Amithlon Setup Guide

[amiga]

@Alpyre:

Nice screenshots u've got !
U could use OWB for 68k (here: http://strohmayer.org/download.php/OWB_m68k.lha ), instead of IBrowse.
OWB is a modern web browser that Joerg Strohmayer has ported to Amiga (68k and OS4).

It doesn't have an address bar, but it HAS an ARexx port, so u could write yourself an address bar.
It also needs ixemul.library version 48.0 (a different version won't work).

[Charlie]

@Alpyre: That's a very tasty setup there!

Amazing what you can do with 3.9 & a bit of grunt...

...yes, I agree: Good old AmigaOS does indeed still cut it as a jobbing OS. FWIW: There's a very nice browser for RiscOS called !NetSurf. There is supposed to be an Amiga port which IMO would make it the best Amiga browser...
...I can't say I've found the Amiga port as yet, but then again I've not exactly looked.

ESX Server - I'm on my holls for a bit (Yey! 1st Christmas off in 9 years!!!) so I hope to dedicate a bit of time to 'Amiga projects'...

[alpyre]

Oh of course, the OWB...
But it is not a recent release. I mean the 68k release is a little dated. It crashes most of the time. Consumes a lots of memory, ect. But it is the only 68k browser with CSS support.
You can also go to websites runnig it from the shell with:
OWB [URL/K]
examples:
1.Workbench:Internet/OWB> OWB http://eab.abime.net/
or
1.Workbench:Internet/OWB> OWB http://www.commodore.gen.tr/

---------
I couldn't find an Amiga version of NetSurf. But it has source codes, and build instructions at their website... Maybe someone may try to compile it for 68k...

[amiga]

@Alpyre:

The latest OWB version for 68k is 1.4 ! Maybe u have an older version.
As I said, in this latest version, the author added an ARexx port, with commands to navigate the page,
so u can write the address bar yourself, maybe using the excellent AWNPipe ( http://web.ukonline.co.uk/awnpipe/ ).

From tests I made, OWB for 68k is not so memory-hungry as the PPC version.
It ran pretty well with a mere 64 Meg of Fast Ram on my WinUAE box (64 Meg is not much these days, on "modern" systems anyway).

[alpyre]

@amiga

Yep, you were right. My OWB was v1.3
I upgraded to v1.4 now. It really is a little more stable, and there is the ARexxPort. But it still crashes randomly (but less frequently). IBrowse still seems a much reliable browser to me. 68k OWB has some more way to go...

PS: I wish a happy new year to all Amiga people around the world.

[Kyon]

Charlie this amithlon works properly with games ?

[Charlie]

Hi Kyon,
Sorry for the slow reply:

It's best to think of Amithlon as being a fast DraCo...
...not sure what one of those is? Possibly the only successful Amiga clone.

In a nut-shell:
The DraCo (and Amithlon) are 68k systems that use a GFX card + Sound card rather than any Amiga chip set such as AGA to run AmigaOS.
It's very much a 'hi-end' solution: Building an Amithlon box will get you a 'genuine' high-end Amiga/DraCo very much faster & cheaper than anything possible with 'real' Amiga hardware.

The consequence is that Amithlon won't run any Amiga chip-set dependant software, which includes the majority of older games...
...Having said that there's nothing to stop any Amithlon user installing one of the 68k versions of UAE, so allowing you to run chip-set dependant software (games).

If you wish to go further this can be achieved quite transparently in a couple of ways:
-Point the emulator back @ your own Sys: partition + a bit of jiggery-pokery. (I did this)
-alpyre came up with a VERY cleaver system involving some scipts, 68kUAE, & WHDLoad. It's on Aminet.

With admittedly some work you can use Amithlon to build an 'ideal', v. fast, Amiga/DraCo for buttons.

Too much work?
X-Amiga would make a very good alternative as it will give you pretty much everything Amithlon does without many of the headaches + that chip-set emulation.

