workbench.library - Should I update it?

[matthey]

Originally Posted by Akira

I dislike hacky shit and keep it pretty clear. I never use MUI, I don't have stuff like Visualprefs or Toolmanager, I ditched MCP in favor of MultiCX and that's probably the only "thirdparty" thing I have on it so I don't have to have a million little patches doing shit like removing the clicking from my floppy or having a screensaver.

The old MUI 3.8 is stable and the way it is added is not "hacky". I'm not a fan of the MUI philosophy or performance either. Problems usually come from 3rd party Libs (bugs or wrong CPU flavors installed). I don't see how you avoid MUI using programs without going back to very old and often buggy programs.

Originally Posted by Akira

Again, the only 3.5/3.9 thing I have in my setup is Workbench.library and I just put it there for the sake of updating. Everything is working just fine.

You do increase the chances of problems by mixing and matching libraries. A newer library may ask for a newer version of some other library which can not be opened. Most of the time you will get an error that some library could not be opened though.

Originally Posted by Akira

Thanks for your tip of looking at NDK39, I Manage to see all the updates it brings. Is 3.9 still updated or has it been left to rot?

Thomas "ThoR" Richter, Olaf "olsen" Barthel, Stephan Rupprecht, etc. have released updates for AmigaOS 3.9 modules after the last official Boing Ball update. There are several other bug fix patches which seem to be stable.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by matthey

The old MUI 3.8 is stable and the way it is added is not "hacky". I'm not a fan of the MUI philosophy or performance either. Problems usually come from 3rd party Libs (bugs or wrong CPU flavors installed). I don't see how you avoid MUI using programs without going back to very old and often buggy programs.

I will never use MUI, ever again. I had it for a while. It made everything sluggish and damn ugly. I never needed it and I always use tools that use something else instead of MUI for UI, and if they don't have an option, command line or screw them it is.
There's ClassAct and other options. And it doesn't matter if what I use is old, if it works fine for me. I don't use my Amiga for everyday. modern shit that my PC is for.

You do increase the chances of problems by mixing and matching libraries. A newer library may ask for a newer version of some other library which can not be opened. Most of the time you will get an error that some library could not be opened though.

Will see when I get there. So far workbench.library update seems harmless. Nobody has said any specific case where it won't work.

Thomas "ThoR" Richter, Olaf "olsen" Barthel, Stephan Rupprecht, etc. have released updates for AmigaOS 3.9 modules after the last official Boing Ball update.

God bless them. The problem is giving money to Cloanto, which I refuse to do. So I guess I am stuck with what I have.

[idrougge]

3.9 hasn't been updated since the beginning of the century, though Olsen does tend to components he made, such as the Shell.

I thought they updated DOS as well, it being the least beloved part of AmigaOS, but perhaps they didn't.

But if you do want to avoid ugly patches, I think 3.9 is the way to go. Updated functionality is integrated in the OS, not patched onto 3.1, and it's easy to prune down the eye candy. And I really like the new Workbench. Just being able to open a Workbench window from the shell is pure gold.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Os 3.1 is a hybrid and obsolete system, can not be updated to OS 3.5/3.9 (3.5 and 3.9 will not be installed properly). For an expanded Amiga the best solution is the 3.9 + BB-1-2-3-4; OS3.1 Does not support many modern applications and does not enjoy applications that came with 3.9.

MUI Is an excellent software, If you have one AMiGA expanded and embellish makes the system more functional, see video:

[ Show youtube player ]

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Akira

I will never use MUI, ever again. I had it for a while. It made everything sluggish and damn ugly.

MUI doesn't slow anything down except MUI. It may be bloated (in Amiga terms) and has some quirks, but it only gets used for MUI applications. If you have it installed, it does precisely nothing until you run a MUI application, and then it still only affects that application.

There's ClassAct and other options. And it doesn't matter if what I use is old, if it works fine for me. I don't use my Amiga for everyday. modern shit that my PC is for.

Well, fair enough I guess. To me that seems the same principle as people refusing to use a hard drive because using floppies is the way the game should be played. I think you're missing out on some excellent software, but if you're fine without it then all is good.

God bless them. The problem is giving money to Cloanto, which I refuse to do. So I guess I am stuck with what I have.

