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[Web] Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide availableANN.lu
Posted on 11-Apr-2004 10:55 GMT by Raffaele84 comments
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On Amigaworld.net it is now available an installation guide for OS 4.0 developer pre-release version. Just click on the icons of the drawers, as on your Amiga Workbench, to learn how it works. News forwarded from Amiganews.
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 51 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by JKD on 12-Apr-2004 14:53 GMT
In reply to Comment 44 (priest):
Aaaargh...you fell for the Anonymous troll bait!

Seriously though....are you going to judge the performance and quality of an OS by how pretty it's installer is?

As far as I recall the full MOS and AOS4 install guides are very similar in nature:

1. Both require setting of some firmware defaults to auto-boot (if you didn't already do it)
2. Both have (optional) partitioning schemes
3. Both then copy all needed system files to the partition via some script. MOS doesn't use Installer (for semi-obvious reasons) and AOS does.
4. Both have scriptable boot console (if you ever hit the OF prompt on a Mac, you'd be straight at home here)

Outside of that, firmware upgrades are a normal part of life and I'mm all for them so long as bugs are being quashed and/or features/performance being added. :-)

Steve
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 52 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by minator on 12-Apr-2004 15:26 GMT
In reply to Comment 14 (Don Cox):
>"I don't remember typing anything at some command prompt when installing
>Windows, Mac, OS/2 or BeOS?!??!"
>
>Did you get a developers' pre-release of those?

I was a BeOS beta tester for 4 years so yes I did.
This was I admit after R3.2 so the installer was a done deal by then.

But...

The BeOS installer was a work of art, it is *piss easy* to get BeOS up and running.

To create a partition you drag a slider, you give it a name and pick a file system. Then you press install. That's it.

Even multibooting is easy!

I see no reason why the AmigaOS (or MorphOS) team could not do something equally easy.

Could you make this any more complex?
It is actually *more* complex than some *old* Linux installers!
http://amigaworld.net/OS4InstallGuide/images/MTB03.jpg
How much of this information is actually useful to the user (or developer for that fact)?

>I doubt if developers will mind typing a few commands. In fact, I think
>most A1 owners would happily push potatoes 50 miles with their noses to
>get AOS4 installed.

Is this installer just for developers or will it be changed for users?
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 53 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by redfox on 12-Apr-2004 15:37 GMT
IMHO this installation guide is very well done. I think it gathers all the required steps together in a logical sequence.

Well done!

---------------
redfox
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 54 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by priest on 12-Apr-2004 15:53 GMT
In reply to Comment 51 (JKD):
"are you going to judge the performance and quality of an OS by how pretty it's installer is?"

Performance? No.
Quality? No.

But it plays a part in "OS maturity" and in "ease of use".

If one just copies everything from a CD to a HDD, you most likely loose all your settings in the process. That is not too advanced way. IMHO.
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 55 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Rigo on 12-Apr-2004 16:09 GMT
<sigh>
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 56 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 12-Apr-2004 16:19 GMT
In reply to Comment 50 (Don Cox):
"I'd like to say the 'ideal' for a platform is to never have to think about partitions, and eventually have a filesystem (persistence system? ;)) somehow good enough that anything you'd ever want to do with partitions can be done in one metaphor. "

Consider a system with one hard drive only. You can groups files into three: those that you should never touch (OS files), those that you change and upgrade (program files), and those that are your own data, stored on the drive only until you back them up. (I'm simplifying of course).

Doesn't it make sense to have three partitions on the drive called "System" (actually "Workbench" for historical reasons), "Programs" and "Data" ?

Aha! But this is why we have Assigns! ;)
Part of the question is whether things like Xen will ever catch on; I'd say in large part they won't (for the same reason it's rare to actually benefit from a dual-boot), but that functionality will keep getting rolled into regular hosts, until we're back to 1985 and if we really need to do something wacky without another piece of hardware, we'll load Translator. (Or VMWare, or Bochs, or MoL, or any of the usermode Linuxes and related hacks...)

That basically is how I partition a drive. If there were no partitions, you would still want to keep these three categories apart, so it would still look the same.

See below, I guess.