Of course (Win)UAE is fantastic but I assume if you're asking about Amithlon you don't appreciate that feeling of a 'foreign OS' getting in the way...
...This is much less apparent in X-Amiga but only Amithlon gives AmigaOS real control of cheap x86 hardware.

All the best.

[amiga]

On Aminet there's this one:

http://aminet.net/misc/emu/amithlon-2.4.35.3.diff.gz

along with its .readme file, which is as follows:

"Amithlon patches for linux-2.4.35.3
maybe s.o. wants to build newer amithlon kernel - with these diff
applied against linux-2.4.35.3 it shouldn't be a problem.
To apply the patch under a gnulinux system:
extract linux-2.4.35.3
cd /path/to/linux-3.4.35.3
gzip -cd /path/to/amithlon-2.4.35.3-final.diff.gz | patch -p1
done"


Maybe we can have a new amithlon kernel out of this.
Anyone willing to try ??

[amiga]

@Charlie:

Regarding your ESX Server attempts:

Amithlon has a linux kernel version 2.4 if I'm correct.
You should choose a linux system with kernel 2.4 in ESX Server (in VirtualBox Amithlon boots).
Try it; if it works I'll use a "dancing banana" for the first time!

[Charlie]

Interesting idea,
Sadly not going to be me - I know b*gger-all about Linux (mostly because it's an OS I dislike intensely, but that's just me)

If any are interested you may do worse than trying to track down Gary Colville - the author of the most up to date kernels...
...he used to hang about the Amithlon.open group - I don't know about now.

FWIW:
Yes, the fundamental problem with Amithlon is it's Kernel's lack of support for newer hardware, so swap in a new Kernel & Bob's your significant other...
...Sadly:
As I understand it the main stumbling block to an updated kernel is the driver sub-system in Linux changed substantially between the generation used in Amithlon & the current generation...
...Bernie Meyer (who's the main author of Amithlon) hacked this kernel about quite a bit to suit his needs, so you can't just swap in a new 'vanilla' kernel for the old 'much altered' one.
The result?
Most of G.C.s work involved hacking newer drivers (written to suit the new way of doing things) into the old kernel & then spending much time getting said bodge to work. He's not been active on the 'Amithlon scene' for some time, no doubt because there's only so much of that kind of tedium anyone can stand.

What Amithlon really needs is a ground-up rewrite of it's kernel based on the 'new' way of doing things...
...Sadly (again):
Bernie already did that (among other vast improvements) - It's called Umilator, but he long-since lost/deleted the code for legal reasons.
...Sadly (yet, again):
When pressed; Bernie claims (probably true) that it's been so long since he wrote Amithlon that he can't remember how he did it.

So...
...I'd give A LOT for a copy of Umilator - it was actually up & running before 'legalities' got in the way.
...Amithlon really NEEDS a new kernel, but that would take a ground-up rewrite. So all we can hope for is talented people with A LOT of time on their hands who are prepared to hack newer drivers into the old kernel.

Hence:
My attempt to get it to run on ESX server (not given up yet!)
My suggestion that Amithlon should be considered a dirt-cheap route to building a high-end Amiga(DraCo) & buy parts for a box that are known to work.

For interest. A 'how it could have been' story:
When Amithlon was released the idea of AmigaOS as a viable platform wasn't quite cloud-cookoo land & Amiga.(st)inc weren't publicly the f*ck-ups we now all know them to be...
The idea seemed to be this:
Amiga.(st)inc supported Amithlon for two reasons.
-It was a way of getting 3.9 onto cheap + available hardware, so keeping the platform alive as they had noting else to peddle.
-They knew Umilator was in the pipe-line which not only vastly improved on Amithlon, but started on the road of integrating itself into the OS...
...see where this is going..?
Yes, Amiga.(st)inc were hoping to do what Apple had done before. Migrate the OS bit-by-bit to another architecture with the aid of built-in emulation. In the case of Apple; 68k-PPC. For Amiga.(st)ink; 68k-x86.
By the time any of the frothing zealots noticed we'd have had our equivalent of OS8 running on cheap, readily available x86 hardware...
...game over, job done, the classic OS has a hardware platform.
Then (like Apple) the job of slowly porting the code bit-by-bit to x86 could go ahead as & when they had the money/interest.