OS 3.5 and 3.9 are nothing to do with Cloanto - they were both developed separately by Haage & Partner. Cloanto (and Hyperion) both have licences up to and including 3.1, and that's it. Which is why Cloanto released their hodge-podge 3.X release instead of pushing 3.9, which already included many of the fixes and improvements they were looking for.

If you do find 3.9 for sale somewhere, it's either NOS or reproduced (presumably under a separate licence). In either case, it's probably only the reseller who gets any of your money since H&P have long since exited the scene.

[matthey]

Originally Posted by idrougge

3.9 hasn't been updated since the beginning of the century, though Olsen does tend to components he made, such as the Shell.

ThoR did the shell and the last update was only a couple of months ago.

http://aminet.net/package/util/boot/ShellUpdate

Originally Posted by idrougge

I thought they updated DOS as well, it being the least beloved part of AmigaOS, but perhaps they didn't.

Not that I'm aware of. There is a 3rd party version based on disassembled code but this is very tricky as some old Amiga software relied on certain registers having certain values. A new compile with a different compiler would likely break some old software so this is very tricky. A well tested assembler dos.library with lots of comments has its advantages here.

Originally Posted by AMIGASYSTEM

Os 3.1 is a hybrid and obsolete system, can not be updated to OS 3.5/3.9 (3.5 and 3.9 will not be installed properly). For an expanded Amiga the best solution is the 3.9 + BB-1-2-3-4; OS3.1 Does not support many modern applications and does not enjoy applications that came with 3.9.

I hate the word obsolete as it applies to an OS. AmigaOS 3.1 was the best AmigaOS ever created at the peak of Amiga development. It is still useful, fast and adequate for many low end Amiga users. Later AmigaOS versions surpassed it in areas but none have obtained the same level of overall quality and performance.

Originally Posted by Daedalus

MUI doesn't slow anything down except MUI. It may be bloated (in Amiga terms) and has some quirks, but it only gets used for MUI applications. If you have it installed, it does precisely nothing until you run a MUI application, and then it still only affects that application.

Actually, MUI does not sleep well. Having a MUI program open in the background uses more CPU performance than it should. You can see this with a SnoopDOS/Snoopy type program and check out how many CopyMem() calls it does per second. This is not a problem when no MUI program is running but I think that is Akira's point.

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Well, fair enough I guess. To me that seems the same principle as people refusing to use a hard drive because using floppies is the way the game should be played. I think you're missing out on some excellent software, but if you're fine without it then all is good.

This comparison makes ClassAct/Reaction look inferior as it would be the "floppy" and MUI the "hard drive". MUI version 3.8 does have more functionality and polish than even the AmigaOS 3.9 Reaction but this was just lack of attention as can be seen with AmigaOS 4.x Reaction. They are both nearly limitless customizable OO GUIs. MUI does create its own style instead of following the Amiga style guide and it does more than it needs to which reduces performance and requires more resources.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by matthey

Actually, MUI does not sleep well. Having a MUI program open in the background uses more CPU performance than it should. You can see this with a SnoopDOS/Snoopy type program and check out how many CopyMem() calls it does per second. This is not a problem when no MUI program is running but I think that is Akira's point.

Yeah, fair enough. I have to say I've never noticed anything feeling slower when MUI is running, but I don't run it on anything below an 030. And I suspect that if someone doesn't like MUI, they're hardly likely to have MUI applications loaded up everywhere. It's more a case that having it on the hard drive will make no difference, and it will be available on the rare occasion that you do actually want to try out YAM, or SimpleMail, or SongPlayer, or SWOSEd, or AmIRC, or WookieChat, or SimpleCat, or any one of a multitude of other MUI applications that might not necessarily have a decent equivalent.

This comparison makes ClassAct/Reaction look inferior as it would be the "floppy" and MUI the "hard drive". MUI version 3.8 does have more functionality and polish than even the AmigaOS 3.9 Reaction but this was just lack of attention as can be seen with AmigaOS 4.x Reaction. They are both nearly limitless customizable OO GUIs. MUI does create its own style instead of following the Amiga style guide and it does more than it needs to which reduces performance and requires more resources.