The other thing to remember about "persistence" is that nowadays all storage media are hot puggable, including hard drives. You can no longer run an OS on the old assumption that there is a fixed network, fixed hard drives that stay in place for years, and a server. The only thing permanent in a computer is the flash ROM.

One effect of this is that you need to know exactly where you are storing everything.

I sure as heck agree, and that's one of the hard problems implementing that sort of thing. But the absofrickinglutely huge caches of coming years should let us play all sorts of log-structured and algorithmically-apportioned games. (I get the feeling everyone's going to go RAID sooner or later, outside of handhelds; the question is whether the RAIDs will continue to look like RAIDs, or if they'll be in single 3.5" enclosures with a SATA/SAS plug on the back. Further, surprisingly few people b*tch about the monstrosity that is CD burning, so I think a confluence of pressures will eventually make 'standard procedure' similar to XP's pre-Mt. Rainier tradeoff; when you want to truck your data around, you'll either tag it - or hopefully have it pre-tagged, via something like an Assign - and blast it over the network. 'Data recovery,' whilst always important, continues to get more and more expensive and unthinkable versus not losing data in the first place.)

'Real men don't keep backups,' 'real men don't (reformat and) reinstall.' Stupid on the face of it, but also an admission that those solutions don't solve "the problem" (where the problem includes the inconvenience and expense) effectively, or a rational being by nature would perform them. ;) [Not to say there isn't room to improve from other directions, but I don't see the problem of 'the only cost-effective way to back up a cheap IDE drive is to another cheap IDE drive' changing any time soon.]
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 57 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Don Cox on 12-Apr-2004 16:32 GMT
In reply to Comment 56 (Joe "Floid" Kanowitz):
"Not to say there isn't room to improve from other directions, but I don't see the problem of 'the only cost-effective way to back up a cheap IDE drive is to another cheap IDE drive' changing any time soon."

I never thought this was a useful approach. It doesn't deal with the problem of the drive filling up with data (which happens quite quickly if you are doing audio stuff), nor with protection against fire and theft. Company data should be backed up each day and the disks or tapes taken off the premises.
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 58 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Don Cox on 12-Apr-2004 16:34 GMT
In reply to Comment 56 (Joe "Floid" Kanowitz):
"'Real men don't keep backups,' 'real men don't (reformat and) reinstall.' "

I certainly make backups regularly, but I never reformat and reinstall, being mainly an Amiga user.
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 59 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 12-Apr-2004 16:51 GMT
In reply to Comment 56 (Joe "Floid" Kanowitz):
...and for handhelds, bandwidth doesn't really look like it'll be a problem.

One thing I don't think anyone really... well, wanted to predict, anyway (you could see it coming from the sense that 'digital' and 'packet-switched' has always proved a no-brainer on the scale of solid-state electronics or AC power)... was that TVs and phones would become so bad that people would want 'computers' of various flavor to take over. There are a lot of sociopolitical issues clouding it right now, but let's face it; look what happened to music (and look what VoIP is already doing everywhere outside the first-world)... Orkut and blogs may be false prophets ;), but the interesting thing is that music itself was not so obviously reliant on Metcalfe's Law, (mail was, but the mail system was overloaded anyway)... When all your friends can't be reached save by VoIP, or you can't take part in the latest telepresence-phenomenon (er, which is what a hit show is, right?) except over 'the web,' you'll know the tipping point's been hit. Now that it's obvious that could happen, selling the bandwidth to make it so is big-business, even if some of those same companies are desperately trying to stave it off.

What all this means is that, even if you can argue for getting by with a C64 now, eventually you might seem a little Amish. ;) And once the planet busts through that wall (hint: MS is apparently in talks with Skype already?), there becomes -- both because and as part of it -- a very good argument for more storage for that handheld than you'll ever be able to (afford to) carry with it.

People have screwed this up many a time, but as the components become more obvious to a plurality of customers, eventually someone, somewhere, is going to have to hit that grand slam. Similar to the chances of that one molecule in the primordial soup managing to form, react, and self-replicate.