Did you ever wonder why (when everybody else thought it was wonderful) that Hyperion were the loudest nay-sayers regarding Amithlon..?
That's right, they were deep into coding AmigaOS 4 & could see where this was going:
-Amiga.(st)inc have a version of 3.9 running on cheap / available hardware, that has an obvious future.
-Hyperion have invested time & money in a PPC OS for a platfrom that hardly exists & none but the zealots will buy.
Hmmm...
...sadly, as usual, it all got screwed-up!

Oh, cumon!
OS4, far too late, running on hardware nobody wants.
vs
3.9+, just about in time, running on hardware everybody already has. AND able to run all the non-chipset apps. AND with 68k-UAE for the games. AND with an obvious development path.

Bleh! Bloody Amiga.(st)inc.

[amiga]

@Charlie:

Thats a sad story indeed !!

Now, regarding ESX Server:
Try to choose a linux machine with kernel 2.4 (if available) in the list of emulated machines.
In VirtualBox (other virtualization platform) Amithlon boots up this way.

[cosmicfrog]

it is a very sad story and brings a tear 2 my eye every time i hear it

Just thought I'd post saying thanks so much for Charlie's Guide. It's been referred to extensively while attempting to get Amithlon working on an upgraded PC.


There doesn't seem to be an intro's section on this forum, so seeing as this is the first Amiga forum I've joined, and my first post here, here goes - make yourself a cuppa (and reboil the kettle for when you'll need a second one)...


I used to do alot of tinkering/remixing with Sound/ProTracker back in the late 80's and early 90's, and I've owned an A500, two A600's (one with HD) and an A1200, which I still use virtually every day (see sig for specs) for 99% of my email (no viruses!) and about 90% of web browsing (the SSL levels in IBrowse aren't up to speed with the latest internet banking sites, eBay and facebook). Back in the day (1989 onwards) I was on BBS's a hell of alot - 9-line chat BBS's, and local (Sydney) Amiga-only BBS's (anyone else have relatives that always complained to their parents that the phone line was always engaged will know what I'm talking about ). I had (and still have, if they're not rusted by now!) hundreds of floppies full of protracker modules and demos, but rarely played games (which I think is funny, for a computer which became popular for it's games) although I did like Civilization, Populous and even before those - Dungeon Master, which was a game WAY before it's time IMHO). I don't have time to play games on either PC or Amiga these days.


Now getting back onto the topic...

Several years ago I thought it a good idea to have a "backup" in case the old hardware bit the bullet one day (luckily it's still cranking along after about 16 years!)

A few years ago I had a 100% working "mirror" of my real Amiga hard drive/setup on Amithlon using a 1GHz Gigabyte 71XEH mobo (I think that was the model) with AGP gfx card, 256MB RAM, booting from the original Amithlon CD to then load off a hard drive partition o the PC which I'd created ($76!) and copied my original SYS: partition onto a CD.

A couple of years ago I upgraded my PC to a Gigabyte GA-M55plus-S3G 2.5GHz, 2GB RAM, only later to find out Amithlon would no longer boot using the CD, and a search revealed Charlie's Amithlon Setup/Guide, which gave me the opportunity to play with a whole lot of things and I obtained some assistance from the amithlon_open yahoogroup (trying to create a new boot-cd was a lost cause though). I went the grub option and tried all the settings, only for all of them to fail, but some had abit of progress (see next para). I figured seeing as I found the guide from here that I'd join up for some other's experience and suggestions in my quest to get it working properly.