Well, yes, that was kind of the point I was trying to make. ClassAct/RA do have fewer features and are a more basic level of toolkit, which has both advantages and disadvantages, just like when using floppies you can get away without a RAM expansion, whereas a hard drive practically demands one (=more resources). But the point of the comparison was more that you can miss out on a lot of functionality and nice software by needlessly sticking to your convictions, in effect cutting off your nose to spite your face. No, MUI is not nice, but by compromising and accepting the fact that it is a little bloated, you open yourself to a whole host of new things, without having to compromise your system in any way when they're not running. But, like people who insist on using floppies (and I suppose, using Amigas at all), I admire the dedication. Everyone has a limit as to how much convenience they give up for their hobby, and some go further than I personally think is needed.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Originally Posted by matthey

I hate the word obsolete as it applies to an OS. AmigaOS 3.1 was the best AmigaOS ever created at the peak of Amiga development.

Obsolete i do not know what it means in English, in Italian means old, inefficient, inadequate and not compatible with new applications. Os 3.1 it was a great system before it was born OS3.5 ans OS 3.9 more modern and compatible with all applications born from 2000 to today.
On AFA OS you do not notice any slowdown with MUI everything is super fast, see my video.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

MUI doesn't slow anything down except MUI. It may be bloated (in Amiga terms) and has some quirks, but it only gets used for MUI applications. If you have it installed, it does precisely nothing until you run a MUI application, and then it still only affects that application.

YEah exactly! MUI itself is junk to me.
I will also expand on this to clarify: MUI looks terrible and I never liked any apps that require it. Yes, it does not slow the system down, but the apps that use it are super slow on low spec systems.
I always prefer programs that use the in-built UI system, even if they don't look as nice, because they perform a lot better.

And yeah, if something works well for my use. I don't have this mentality of "must have the latest thing just because it's the latest thing", and it works well for me. As my Workbench use is minimal (just point around and double click on a game or demo or app), there's no real need for me to upgrade to 3.9

To me that seems the same principle as people refusing to use a hard drive because using floppies is the way the game should be played.

It's not like refusing to use a hard drive, a hard drive is infinitely more convenient than a floppy drive, but the additions to 3.9 from 3.1 are in my opinion not of that much an advantage to me. Unless you really use your Amiga as your everyday computing platform, in which case, well, I question why you would use AmigaOS going bak to your hard drive and floppy drive comparison: why use an Amiga with 3.9 when you can use a PC or Mac with the latest OS and much more processing power and do everything better?

OS 3.5 and 3.9 are nothing to do with Cloanto

Sorry, I meant Hyperion. Whoever still sells 3.9. I don't care, really. Not going to buy it.

My conversation is drifting off-topic anyway. I'm sorry about that.

It seems to me there is no point in me updating workbench.library for the use I give to the system. Thanks everyone for your input on this!

[Daedalus]

Yeah, that's the thing really - we're all gluttons for punishment really it just depends how far down that scale we're happy going. Personally I use my Amigas for development and writing so it's 3.9, 4.1 or MorphOS for me, anything further back just isn't as enjoyable. I'm doing some hardware fiddling on a 2.1 A2000 at the moment, and it bugs the hell out of me

[matthey]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Yeah, that's the thing really - we're all gluttons for punishment really it just depends how far down that scale we're happy going. Personally I use my Amigas for development and writing so it's 3.9, 4.1 or MorphOS for me, anything further back just isn't as enjoyable. I'm doing some hardware fiddling on a 2.1 A2000 at the moment, and it bugs the hell out of me

Throw a 3.1 ROM in the 2000 and install AmigaOS 3.1 and I bet you like it better. AmigaOS found its direction and came together with 3.0 and then bug fixes created the solid and great 3.1.

Performance and memory help the experience but the OS still matters. I recently bought a new "PC" going from a Core2Duo with 32 bit XP to a i5 with 64 bit 7 (my brother and friends wanted me to play a game with them where XP was "obsolete"). The CPU is supposed to be twice as fast per core and there are twice as many cores but 7 is so much slower (I crashed the UI several times by clicking too fast before updates fixed the problems), the UI interface requires twice as many clicks to do anything and is not consistent and 64 bit was sometimes slower to load until I added a DIMM for dual channel giving twice the memory bandwidth. XP's UI is not great but clearly better than 7 and 7 is so inefficient. XP is a good OS for low end PCs kind of like AmigaOS 3.1 is a good OS for low end Amigas. Ok, that analogy kind of bothers me too so I'll stop.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Yeah, that's the thing really - we're all gluttons for punishment really it just depends how far down that scale we're happy going.

