Miss Amiga? Try DragonFly!

Amiga users are the longest-suffering technology loyalists that the computing industry has ever seen. Though once the best solution for 3D and special effects work, the operating system has long since been superseded as mainstream options, such as x86 hardware and new Mac and Windows operating systems, have become more powerful.

For instance, AmigaOS only gained support for memory paging in 2008, with AmigaOS 4.1, and USB 2.0 in 2011, with AmigaOS 4.1u3. That's over a decade after the USB standard was released, and three years after its successor, USB 3.0, was finalized. Amiga support for modern operating design and peripheral hardware is, to say the least, beyond hope.

On top of that, AmigaOS only supports dead, 32-bit processor architectures. AmigaOS 3.9 supports the Motorola 68k series up to the 68060 (released in 1994). AmigaOS 4, while slightly more modern, only runs on older P.A. Semi PA6T, Freescale e600, and IBM 750 parts. At best, AmigaOS is a decade behind.

So what is an Amiga user to do? If you're at all familiar with Unix or FreeBSD, there is one option out there that Amigans can look to—as long as they're okay with rock-hard stability, modern operating system design, and pervasive 64-bit support.

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FreeBSD X: Berkeley Unix, Apple Quality

The various Berkeley Software Distribution operating systems, having been nearly destroyed in an ugly lawsuit with AT&T, have had a challenging past. FreeBSD has been the only non-commercial Berkeley unix to have had any measure of real success and, to this day, the hangover of its early legal woes still stymies its popular use outside of industry despite improvements to its codebase.

The infamous AT&T/BSD lawsuits caused FreeBSD to jettison two-thirds of its codebase and start over from scratch, knocking its feature-set back several years, causing it to be bought out and divested by hopeful investors and only reaching robustness with code infusions from two commercial unix systems, BSD/OS and Mac OS X.

So as FreeBSD heads toward its milestone tenth release, it is Apple's platform that has been the center of gravity for the demonic operating system, largely in part by Apple's open-source efforts that have been more and more contributing code back into the main FreeBSD development branch. It obviously won't be long until the two are completely merged—so when thinking of 2014 and FreeBSD 10, starting thinking “FreeBSD X.”

But first, how did we get here? What did BSD/OS contribute or, more importantly, how did it take away from FreeBSD? And what exactly does FreeBSD 10 look like? What is Apple's role in the operating system? Important questions to be answered, picking up from after the lawsuits…

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QNX CRASHED MY CAR

THE Q-N-X OPERATING SYSTEM IS A BAG OF HURT COMMA AND I KNOW BECAUSE I'M SITTING AT HOME WITH MY ARMS WRAPPED IN CASTS FROM MY SHOULDERS TO MY FINGERTIPS AFTER MY CAR CRASHED INTO A RAVINE PERIOD TAKE THE TIME TO READ THIS IF YOU DRIVE COMMA OR ARE THINKING OF BUYING COMMA A CAR RUNNING THIS QUOTE REALTIME UNQUOTE OPERATING SYSTEM PERIOD

I BOUGHT A NEW CAR LAST YEAR BECAUSE I WANTED THE MOST EFFICIENT DRIVE OUT THERE COMMA MEANING A V8 ENGINE RUNNING Q-N-X PERIOD IF Q-N-X CAN RUN HOSPITAL EQUIPMENT THAT KEEPS PEOPLES HEARTS BEATING AND LUNGS BREATHING THEN IT MUST BE OKAY TO RUN A CAR ENGINE COMMA RIGHT QUESTION MARK THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT AT LEAST PERIOD

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Game Review: Legend of the Ancients (1988)

I picked up a pretty cool video game last weekend called Legend of the Ancients, an old roleplaying game for C64 from 1988. To win you have to battle the evil Duke Durthane, who kills the king and rapes the prince every night. After opening the three power scrolls you become a dungeon-master and fight him to the death.

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QNX 6.5 Plagued by Performance Problems

Tonight, I installed QNX 6.5 on my new PC that I bought just a few weeks ago. It isn't top of the line, but it's more than adequate for daily Internet and office stuff, and even a little gaming and compiling. And while I know that QNX isn't the fastest operating system in the world due to its realtime nature, I was more than a little underwhelmed by its performance—especially for development.

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A Brief History of the ASCII Penis

Man has always sought to create, and has indeed done so since time immemorial: mathematics, civilization, language. Some of his modest efforts have reached the realm of art, especially as influenced by the primacy of his ability to create. And it is that very intersection that we discuss today: the ASCII penis.

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Warning: Beware of Sex with Eric S. Raymond

Anyone who has had sexual intercourse with Eric S. Raymond and/or uses Linux should go and get an AIDS test immediately!

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NetBSD: Designed to Fail

While FreeBSD and Linux are hard to shake, I gave NetBSD a glance recently and found some serious problems that not only made me secure in my choice to stay with FreeBSD and Linux, but also compelled me to write this mini-review of NetBSD.

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Why I Uninstalled OpenBSD

I uninstalled OpenBSD the other day after using it since version 3.1 came out nine years ago. I had grown used to it and contributed too, following the OpenBSD mailing lists and even submitting code a couple of times. But when I began thinking seriously about security, things began to change.

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Eric and Linus's Hot Core Linux Developer Meeting

Eric pulled his Colt M1991A Officer’s Model out of the front of his grey sweatpants and looked down at the kneeling, simpering mess in front of him.

“Would you like to hear a joke, Linus?” Eric said as he looked at the barrel of his gun as if to ignore his prisoner.

Linus didn’t say a word, but his eyes, already saucer plates, grew wider.

“So a core Linux developer finds out that a second core Linux developer has filed a restraining order against him.”

Eric locked eyes with Linus—as best he could, as they didn’t always line up—and brandished the Colt.

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Wii2 Mk 2: Nintendo's 8G Console Hits the Gym

Since the last time I wrote about Nintendo's eighth-generation console development efforts, some major strides have been made that specifically address the top-five complains of the currently-shipping seventh-gen Nintendo console, the much-beloved Wii. (Those top-five complaints, for those who don't know, are: graphics, graphics, graphics, lack of a DVD player, and graphics.)

The Wii2 will have a much more muscular set-up than its predecessor. Much like the original Wii's competition, the Wii2 will have a core processor for running the operating system, game AI, and system IO but most of the game will be rendered by a combination graphics/number-crunching engine. But while this strategy resembles the beefy 7G powerhouses, the hardware will a touch of finesse that the competition doesn't seem interested in.

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From Floppy to Flash: The New QNX Flash Demo

Long ago and far away, a little company called QNX Software Systems (QSS) had a tiny operating system. It was so tiny it ran on things like wristwatches, hospital machinery, and remote-controlled cars. So small was QNX that QSS decided to show off with a one-of-a-kind floppy disk demo.

About a dozen years later, QNX is doing it again. Thank to some new features in its newly-released QNX 6.5, QSS is distributing 256 MB flash drives with a full, working install of QNX 6.5 with multi-core support. But let's look back at the forerunner to this project.

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