Progress on the Gigabyte mobo halted - the furthest I got was a grey screen, but was able to do the CTRL-LA-RA soft-reset and see the screen flicker shades of grey, but no visible workbench screen. I got this on both internal hd image and hd booting (obviously the hd booting showed some disk activity). It was obvious Amithlon was working - I just couldn't see anything. This was with the latest kernell. I tried a known-working (others have used it - FX5200) PCI gfx card but that failed to improve progress.

I have since sourced another PC box. I can't remember if this one booted the original Amithlon CD, but I set about installing grub, and updating the FAT32 partition to contain the latest kernel, and now it's working, with the FX5200 gfx card. I even did the updates and have a decent screen resolution (I think it turned out to be the same as my real Amiga - 1152x900). I can't seem to get the NIC working (so many drivers etc to choose from, and I wouldn't be surprised if the built-in NIC on the mobo isn't compatible). Preferably rather than having to start again from scratch, I'd like to get the "mirror" partition on the other PC's hard drive working, only because it's on my main PC's boot drive, I don't think that will work in the new Amithlon PC without some issues such as it knowing which hard drive to boot from (I haven't got anywhere near as much PC knowledge as I have Amiga knowledge, even after all these years of slowly getting used to having to use PC's for alot of computing). Another idea I had was to copy the $76 partition from one drive to another drive, but I haven't progressed past the thought of it due to my lack of PC knowledge.

Even more ideally, I'd like to find out what's causing the "grey" screen on my normal PC - I feel there's some simple setting I'm missing somewhere in the grub boot options (I've tried many!). Perhaps there's a list of all the screen modes (during some of my tinkering while trying to create boot-cd's, I had to type in the bootline after the CD loaded up with a dos-prompt. Using that I could see some output that was probably obscured by the bouncing boing-ball. I wrote down what the outputs were but can't remember what they were (I don't know if I still have the notes either). I think it related to the display not fitting into memory?


I'll update some more as I progress (or more precisely, when I hit another brick wall!).


I joyfully accept all flaming for such a long post



edit: sig doesn't appear to be displaying. Here it is:


-------------------------------------------------------

Towered A1200/40MHz_128MB-RAM_CV64-3d_1GB-IDE_20GB-SCSI_OS3.9 on 24/7 + had a fully working mirror of A1200 on an old 1GHz PC box running Amithlon (now upgraded with new mobo 2.5GHz and countless attempts/in progress to get it working).

[dframeli]

Charlie,

Did you ever get anywhere near running Amithlon inside VMware?

If so, can you provide details of what you tried, what worked and what didn't?

Thanks!

[Charlie]

Hello Aero and welcome to the EAB!
There's plenty to get up to around here - I very much hope you enjoy your stay.

Glad you've got Amithlon up & running again, sorry to hear your troubles with the GA-M55plus-S3G.

Some thoughts:
If you can post your Grub sequence I may be able to make some specific comments, but for now I've done a quick google of that mobo - a few thoughts:
-In theory Amithlon should run with nVidia IGP chipsets as they are basically GF4-grade...
...sadly this doesn't seem to work - I suspect the kernel simply doesn't recognise the internal id code for IGP versions & it just 'bombs'. Probably easy to fix if you have any idea with regard to doing kernel compiles (I don't)
-Sadly the same is true for PCIe slots - Two identical cards: One AGP, one PCIe - Amithlon will bomb using the second, I'm afraid.
-Modern processors: AMD64 - ok-ish, Intel - no chance. Despite much trying I've never gotten Amithlon to boot with my dual-core processor - should work.
-SATA: For almost all mobo's if this is not disabled in the BIOS you'll not get it to boot.

On the lack of a working NIC for your 'functioning' setup: Do you know what the chipset is? I may be able to point you in the right direction...

Hope that helps a bit.


Hello dframeli and welcome to the EAB!
There's plenty to get up to around here - I very much hope you enjoy your stay.

I hope you found the PM useful.


Best regards to you both, glad my (increasingly out of date) guide has been of use...
...until the day I (finally) get round to updating it don't forget to have a good nose round the 'net - a lot of the included files aren't the most recent.