[ATSC is about to blow the legs off the broadcast industry, tempered by the fact that everyone's isolated on cable and DBS anyway, and nobody listens to Clear Channel already; telecom is in an odd position, where they sure won't die selling everyone the bandwidth that makes life possible, but that artificial constraint to show 'growth' -- as Squid brought up way back when -- forces them to make the dumb decisions that will drive people to data services in spite of everything. And thus we're into real digression-territory, but again, when every Microsoft customer has access to a terabyte archive of whatever scraps of his life he could save between reinstalls at all times... even us lunatics will need a good browser. ;)]
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 60 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 12-Apr-2004 17:04 GMT
In reply to Comment 57 (Don Cox):
"Not to say there isn't room to improve from other directions, but I don't see the problem of 'the only cost-effective way to back up a cheap IDE drive is to another cheap IDE drive' changing any time soon."

I never thought this was a useful approach. It doesn't deal with the problem of the drive filling up with data (which happens quite quickly if you are doing audio stuff), nor with protection against fire and theft. Company data should be backed up each day and the disks or tapes taken off the premises.

Point being that the common cases of fire and (physical for-sake-of-equipment-value) theft are easily and cheaply solved with network backup, RAID-to-RAID. This obviously does not solve for the case of being targeted and hacked on both sites -- which turns out to be a much less common case, unless you run homogenous systems on both ends that happen to be vended by the major target for worm authors. On one of those ends, you can even swap RAIDs once in a while to preserve a network-detached copy.

As to disks filling up... Indeed, but where are you going to get a "BFI*"'s worth of storage of storage cheaper than on another BFI? (Tape is getting cheaper again, but cheap enough to offset the 'labor' of babysitting it? For some installations, sure, for installations not already using it... tougher call. For business, maybe it's better to invest that cost in options on your competitor. ;))

*Vernacular for "Big ____ing IDE." ;)
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 61 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Hagge on 12-Apr-2004 19:12 GMT
Rotfl, wait until the linux zealots find out about this installer! ;D
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 62 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Kjetil on 12-Apr-2004 19:53 GMT
In reply to Comment 61 (Hagge):
You know there is not one common innstaller for linux, there are many different installers for different distribution.

there are many good installers for Linux, RedHat installer, COREL Linux installer, I don't like SuSE installer, Debian Installer not to bad.
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 63 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Kjetil on 12-Apr-2004 20:06 GMT
About the removeable media age, I don't understand the problem,
I remember having 2 disk drivers on my Amiga500, swapping disk inn and out,
all the time, remember AmigaOS asking me to insert disk labled "Workbench", "Extras" etc, and not only this a partitions name inn AmigaOS can equally be reared to as a device name, no need to call you partisans DH0: call it work: and programs: what ever and use this inn you assigns, do not refare to device names they change all the time, use the volume name of partsion, and yes you cab assign to devices not active, i think the parameter you added where DEFER at the end of your assign.
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 64 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Marcus Sundman on 12-Apr-2004 21:25 GMT
In reply to Comment 56 (Joe "Floid" Kanowitz):
> the question is whether the RAIDs will continue to look like RAIDs

Can you people spell "LVM"?
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 65 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Bill "tekmage" Borsari on 12-Apr-2004 22:11 GMT
In reply to Comment 64 (Marcus Sundman):
"I get the feeling everyone's going to go RAID sooner or later, outside of handhelds; the question is whether the RAIDs will continue to look like RAIDs, or if they'll be in single 3.5" enclosures with a SATA/SAS plug on the back"

If you read the whole statement it's entirely a hardware comment in which any type of host based LVM software is extraneous. I believe his point is in the future home consumers will be able to purchase some form of a single unit which contains internal redundancy. How they provision that device beyond simple RAID 1 (Plain Mirroring) is up to the OS.

Certainly for enterprise users there will always be a need to have multiple copies of the data online, near-line and offline. Online being active mirrors, near-line being replication/detached mirrors and offline being classic backup.
How this has happened over the years has been changing rapidly and it will continue to change as new hardware, standards and software become available. For home users who are just discovering RAID and it's possibilities will be motivate by price, period. As the technology moves forward and the price point drops, more and more home users will start to implement it.

I'll guess that the vast majority of 2nd hard drives in computer systems are for additional storage and not for mirroring or striping.