To be fair, after owning an accelerated Amiga for a long time, not too many years ago I had to install two A600s that were stock, and I cannot understand HOW I navigated through WB2 back in the day, on a 1 or 1MB 6800 machine, and even with an 8 color WB at times!!!! SO slow!

So I am not a complete masochist but I admit I got caught by "upgrade-mania" when I had the chance to put a new KS on my A600 and re-do my hard drive, so I went for this update just because. I since reverted it, no need My system runs fast, is responsive and doesn't crash. That's all I required! Oh it also looks pretty damn nice.

Originally Posted by matthey

Performance and memory help the experience but the OS still matters. I recently bought a new "PC" going from a Core2Duo with 32 bit XP to a i5 with 64 bit 7 (my brother and friends wanted me to play a game with them where XP was "obsolete"). The CPU is supposed to be twice as fast per core and there are twice as many cores but 7 is so much slower

Dude 7 is already old :P And XP is "obsolete" in the way that support has been officially killed for it (save for the recent update to save XP systems from that worm).
I've had 7 Pro 64-bit for like 6 years now and it's super smooth and fast.
Make sure you don't use that Aero garbage and the UI will become a lot more responsive. It would also help if your computer were more current too, though. Stuff like an i7 and an SSD help a lot.

With all that said, my old Atom N280 still runs XP happily. 7 would definitely be a drag, but what do you expect when you try to install it on hardware that is 10 years old?


Going OT again, sorry. :P But the gist of it is: the right OS version for the right platform.

[matthey]

Originally Posted by Akira

To be fair, after owning an accelerated Amiga for a long time, not too many years ago I had to install two A600s that were stock, and I cannot understand HOW I navigated through WB2 back in the day, on a 1 or 1MB 68000 machine, and even with an 8 color WB at times!!!! SO slow!

Ya, if you are doing anything more than popping in a game then a stock 68000 Amiga feels almost unbearable. I don't think I could go back.

Originally Posted by Akira

Dude 7 is already old :P And XP is "obsolete" in the way that support has been officially killed for it (save for the recent update to save XP systems from that worm).

XP runs perfectly fine and an anti-virus program takes care of most security problems. It would be the best choice for old PC hardware if developers would ignore M$ who benefits from the "obsolescence" of an old OS and hardware so it can sell new versions to the sheep.

Originally Posted by Akira

I've had 7 Pro 64-bit for like 6 years now and it's super smooth and fast.
Make sure you don't use that Aero garbage and the UI will become a lot more responsive. It would also help if your computer were more current too, though. Stuff like an i7 and an SSD help a lot.

I have all the "garbage" turned off and 7 is still much slower than XP. Even XP is slow. I had a XP laptop with Pentium M fan failure which dropped it back to 800MHz which is so many times faster CPU than my AmigaOS 3.9 68060@75MHz but it was unbearably slow as I could watch the screen update and I had to hold the mouse button down over buttons to get them to register. It is funny that you demand the fastest AmigaOS but tolerate a PC OS which is many times slower.

My i5 is Ivy Bridge which gives the following scores under Control Panel ->Performance Information and Tools.

Processor: 7.5
Memory: 7.7
Graphics: 6.5
Gaming Graphics: 6.5
Primary Hard Disk: 5.9

The i7 has multi-threading but this can actually hurt performance for games. My i5 outperforms my brothers early i7. I could use an SSD as disk performance is my bottleneck. I do know a bit about this stuff which helped me save some money as I paid less than $200 U.S. for the above performance which is adequate for playing all but the most demanding games.

Originally Posted by Akira

With all that said, my old Atom N280 still runs XP happily. 7 would definitely be a drag, but what do you expect when you try to install it on hardware that is 10 years old?

I expect an OS which does not get slower with each generation and an interface which is more responsive and streamlined for better productivity. Just because CPUs get faster is no excuse for the OS to get slower. With the end of Moore's law, this can not continue.

Originally Posted by matthey

XP runs perfectly fine and an anti-virus program takes care of most security problems. It would be the best choice for old PC hardware if developers would ignore M$ who benefits from the "obsolescence" of an old OS and hardware so it can sell new versions to the sheep.