[Methanoid]

Anyone know if Amithlon works with an X2 CPU?

What about any Core2Duos (which mobos)...

I want a FAST machine for Amithlon and other uses (XP, OSX, Linux)

[tero]

Originally Posted by Methanoid

Anyone know if Amithlon works with an X2 CPU?

What about any Core2Duos (which mobos)...

I want a FAST machine for Amithlon and other uses (XP, OSX, Linux)

I run it on 64 x2 3800+ 2Ghz without problems

Err, ok Sound won't work
but that's no CPU thing

May the Boing with you

Originally Posted by Charlie

Glad you've got Amithlon up & running again, sorry to hear your troubles with the GA-M55plus-S3G.

Some thoughts:
If you can post your Grub sequence I may be able to make some specific comments,

It's pretty much the original grub settings as well as "HeZoR"'s config from the yahoogroup that I tacked onto the end of it. His config was having the most success for awhile on the m55plus mobo.

--------------

# Boot Internal Amithlon HDD Image - ( If your card does not play nice )
title Internal Amithlon HDD Image - Force VESA + VGA ( Naughty unsupported Cards )
root (hd0,5)
kernel /amithlon/kern310 console_level=0 init=/linuxrc root=/dev/ram0 mem=512M vga=769 ramdisk_size=12010 leavepages=8200 cachesize=65536 video=dovesa
initrd /amithlon/bigird.gz
-------------

I did manage to install the updates and have a decent WB screen resolution (as per my first post) - I think the drivers override the kernel's settings as initially I only had a 640x480 256-colour screen for WB. I have yet to try any other suggestions as mentioned at the bottom of the grub menu.lst (vga=769 is the number which specifies the screenmode I mentioned above and is the default number in your original grub menu.lst file).

but for now I've done a quick google of that mobo - a few thoughts:
-In theory Amithlon should run with nVidia IGP chipsets as they are basically GF4-grade...
...sadly this doesn't seem to work - I suspect the kernel simply doesn't recognise the internal id code for IGP versions & it just 'bombs'. Probably easy to fix if you have any idea with regard to doing kernel compiles (I don't)

No idea on how to compile either. I was thinking it might be a gfx mode problem, however the monitor doesn't shut down into power-saving mode...

-Modern processors: AMD64 - ok-ish, Intel - no chance. Despite much trying I've never gotten Amithlon to boot with my dual-core processor - should work.
-SATA: For almost all mobo's if this is not disabled in the BIOS you'll not get it to boot.

I don't think it's a CPU or SATA problem as the kernel seems to work, as display "resets" when I do the soft-reset key-combo; I just can't see any gfx.

On the lack of a working NIC for your 'functioning' setup: Do you know what the chipset is? I may be able to point you in the right direction...

The "working" PC (the secondary one) mobo is a Gigiabyte 8ik1100.

[Methanoid]

I never got Amithlon to work with my GF6150 based IGP mobo... so gave up. Gary Colville said I had no chance as GF6xxx or newer graphics chips won't work...

I have another Amithlon query

I'm prepared to spend the money to get the fastest system I can run Amithlon on (seems to be an X2 right now with an A8N-SLI-SE mobo as no evidence of fully working Core2Duo machines) but the machine will have to multi boot all the OS's I use.

I did use XFdisk before to boot Amithlon, XP, OSX but that needed all 4 primary partitions in use (the 4th is the kernel boot partition).

If I install Linux I get grub which I prefer but I may not be able to have another primary partition. Do I still need that small kernel boot partition? Does anyone know if Linux needs a primary partition.

For the record I want to quad boot Linux, OSX, XP and Amithlon. I doubt I am the only one!!

[Methanoid]

Might sound like a dumb question but can I have two network cards enabled (onboard and PCI card), as I need the onboard for OSX and a PCI card for Amithlon. Can Amithlon be told which card to use and which to ignore?