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The MorphOS Thread

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The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.
repairedCheese said:
They have a forum, and I really have to imagine it would be a better place to get an idea of the state of things.
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Fairly reasonable answer, but my complain was about documentation in general, tutorials etc as a broad aspect. Because in PPC Linux we don't get many specific tutorials (except the one's found in this forum, and thanks to all collaborators for doing it! :) ) but we can apply other tutorial architectures like x86 and even ARM without many big issues, but MorphOS it's a very niche OS that have many strong features
 
wicknix said:
The desktop site struggles a bit on the G4, but using the built in iPhone UA it loads and starts playing a hair faster than tenfivetube. Once I get unpacked and set up I'll do a quick video. Currently can't find my stand to mount the phone to desk to make a video. It's somewhere in a pile of boxes I haven't dug through yet.
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Many thanks for the tip. Smart idea!!

I've been trying to "rescue" my old faithful PowerBook5,8 from the attic, and struggling with different distros and finally, after many, many failed installations and so many burned discs thrown in the trash, i ended up trying your Lubuntu 16.04 Remix, and i was so happy, finally something that works! Thank you, sincerely for all your work with this and the community!

BUT, today i stumbled upon "the poll of most popular powerpc-installations" here on the forum... and... found Morphos. NOW THAT (soory for screaming loud with excitement), is what i'm talking about. What a gamechanger.
It simply flies on my machine, like i believe i never seen it behave anytime in it's 16 years of life, and the Cpu-consumption is ridiculously low. It's like finding a hidden secret.

I only miss one thing, and that is my question to you, and the forum:

How can i get wifi working with WPA2, that most routers have for safety.

I realized that if i found an USB adapter (cheap nowadays), or a PCMCIA WiFi card (difficult to find) there very probably won't be any driver (needed???) for it in morphos (especially), and their forums does not seem very keen to solve this...

How did you do, or, are you still running on WEP only for your WIfi???

Somebody suggested using a TP-LINK WR702N nano router. I might have to check that option but would like to know how that works. Isn't there a need for a driver also for the nano router then???

Second question, before i gladly pay the 75 Eur for a license: Backlit keyboard was one of the best features of this amazing machine, but it does not seems to work. Can it be solved?
 
Yeah, MorphOS is neat. However it's more of a "tinker" OS for many as there aren't any good office suites. Only simple text, rtf stuff. That's about it. For classic Amiga games, listening to music, watching videos and browsing the web casually it does fairly well though.

I've never had an issue with WPA2 honestly. My 15" powerbook, mac mini, and powermac G5 all connected no problem.

As for the backlit keyboard, i don't remember if it worked or not. I bought the license for my mac mini because i really like dual booting Leopard and Lubuntu 12.04 Remix on my 15" powerbook. For the record, back lit keyboard does work on 12.04 Remix and also on Void-PPC Linux. It always acted wonky on Ubuntu 16.04 (including 16.04 remix) and Debian 10 for me however.

My suggestion would be to install MorphOS so you get the "real" feel of it. Install some software and play with the 30 minute demo mode for a few weeks (rebooting every 30 minutes). If you like what you see buy it. It took me a few years to break down and buy a license. I used it for a month or 2 and now i never really use it. I still have more fun with Leopard and Linux, and can do more with them. It is a cool OS though, and it is fast. It just lacks in some areas in my opinion and crashes quite often. Thankfully it reboots in like 15 seconds. ;)

Cheers
 
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wicknix said:
I've never had an issue with WPA2 honestly. My 15" powerbook, mac mini, and powermac G5 all connected no problem.
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Hmm, the thing is that wpa2 has worked for me in the few distros i have managed to install so the card should be fine. I may need to check my router too, I will have to check some more settings in morphos when i dig deeper. Perhaps missed something when installing. it was so very fast and simple, and NO grub-partitions to specify as far as anybody can see :)

