AmigaOS 3.2 and beyond

[Warty]

I could write you a program that you call in your start up routine. At some random point it would put up a guru meditation message, and then crash your machine for real. Or you could take a cheese grater, rub against your nose for 30 seconds, and squeeze some lemon juice onto your nose. Many, many choices here...

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Hopefully not. If you want to crash your machine, I suggest Kick 1.3 or before.

, no i mean the text only, change back from "Software Failure" to "Guru Meditation"

[bubbob42]

Let’s change the topic, please. The Guru message will not have its comeback in 3.2.

[gulliver]

@Thomas Richter

Nice little goodie to use with 3.2 and ViNCEd https://aminet.net/util/shell/ViNCEd_Boot_Shin.lha
Thanks!

[alpine9000]

Originally Posted by bubbob42

Let’s change the topic, please. The Guru message will not have its comeback in 3.2.

Why not?

Seems like a great way to honour the guys that originally wrote and designed the OS.

I imagine C= originally removed it as they thought that it wasn’t something that a “serious business” OS would do.

But now we all know no-one would do serious things with such a seriously flawed OS, I say it’s time to bring it back!

[Storm]

Thanks to everyone involved in continuing to support the Amiga, a machine that will always have a place in my heart. Oh, and the C64, can't forget that little guy

My EPROM burner is starting to get quite excited at the prospect of making new Kickstart chips for my A500+, A600, A1000, A1200, A2000 and A4000, all which currently run 3.1.4.1.

Awesome work, I'm really looking forward to it's release!

[Michael]

Originally Posted by alpine9000

Why not?

But now we all know no-one would do serious things with such a seriously flawed OS, I say it’s time to bring it back!

What's seriously flawed ? There are design decisions motivated by time and hardware resources that we are restricted to. When software evolves and gets mature there are less flaws in it and more robustness to prevent crashes even from misbehaving software. Considering the work put into the updates the future holds for us the most stable AmigaOS ever and you should see less fails. You can happily run AmigaOS for days without rebooting if you are not playing system unfriendly demos of really bad software that never got properly tested and fixed.

[Argo]

Originally Posted by Michael

You can happily run AmigaOS for days without rebooting if you are not playing system unfriendly demos of really bad software that never got properly tested and fixed.

It's been like that for me since 3.0 on my A1200 way back in the 90's

[alpine9000]

Originally Posted by Michael

What's seriously flawed ? There are design decisions motivated by time and hardware resources that we are restricted to. When software evolves and gets mature there are less flaws in it and more robustness to prevent crashes even from misbehaving software. Considering the work put into the updates the future holds for us the most stable AmigaOS ever and you should see less fails. You can happily run AmigaOS for days without rebooting if you are not playing system unfriendly demos of really bad software that never got properly tested and fixed.

Seriously flawed in the same way every home computer OS from it's era was. No memory protection and no way to add memory protection. This means zero security and every single bit of code has the ability to take down the whole OS.

I'm not saying it's bad, it fact it's easily the best OS of it's peers. I love using it and develop for it almost daily.

However not even the people developing it now think it's anything other than a toy/hobby for us to play with. No-one would risk using it for serious business applications today.

[Michael]

A bit of topic, but memory protection is nice to have but sadly not a guarantee that things will brake and once they do, consequences are usually much worse since you less expect them. Like the latest 2004 win10 update, simply crashes into a full freeze doing nothing or maybe running some os update/check in the background, and you can't do anything about it, it has to happen in a few days or just hours after booting. Modern games can take it down too. So you either write good behaving code that works or it does not, and the more complex it is, the harder to keep it alive.

Anyway, the dream is still alive and kicking. Creative people still use it professionally for some tasks that do not require massive ram and cpu resources.

[alpine9000]

Originally Posted by Michael

Anyway, the dream is still alive and kicking. Creative people still use it professionally for some tasks that do not require massive ram and cpu resources.

And would those hard core users prefer “Software Failure” or “Guru Meditation”

For me Guru Meditation is a return to Amiga’s free spirited roots. Created by creatives for creatives. The people that changed it to “Software Failure” are probably the same people that steered Amiga down the road to eventual failure.

[daxb]

Here is your Guru Meditation: http://aminet.net/package/game/gag/Guru Run it from a script or another program if you want to see a Guru at random time. Maybe you want the challenge to get a smaller size. Why not start a coder competition (for the honour?).

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by daxb

Here is your Guru Meditation: http://aminet.net/package/game/gag/Guru Run it from a script or another program if you want to see a Guru at random time. Maybe you want the challenge this to get a smaller size. Why not start a coder competition (for the honour?).

, should be easy enough to modify the rom with a hex editor and soft kick it, still not the same as official though.

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by alpine9000

Why not?

Seems like a great way to honour the guys that originally wrote and designed the OS.

I imagine C= originally removed it as they thought that it wasn’t something that a “serious business” OS would do.

But now we all know no-one would do serious things with such a seriously flawed OS, I say it’s time to bring it back!

You ask a developer about this matter, you'll get a developer's answer, I'm afraid

The "Guru Meditation" is an error message which used to appear either while the system was running (and was about to crash) or after the system had crashed and during early system startup tried to show you what may have led to the crash. As a developer, you might have had a null-modem cable attached to your Amiga, with an Amiga debugger on the other end of the cable ready to take control if you clicked the right mouse button. Then you could examine the state of the system to some degree, as it was right before the crash happened.

This was not intended to be useful for anybody but the developers who created hardware and software for the Amiga, including the original Amiga operating system developers, and the label "Guru Meditation" certainly spoke to the hacker ethic which gave us the Amiga.