Bill "tekmage" Borsari
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 66 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 13-Apr-2004 02:49 GMT
In reply to Comment 65 (Bill "tekmage" Borsari):
"I get the feeling everyone's going to go RAID sooner or later, outside of handhelds; the question is whether the RAIDs will continue to look like RAIDs, or if they'll be in single 3.5" enclosures with a SATA/SAS plug on the back"

If you read the whole statement it's entirely a hardware comment in which any type of host based LVM software is extraneous. I believe his point is in the future home consumers will be able to purchase some form of a single unit which contains internal redundancy. How they provision that device beyond simple RAID 1 (Plain Mirroring) is up to the OS.

Actually, I'm assuming something like block-level RAID 5 by default, in whatever a NG 'disk' made of independent microdrives (or post-platter drives) will look like... and if all any cheap incarnation of it would buy is the same MTBF as a plain drive of the current era, there's probably a point to be taken.

However, the upshot is that such a drive would theoretically remain recoverable after ('common case') failure; the loss of a single subdrive would send up an alarm in some way, and given Windows, the proverbial "Western Maxtor Data Recovery Wizard" would probably send some proprietary commands and allow recovery to a disk of the same make. (Open-Sourceniks would doubtless hack their own tools, goad the manufacturers into releasing binaries, or make a mass exodus to SCSI.)

My understanding is that the manufacturers can only get so much more life out of a 3.5" platter (mechanical considerations; too big, too much wobble), and can only extract so much cash out of existing designs, so this is the sort of thing we're supposed to expect in the next ten years, especially as reliabilities otherwise continue to... maybe not be so good. It all depends what the big system-builders want, of course, and if they do want LVM and portables, it might stay in software/on the controller end.

Obviously LVM is cool, albeit a buzzword (just as 'persistence' is a buzzword), but on the 'volume management' end, what's the difference between a LVM setup and directories in a single flat filesystem with quotas? (Answer: Recoverability, block-size issues, and presently there's never been a single 'normal' way to span a single 'FS' across devices... But whether you tackle that with a FS, something below it, or something 'completely different' like 'persistence'... to some extent, that's all just semantics. If low-level stuff doesn't belong in the filesystem... Well, we still use filesystems built to perform optimizations at levels so low they don't "exist" anymore! Write precomp, anyone?)
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 67 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by miksuh on 13-Apr-2004 07:08 GMT
In reply to Comment 11 (Ronald):
That's developer prerelease, developers don't mind typing few commands. Lot's of developers use eg. GCC from shell, so typing eg. 8 commands sure is not so awful for them.
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 68 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by miksuh on 13-Apr-2004 07:13 GMT
In reply to Comment 17 (Ronald St-Maurice):
Have you ever installed Linux, *BSD etc ? You can't avoid typing stuff when you install those, so that still happens in mainstream land too. If you have to type few commands to install OS4 developer prerelease, it's still much easier than installing those unix variants.
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 69 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by miksuh on 13-Apr-2004 07:17 GMT
In reply to Comment 29 (Hans-Joerg Frieden):
That explains a lot.
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 70 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Ole-Egil on 13-Apr-2004 12:18 GMT
In reply to Comment 58 (Don Cox):
He's right, though.

Real men don't take backups, they just cry more ;-)
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 71 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Ole-Egil on 13-Apr-2004 12:23 GMT
In reply to Comment 43 (Anonymous):
Wouldn't "copy cd0: dh0: all" give you a bunch of write-/delete-protected files? ;-)

Tsk, tsk. Bad idea.
"lha x cd0:amigaos4_0.lha hd0:" makes more sense in that regard...
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 72 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Ole-Egil on 13-Apr-2004 12:33 GMT
In reply to Comment 49 (Joe "Floid" Kanowitz):
But unlike bitmap graphics, that clicking disk-drive and the much improved (over CP/M) partition table was actually among the STRENGTHS of the Amiga. You take out the floppy, insert a new one and the icon pops up. DO THAT ONE IN WINDOWS, I DARE YOU ;-)

More than 4 partitions in a CP/M partition table is done by the extended/logical partitions, and just TRY to explain that one to a newbie... Oh, and that screenshot of the partitioner that someone complained about earlier is of the expert mode. If you're not an expert you're not supposed to use expert mode. If you're a complete newbie and clicks on "expert features" then you're obviously too stupid to own a computer. Or too proud to ever admit a failure ;-)
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 73 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Don Cox on 13-Apr-2004 12:35 GMT
In reply to Comment 71 (Ole-Egil):
"Wouldn't "copy cd0: dh0: all" give you a bunch of write-/delete-protected files? ;-)"