wicknix said:
As for the backlit keyboard, i don't remember if it worked or not. I bought the license for my mac mini because i really like dual booting Leopard and Lubuntu 12.04 Remix on my 15" powerbook. For the record, back lit keyboard does work on 12.04 Remix and also on Void-PPC Linux. It always acted wonky on Ubuntu 16.04 (including 16.04 remix) and Debian 10 for me however.
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I dream about dual booting, but never seem to get the hang on the simplest partition-editing even for a single boot, that's why i really enjoyed your remixes with no Grub-part anywhere.
I normally always choose the "automatic" and let the distro format and setup partitions, but in many cases for powerpc, it seems it prefers to do a long, long install, and then fail in the last step: "there is no place to put the grub"
wicknix said:
My suggestion would be to install MorphOS so you get the "real" feel of it. Install some software and play with the 30 minute demo mode for a few weeks (rebooting every 30 minutes). If you like what you see buy it. It took me a few years to break down and buy a license. I used it for a month or 2 and now i never really use it. I still have more fun with Leopard and Linux, and can do more with them. It is a cool OS though, and it is fast. It just lacks in some areas in my opinion and crashes quite often. Thankfully it reboots in like 15 seconds. ;)
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Will take your advice!
Haven't had any crashes yet... :)
 
Start installing software. It will crash eventually. MorphOS specific software is fine. Its once you start installing some Amiga software to play with that you might run in to random lockups. I eventually singled out the problem software on my mini and removed them. Since then its been 95% stable. Still crashes when changing themes every so often though.

Cheers
 
wicknix said:
Start installing software. It will crash eventually. MorphOS specific software is fine. Its once you start installing some Amiga software to play with that you might run in to random lockups. I eventually singled out the problem software on my mini and removed them. Since then its been 95% stable. Still crashes when changing themes every so often though.

Cheers
Click to expand...
My wifi-connection works fine now, it seems (but the settings for network crashed 3 times though while i was testing)...
The backlit keyboard i got to work also, just by clicking F8! (and trying in the dark, lol) Nice :)
Will try to install things and see. I feel like i'm working on an Atari, if there ever was a laptop, it's that fast!

Cheers!
 
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PC mcLinMorph said:
I feel like i'm working on an Atari,
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HERETIC !!!!!



The question is what you wanna do with it.

As to "modern" stuff, there is Iris for email and for the web either Odyseey (on the ISO but not getting updated) or the new Wayfarer (separate download till 3.16 gets released).

Plenty emulators for games consoles PSOne and older, some ported games (20-30 years old, cos none of the HW is really fast enough for recent stuff).
 
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Bug-Creator said:
HERETIC !!!!!



The question is what you wanna do with it.

As to "modern" stuff, there is Iris for email and for the web either Odyseey (on the ISO but not getting updated) or the new Wayfarer (separate download till 3.16 gets released).

Plenty emulators for games consoles PSOne and older, some ported games (20-30 years old, cos none of the HW is really fast enough for recent stuff).
Click to expand...
Ooops, i forgot that this is a mac-forum :) Anyway, i sold my Mega STE 1993, so i could be wrong in my memory, LOL.
p.s i saw one for sale here in Sweden at 800 USD and... the floppy drive was missing and the keyboard/mouse not working. Shoul'd ve kept it i guess
 
Dronecatcher said:
Video from when I played around with it:

Click to expand...
Thanks for submitting this. Interresting to see. There must be an enormous programming effort behind creating this OS. Impressive to think about, really. I'll play with it for a while. My muscle memory kind of likes it, giving a warm fuzzy feeling that's been gone for quite a while :) "Only" had one "Program is meditating"-occurance yet :)
 
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Didn’t even know there is a thread like that. I’ve got it on PowerBook G4, using mostly as support for my amigas. It’s really neat that you can just plug an Amiga drive and it works.

Had a Mini also but sold together with most of my Amuga stuff.
 
MysticCow said:
Unlike Linux (and this isn't bashing Linux), you pay for MorphOS. If they're going to charge 80 Euro for it, it better be better than any other OS out there for that system.
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The system itself seems wonderful, super, super responsive, BUT it has the usual, classical problem: No usable software ("define useable") for me, except it has an awesomely fast, updated browser (wayfarer).
Well, it all depends on what you are going to use your old door stop-mac for. I've only been playing with morphos as a hobby-toy, and for that it surely works and is fun and exciting to relive the good old days, but as it looks now i'll probably will go back to hunting for the perfect linux to use "for real" if possible, and the fact that i'm on powerpc doesn't make this any easier for sure, especially for someone with my limited knowledge of linux and who knows it could end in that i will install os x again. I appreciate all the hard work these guys are doing :)
 
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Bug-Creator said:
HERETIC !!!!!