Back in the Kickstart 1.x days the "Guru Meditation" would appear frequently because of both hardware and software quality issues, even in the operating system software itself. For example, the intuition.library which implements the Amiga user interface has a function which opens a custom screen according to certain specifications, and it can only return success (screen opened) or failure (screen failed to open) without stating in more detail why it did not work out. So it dropped straight into a "Guru Meditation" in the 1.x days if the screen type parameter was not known. Not exactly perfect for debugging, but it likely may have been helpful for the developers in the day.

So frequent were the crashes that you, not unlike myself, may have associated the "Guru Meditation" with being something characteristic of the Amiga itself. But this bit of hacker humour has its limits. For one thing, the label does not in any way suggest what's going on here. If you have to explain to somebody that what you're seeing is an error message and what you can do next, chances are that you ought to word the very error message in a way which needs no further explanation. This is, ultimatively, a customer support issue

Knowing what "Guru Meditation" means is insider knowledge of the best kind in hacker terms, when that knowledge was still hard to come by. It's a signal both of privilege and how long you have been part of the Amiga community.

For sure, when the label was replaced with "Software failure" it was chipping away at that kind of whimsy and hacker humour which was found in the oddest places in the Amiga operating system. On the other hand, the operating system also became, through very hard work, far, far less crash-prone with version 2.0 and beyond. You got to see the "Software failure" (formerly "Guru Meditation") much more rarely, as it should be. It's a signal of failure first and hacker humour maybe second.

So, why not bring it back? I would say that the "Guru Meditation" had its place at the time in the context of the operating system as it used to be. So has the "Software failure" label. Considering that you only see it very rarely today (or should see it only very rarely today) and changing the label back to "Guru Meditation" does not make it a more useful tool to a developer, you'll not find any enthusiasm among the developers who currently take care of the Amiga operating system for making that change.

The label has different meaning for people such as myself and for you, I suppose.

And this is what you get when you ask a developer about it

[alpine9000]

Is there anyone left using an Amiga that doesn’t know what Guru Meditation means?

I remember the days of non computer types telling me they were typing their school assignments into Kindwords and lost everything because the guru decided to mediate.

I’m not sure their experience would have been any different if they told me the software decided to fail

But if there is one thing we can agree on, is that Kindwords was hopeless and a guaranteed way to see Guru messages.

[amigo1]

@gulliver
@thomas_richter


can you please change OS3.2 to have the same window gadgets as OS1.3?


Please also add the blue-white-orange-black color back and all the drives to the right side of the Workbench screen.


I feel the era when people were most fond of Amiga was during kickstart 1.3 and 1.2 so for the sake of consistency and in order to increase the nostalgia and retro factor, you should consider rolling those features back!


Please also consider including a beige Tank Mouse as an optional to the selling options. Maybe it could be named "Amiga Magic Mouse Pack". But it should not up the price more than 3 EUR.


I think another nice feature to consider would be a real life sized poster of an A1084 monitor. The border of the inner part, where the screen is, should be perforated, so we could just remove it and glue the outer frame to our modern LCD monitors.

This would greatly improve the look wehn playing a retro game.


Also, I like the suggested idea of the GuruMeditation coming back. So if it's possible, please add a RandomGM.device to L: and its driver to DEVS: DOSDrivers.
Whenever we like to have the "GuruMeditation" back we drag the Driver from "SYS:Storage/DOSDrivers" to "SYSevs/DOSDrivers" to activate it.
To increase the feeling it should have to possibility to add the "RandomCrash=YES" Tooltype. So the Amiga will randomly crash.


You know, for the fun factor.

Please don't let us down on this. These are very important features and it will increase the sold units by a great factor.



Oh, btw, I lost my licence key for AmigaOS 3.1.4.1, I really can't find it anymore. I looked _everywhere_! Do you mind sending me a copy with 2 ROMs for my A1200? I will send them back to you as soon as possible when I don't need them anymore. Or if you still need them pronto, I will x-copy and send the floppies back to you. Promise!



Thank you!!!


p.s. I send you my postal address (for the Floppy disks) via SMS
p.p.s or in IRC next time I connect.
p.p.p.s. do you still have a voice box on your landline?
p.p.p.p.s. after lot of thought, I think the RandomGM.device should be in the ROM, so we do not need to boot to Workbench to activate it. I should be an option in the "Early Boot Menu". To make room in the ROMs, you besides the "workbench.libarry" could remove the "scsi.device" as most games do not use it anyway.

[E-Penguin]

I imagine that five minutes with a hex editor and an eprom burner could bring back the guru for anyone sufficiently keen

[alpine9000]

@amigo1 I know you’re being funny, but you’re actually right about something here, The gadgets and window dressings should be updated if we want them to look more modern.

“Modern” Amiga desktops tend to look like a Linux desktop from the mid 90’s.

Maybe going back to something cleaner inspired by 1.x would be an improvement.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

You ask a developer about this matter, you'll get a developer's answer, I'm afraid

The label has different meaning for people such as myself and for you, I suppose.

And this is what you get when you ask a developer about it

If I may add: If you really want the "expert friendly humor" from the past back, install "COP" from the Aminet. Not does it allow you to provide an expert friendly user interface to hunt down the issue, targetted at the real hacker (not just the wannabe fans), it also prints the sentence "Please do not panic" in nicely typed letters to the monitor. If that isn't a true advantage, I do not know what. Not just a boring red blinking box, but even some function that comes with the moral support.



So - enough commercials for today.

[Minuous]

Originally Posted by alpine9000

The people that changed it to “Software Failure” are probably the same people that steered Amiga down the road to eventual failure.

Release 2 was arguably the biggest and most important AmigaOS upgrade ever. These harsh comments about the Release 2 developer team are rather unfair.

Maybe going back to something cleaner inspired by 1.x would be an improvement.

But OS1.x looks like a toy OS; also OS1.x gadgets are missing important depth cues.