MorphOS 3.0 Released: Refusing To Let the PPC Desktop OS Die Gracefully 214
An anonymous reader writes "Version 3.0 of MorphOS has been released. It's the independent PPC OS designed for outdated Apple systems like G4 PowerBooks (5,6; 5,7; 5,8; or 5,9) and eMacs (1.25 GHz/1.42 GHz) and PPC Mac Minis, and some G4 PowerMac models (depends on graphics hardware). It further runs on discontinued and niche Genesi desktop systems (Pegasos) and the stunted 128-megabyte-of-RAM tiny Efika. MorphOS is a nice-looking, low-resource, and nimble OS that can't match the capabilities of current Windows, Mac, and Linux. Its installation/live CD is free without caveat, and runs for 30 minutes at a time, as many times as you like. You may purchase MorphOS to remove the time limit. A particular weakness of MorphOS is its lack of support for wireless networking."
Debian/Ubuntu PPC are alive and well (Score:5, Informative)
The Debian [debian.org] and Ubuntu [ubuntu.com] PowerPC ports are alive and well. Main lack for modern use is Flash. But I long dual-booted Ubuntu PPC on a G3/G4. A more reliable DVD burner than Mac OS X 10.4, and wider hardware support.
Miss Amiga? Try DragonFly! (Score:5, Informative)
FreeBSD (Score:4, Informative)
Also has a PPC edition, as does NetBSD.
Re:Another weakness (Score:5, Informative)
What the summary fails to mention is that MorphOS grew out of AmigaOS and can run a lot of Amiga software. People who like Amiga software find it useful to continue running it on hardware that can still be maintained to some degree, which has built in ethernet and USB ports - all stuff the original Amigas lacked.
Re:Another weakness (Score:5, Informative)
Python and believe it or not, Fortran (I guess a lot of fluid dynamics types use Fortran still for some reason).
There are three reasons we still use Fortran in the CFD business. First, a lot of good old numerics code is written in Fortran, and interfacing between languages means overhead. (You see, we're the types that define and use onethird=1.0/3.0 if we have to divide by 3 more than 10 times in a tight loop since multiplication is faster than division, or loop over j in the outer and i in the inner loop because that's how arrays are stored...)
Second, for the type of stuff we normally do, Fortran is 10-20% faster than C and orders of magnitude faster than other languages. (C is faster at file I/O.) This is important when you measure runtimes in weeks. (With Python, the simulations I did for my thesis would literally take years.)
Third, there is still significant work by large companies to create even more efficient Fortran compilers (see Intel, PGI, NAG).
Re:Another weakness (Score:4, Informative)
TBQH sounds like a hardware issue, or else a bad misconfiguration / botched upgrade. You checked dmesg or any of the logs? You tried a clean reinstall?
Re:Another weakness (Score:4, Informative)
Ah FORTRAN.. the cockroach of computer languages...
We've been allowed to call it "Fortran" for quite a few years now, and cockroaches are a very successful species.
Besides, with all the time and effort invested in Fortran development, there's a vast installed codebase of tested code out there, possibly even rivalling or bettering things like CPAN for perl.
Re:Another weakness (Score:5, Informative)
The funny part is she's not really that geeky. She's got all the computers and stuff, but she's a mathematician, so she knows how to write programs to do fluid dynamics simulations but calls me to come install Adobe Reader. Or maybe she's just giving me some little menial task to make me feel a little bit useful.
And get this (I swear it's true) when I met her, she was a stewardess for a European airline, back when stewardesses had to be hot.
I am an unexceptional person. But I hit all five numbers and the powerball when it comes to finding a wife. It is by far the luckiest break I ever got in life.