No. Why would it?
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 74 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Amon_Re on 13-Apr-2004 13:37 GMT
In reply to Comment 73 (Don Cox):
Ole is refurring to a typical windows behaviour.
When you make the CD with MakeCD for instance, the protection bits remain on the CD (Unless it also depends on the cdfs you use)

Cheers
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 75 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Don Cox on 13-Apr-2004 14:04 GMT
In reply to Comment 74 (Amon_Re):
"Ole is refurring to a typical windows behaviour.
When you make the CD with MakeCD for instance, the protection bits remain on the CD (Unless it also depends on the cdfs you use)"

Even if you take a CD made on Windows and copy the files on it to an Amiga drive, they are not write protected. It is purely a Windows bug (unless Linux imitates Windows as usual).
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 76 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Amon_Re on 13-Apr-2004 15:18 GMT
In reply to Comment 75 (Don Cox):
Erm, not so Don, well, not in the config i used to use.
The amiga copies the files with their own protection bits, if the file on the CD had the write protected bit enabled, it would be copied as write protected.

Cheers
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 77 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Ronald St-Maurice on 13-Apr-2004 15:23 GMT
In reply to Comment 68 (miksuh):
You mean like Mandrake, Red Hat, Lindows, SUSE?

I don't remember going to the command line to install these? All of these Linux distros have proper install setup routine to get the OS up and properly running as fast as possible.

I know that this is for the pre-release but I hope it will change for the better. Go read post 52.
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 78 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Mostafa on 13-Apr-2004 15:59 GMT
In reply to Comment 77 (Ronald St-Maurice):
I dont know if you read the message from one of the Fredian (sp?) borther, or missed it,

But the only reason the current version needs people to upgrade firmware and/or start the boot from the uboot command line is due to all the current users having a old version of uboot which is not setup to do the autoboot off the cd.

All new boards sold after this release of the cd will have the latest uboot version and so will install the cd from the poweron button (whilst having the cd in it), and then going into workbench from the cd and then starting the installer before you have to do anything.
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 79 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Amon_Re on 13-Apr-2004 16:37 GMT
In reply to Comment 77 (Ronald St-Maurice):
Well, being a mandrake user myself i'll let you know that i often use the console, and yes, i had to mess arround in the console prior installation. (Some of my machines are 'weird')

Anyway, the only console stuff is the firmware upgrade, wich is something *OUTSIDE* of AmigaOS.

Cheers
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 80 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by JKD on 13-Apr-2004 17:13 GMT
In reply to Comment 54 (priest):
Aaah...so this OS4beta is an upgrade version from OS 3.1 or 3.5 or 3.9...you can simply install over the top and keep all your settings? (sarcasm intended)

Even if it was an upgrade from early developer beta releases...it would be far better to do a clean install anyway (for pure testing purpose)..so the point is moot.

Steve

FWIW The MOS1.4 install script, copied over the top of 1.3...or you could install from scratch.
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 81 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Ole-Egil on 15-Apr-2004 05:13 GMT
In reply to Comment 76 (Amon_Re):
Indeed, has happened to me more than once.
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 82 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by someone somewhere on 16-Apr-2004 01:36 GMT
In reply to Comment 6 (reflect):
I don't suppose anyone will port FFS2 to m68k any time soon :)
Hence the dissopointment some feel with FFS being kept up..
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 83 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by someone somewhere on 16-Apr-2004 01:38 GMT
Anyone notice the lzx.keyfile in the screenshot? :)
Looks like the m68k emulation is running!
Amiga OS4: Developer Pre-release Installation Guide available : Comment 84 of 84ANN.lu
Posted by Don Cox on 16-Apr-2004 14:03 GMT
In reply to Comment 83 (someone somewhere):
"Anyone notice the lzx.keyfile in the screenshot? :)
Looks like the m68k emulation is running!"

The slow one is. The JIT emulator is not yet integrated into the OS, AFAIK.
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