As a security guy, I'm going to have to disagree here. I'd be _very_ reluctant to put XP on any network that touches the internet. Your attack surface is large, well documented, and so vast it requires an entire OS rewrite, which is exactly what they did.

I'm not a M$ blowhard by any means. In fact I'm predominantly a linux guy. But XP should not touch the internet!

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Akira

It's not like refusing to use a hard drive, a hard drive is infinitely more convenient than a floppy drive, but the additions to 3.9 from 3.1 are in my opinion not of that much an advantage to me. Unless you really use your Amiga as your everyday computing platform, in which case, well, I question why you would use AmigaOS going bak to your hard drive and floppy drive comparison: why use an Amiga with 3.9 when you can use a PC or Mac with the latest OS and much more processing power and do everything better?

Why use an Amiga with 3.1 when you can use a PC or Mac with the latest OS and much more processing power and do everything better?

Why use an Amiga with 2.0 when you can use a PC or Mac with the latest OS and much more processing power and do everything better?

Why use an Amiga with 1.3 when you can use a PC or Mac with the latest OS and much more processing power and do everything better?

Yeah, let's stick to AmigaDOS 1.2, that's the real classic OS without all that bloat.

The thing is, if you really use your Amiga, and I don't mean in the sense of using it for web browsing or hard disc recording, 3.9 improves on 3.1 in a lot of small ways. It was made by the people who really loved AmigaOS, with lots of bloatware to keep up with Windows 98. But throwing the bloatware out is easy, because at its core, it is still AmigaOS, which is a modular, customisable system.

[matthey]

Originally Posted by esc

As a security guy, I'm going to have to disagree here. I'd be _very_ reluctant to put XP on any network that touches the internet. Your attack surface is large, well documented, and so vast it requires an entire OS rewrite, which is exactly what they did.

Windows is one big vulnerable hacking target. XP has more vulnerabilities than later versions but there can still be several layers of protection including updated software, google e-mail filtering and a good anti-virus program. I was able to keep viruses out and didn't suffer from identity or credit card theft even though I was on the internet (not using Explorer or Outlook). Could dedicated professional hackers get into my XP computer or intercept data transmissions? Probably. The NSA already has backdoors provided for it and probably has all my info on their drives already. If my computer was used for business or I was a politician not aware of top secret data then I would want better security than what M$ can provide.

[Amiga1992]

Thread derailed to pointlessness.
Whether 3.9 is better than 3.1 or Windows 7 better than Windows XP doesn't have anything to do with my question, I already decided it is better for me not to change the library alone.

[McTrinsic]

Sorry for coming back to topic.
How do you best upgrade workbench.library without touching the ROM? LoadModule will not work or only unreliably, are there alternatives?

[PeterK]

@McTrinsic
The Workbench v44+ will also need the icon.library v44+ and maybe the workbench.catalog v44.

1.) You can use RemLib from Thomas Rapp to remove the old libraries from the resident list. Then the new libraries will be loaded from Libs: without a reboot.

If EXISTS Libs:icon.library
   RemLib >NIL: icon.library
   If EXISTS Libs:workbench.library
      RemLib >NIL: workbench.library
   EndIf
EndIf

2.) Or you can use LoadResident (from RemApollo):

Version >NIL: icon.library 44
If WARN
   LoadResident >NIL: Libs:icon.library
   LoadResident >NIL: Libs:workbench.library REBOOT
EndIf

3.) Or use SetPatch v44 only!

RemLib and LoadResident are both included in my icon.library package:
http://aminet.net/package/util/libs/IconLib_46.4

[daxb]

Originally Posted by matthey

Actually, MUI does not sleep well. Having a MUI program open in the background uses more CPU performance than it should. You can see this with a SnoopDOS/Snoopy type program and check out how many CopyMem() calls it does per second. This is not a problem when no MUI program is running but I think that is Akira's point.

Are you sure about this? I tried LibSnooper and SnoopLibs to catch CopyMem() calls and there wasn`t a single one with IBrowse and SongPlayer running. Only if SongPlayer is playing a file infinity CopyMem() calls are printing.

A lot of (most?) GUI elements of MUI is configurable. So if you don`t like you can make it look similar like intuition. The problem with MUI is that you need it if you want to use one of the many MUI programs. Its a quasi must-have even if you dislike/hate it.