The question is what you wanna do with it.

As to "modern" stuff, there is Iris for email and for the web either Odyseey (on the ISO but not getting updated) or the new Wayfarer (separate download till 3.16 gets released).

Plenty emulators for games consoles PSOne and older, some ported games (20-30 years old, cos none of the HW is really fast enough for recent stuff).
Click to expand...
wicknix said:
Start installing software. It will crash eventually. MorphOS specific software is fine. Its once you start installing some Amiga software to play with that you might run in to random lockups. I eventually singled out the problem software on my mini and removed them. Since then its been 95% stable. Still crashes when changing themes every so often though.

Cheers
Click to expand...
So, we meet again. You seem to have your finger on the pulse of just about every OS a Mac PPC can run. After failing miserably trying to load MintPPC on my G5, I decided to look around for some other OS it might run. I came across MorphOS, burned the live CD and it booted right up. It was very nice and pretty fast so I thought I’d install it on a clean internal 250GB HD. Started the installer and got to the point where you partition the HD for installation and the wizard didn’t show ANY hard drives!!! Any idea why? My next step is to split the HD so I can (re) install MacBuntu on one partition and MorphOS on the other.

Hope you are having a great holiday season!!!
MacMav855
 
MacMaverick855 said:
It was very nice and pretty fast so I thought I’d install it on a clean internal 250GB HD.
Click to expand...

On the CD go to Tools and start HDConfig and see if it shows up (you could also start UnitControl to check if the HD is detected but won't be able to do much else there).

If it ain't detected I see 2 possible reasons:
- it is an old HDD on it's last breath, had at least 2 cases where MorphOS failed to detect such drives that still worked with OSX

- it is a somewhat older SSD that is incompatible with the G5 on a HW level
 
@Bug-Creator , The drives are likely over 10 years old and I’ve seen a lot of talk about jumpers. I don’t think these drives have jumpers but I’ll look. I can tell you that this drive is in the upper bay of the G5. There are no other operating systems on it, but it’s twin sister is in the lower bay with OSX Tiger and Leopard. The MorphOS installer/partitioner doesn’t see either drive.

I had (have) intentions of partitioning the upper drive to load a Linux distro on one partition and MorphOS on the other. I’m going to see if loading linux onto the drive will make it visible to MorphOS. I’d use a linux partitioner to make a partition for MorphOS or use the partitioner from the MorphOS installer to create space for the install if it detects the drive.

I will check out HDConfig as well.

Does it matter what format the HD has? Journaled? Journaled case sensitive? DOS? GUID, Apple partiton map?

Thanks for the feedback.
MacMav855
 
From my own experience, don't try to dual/triple boot with morphos. Install it to its own hard drive instead. You'll save time and some hair. While it is possible to dual/triple boot, it takes some extra steps that aren't very straight forward. I managed to do it, but i wouldn't recommend going that route for a first time user.

Here is an old guide for dual booting osx + morphos.

Cheers
 
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@wicknix, I appreciated the heads up on dual booting MorphOS. in the meantime, I’m having trouble getting MacBuntu remix back on the G5. The dvd doesn’t appear on booting holding down the option key. Other dvds do, but both MacBuntu and 16.04 remix dvds just don’t show up. I burned both on an iMac G5. I even used a windows 10 machine to burn one and it didn’t work either. I flashed two 8GB usb drives to try that method but this G5 never has liked usbs.

As for MorphOS, the live cd boots, but the installer/partitioner doesn’t detect any drives. GAAAH! I’m still working on that.

Have a Happy New Year!!!
MacMav855
 
Zero to YouTube in one minute on a PowerMac G4 Sawtooth (dual 1.8 GHz Sonnet upgrade)

This is MorphOS 3.16 running on a PowerMac G4 Gigabit from 2001 Dual 1.8 GHz Sonnet Upgrade 2 GB RAM 160 GB 7200 RPM hard disk Wayfarer Web Browser (WebKit based) I used a KaiOS user agent copied from https://user-agents.net/platforms/kai... to get m.YouTube.com to be that responsive. The most impressive part is that it plays 360p and 480p video directly in the web browser flawlessly even full screen.

 
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