the hardware miracle wont happen by itself, software one wont either.
 
  Exactly. And that is why such things should be re-scratched.

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

Maybe the genuine MS-OFFICE will be better than Free OFFICE?
 
  If we have tweaked the Core to have the required speed to run Linux Office, then PC-TASK will also be so fast that you can Windows 10 fluently too.

Its not a joke session :-) But looking that way, running lightweight
Russian ReactOS with Office 95/2003 would not be the bad solution. Would prefer native solution.

Libres requirements arent that high. Even for current 5.x its not a hug monster as it look like by number of files and dependencies:

    Linux kernel version 2.6.18 or higher
    glibc2 version 2.5 or higher
    gtk version 2.10.4 or higher
    Pentium-compatible PC (Pentium III, Athlon or more-recent system recommended)
    256Mb RAM (512Mb RAM recommended)
    Up to 1.55Gb available hard disk space
    X Server with 1024x768 resolution (higher resolution recommended), with at least 256 colors
    Gnome 2.16 or higher, with the gail 1.8.6 and at-spi 1.7 packages (required for support for assistive technology [AT] tools), or another compatible GUI (such as KDE, among others)


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
11 Oct 2017 15:55


Vojin,
I believe you have good intention. And I thank you for them.

But your expectations are not realistic.
And advocating unrealistic "pipe dreams" does not help anyone.
Not the users, not the project.

I would propose that you run Apache Office on a real 68060 and use it. Or get yourself a PENTIUM 90 and run LINUX with GNOME on it.

I think your expectations are way to optimistic.




Vojin Vidanovic

Posts 770
11 Oct 2017 16:00


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  I would propose that you run Apache Office on a real 68060 and use it. Or get yourself a PENTIUM 90 and run LINUX with GNOME on it.
  I think your expectations are way to optimistic.

Thanks. Wont bother with it anymore, but I believe we are reaching
P90 levels of performance (ah Cyrix Ratings!). That makes decent Linux feasable with enough dedication.

Best would be Linux backports to MUI and Reaction, as at least free source of software (developers and testers needed). Similar as we do with game backports. Best part is these tools are not only free and open source, they are amongst the best in their class, known to people to some level and could bring Amiga productivity to needed level.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
11 Oct 2017 16:18


Vojin Vidanovic wrote:

Best part is these tools are not only free and open source, they are amongst the best in their class, known to people to some level and could bring Amiga productivity to needed level.

One thing which might not be obvious for non programmers.

For a certain problem e.g. like to sort 1000 number,
there are many different ways to program this all reaching the same result.

In the 80th at the time of people coding for C64/ATARI/AMIGA/DOS - the programmer were very skillful in creating the result in the most optimal/fast way.
This is the reason the games ran fantastic on machines with 7 MHz.

This optimal coding was a required virtues at this time.

Time has changed. Today people have multi Gigaherz PCs.
Is a fact that many coders today do not have this skill.

If the average coder today writes something looking like a C64 game - then there is a very high probability that will will coded in such way that it needs a 1000 MHz PC.

This is not evil doing, today coders simple never learned to code in a way that it will work on a1Mhz machine.

Example:
STARCRAFT for the PC was coded in such way - that it would run 100% fluent on A600 with VAMPIRE.

If someone now re-creates STARCRAFT from scratch (like those open source games) then it will mostlikely not work with less than 1 Gigaherz CPU. This is not evil intention.

This is reality.


Nixus Minimax

Posts 416
11 Oct 2017 16:21


Vojin Vidanovic wrote:

  Thanks. Wont bother with it anymore, but I believe we are reaching
  P90 levels of performance (ah Cyrix Ratings!). That makes decent Linux feasable with enough dedication.

I have been using Linux exclusively at home since 1997. My first x86 PC was a P133 Laptop with 40 MB of RAM and a huge 12" 800x600 TFT display. It ran a 2.0 Linux kernel with the fvwm2 window manager. It was a very much usable machine then.

And that's the kind of linux we might be able to run on an FPGA-implemented 080. I wonder how it would have felt if I had connected a by today's standards modest 1920x1080 monitor to it and had expected the processor to fill all of that with program information...

The Linux of today has very little similarity with that of twenty years ago. Gnome and all the other stuff have stacked layers and layers of software on top of each other. You can't just take one program and port it because you would have to rewrite more than half of the code as it depends on a huge framework. You either compile a recent Linux distribution for 68k and have the processor powerful enough to run it or you don't touch anything of it all. If it ever happens, it is because we have a GHz 080 ASIC.



Nixus Minimax

Posts 416
11 Oct 2017 16:24


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:
Time has changed. Today people have multi Gigaherz PCs.
  Is a fact that many coders today do not have this skill.

It's not a question of skill alone. There simply is no need to put in the extra work. And you can perhaps keep the code cleaner, easier to maintain and more flexible at the expense of some speed of which there is plenty.



Markus Horbach

Posts 35
11 Oct 2017 19:21


I am following this thread just for curiosity.
Begging for linux for Vampire sounds to me like nonsense.
My Linux Box is a 10 year old intel Core2Quad 2,4GHz, 4GB RAM,
SSD, NVidia VGA Card and very often i wish it should be faster.
My gaming PC is faster, but I do not want to install Linux as primary OS on it. Why ? Lack of software if you are not a programmer or sysadmin. I can not imagine any use case a Linux driven 68k Amiga can be useful except of proove of concept in 2017.
99% of all Windows users will agree that they will not switch to Linux in the next decade.
So why switch from Amiga OS 3.9 to Linux ???
Every second hand PC worth less than 100 Euros with Linux will beat any Amiga in usability. Amiga Office Suite and transfer all documents to a Windows PC to print them ?

Programming skills:
A PC CPU is a GHz Monster since 2002. No need to optimise most of the software. Graphics are done with accelerator cards since Voodoo 1, a CPU had never a chance against GPUs. Even intel failed to beat ATI/NVidia in the graphics sector.

But have a look to the embedded sector. An 8bit arduino with 20 MHz shines bright, Cortex-M Boards from 48 to 300 MHz do miraculous things everybody loves. Here the Amiga could be useful, too. Ask for a user Port to blink some LEDs or some tinkering with some homebrew circuits on a breadboard. Embedded programmer still know how to use every CPU cycle wisely. Embedded is a field where the Vampire can grow IMHO. A fast GUI with mouse and Keyboard is missing in the embedded field, Amiga OS 3.9 anyone instead of Arduino with single button and a character LCD ?



Cunn Pole

Posts 29
11 Oct 2017 19:51


Martin Soerensen wrote:

  Even if we wait a couple of years, it's not like a few million Euros will suddenly appear which is what would be required to design an ASIC and put it into production.

I didn't mean that an Asic would ever be produced, just that fpgas are guaranteed to keep getting faster


Gregthe Canuck

Posts 274
11 Oct 2017 20:51


Markus Horbach wrote:

But have a look to the embedded sector. An 8bit arduino with 20 MHz shines bright, Cortex-M Boards from 48 to 300 MHz do miraculous things everybody loves. Here the Amiga could be useful, too. Ask for a user Port to blink some LEDs or some tinkering with some homebrew circuits on a breadboard. Embedded programmer still know how to use every CPU cycle wisely. Embedded is a field where the Vampire can grow IMHO. A fast GUI with mouse and Keyboard is missing in the embedded field, Amiga OS 3.9 anyone instead of Arduino with single button and a character LCD ?

You make a very good point here. Challenge would be price and drivers. Cool to think about.


Samuel Devulder

Posts 248
11 Oct 2017 22:03


Notice that in the embedded market not everyone is doing bare-metal assembly. I know of more and more people using Python or JS for that (on STM32 for instance, see EXTERNAL LINK ).
 
Nowadays there is no need to add a mouse or LCD display on the embedded device, just use the built-in wifi adapter and run an http server running HTML5+JS code. The UI for embedded and IoT stuff is then simply your Smartphone.


Thierry Atheist

Posts 644
12 Oct 2017 11:56


Samuel Devulder wrote:
Notice that in the embedded market not everyone is doing bare-metal assembly. I know of more and more people using Python or JS for that (on STM32 for instance, see EXTERNAL LINK ).

Oh, thank goodness. Because there just ARE'NT ENOUGH computer programming languages....

Espruino
MicroPython
eLua

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