Starting over, part 3

Well, today was fun.

I finally got my hands on OS4.1 for the A1. The good folks at AmigaKit didn't take any chances, shipping in packaging that could ward off just about anything short of a direct thermonuclear strike. Well, that would be true if fusion detonations didn't have the slight tendency to be tens of millions of Kelvin which is detrimental on most packaging materials, but I digress.

I got back from work this evening and unpacked it. OS4.1 came in a standard CD sleeve with a full colour quickstart guide (nice touch) and a self-assembly flattened box

(click images for larger preview)





After dinner I figured I'd had enough of dignified restraint and decided to install. The machine had been a bit left behind, containing only the prerelease v3 of OS4. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that this isn't really capable of running the installer. I rebooted from cold with the CD in the drive and things seemed to be working, up until it started to throw recoverable alerts left right and centre.

Anyway, it turns out that, I'd forgotten that I'd left the hard disk as the primary boot device in UBoot. Changed it to CD and rebooted from cold...

I have to hand it to them, installation was a breeze. I opted to install it fully rather than upgrade. A few basic questions and off it went. The CD booted into workbench and I was able to repartition the hard disk and set it off.

Installation was very fast indeed. After a reboot, I had it up and running. Post install operations configured my maximum display size, audio and network kit and I was good to go.

First impressions, OS4.1 feels very polished. The compositing interface is, as one would expect from a 3D accelerated engine, very fast, even on this old Radeon7000. However, it wasn't long before I ran into the basic problem this card has. Lack of available video memory. After a few large windows are opened up, suddenly the interface got very jerky indeed. I can't really blame the OS for this, Compiz on my linux box has 896MB of video ram to play with. It's clear that OS4.1 needs a better graphics card than the one I have to make the most of the feature.

Still, it's no great issue for me. I have rather had my fill of such interfaces for the time being, I opted to switch off the compositing system and go back to the days of traditional 2D. A few interface tweaks in the GUI preferences to make it look a bit more 3.x like and I was having a ball



Other than installing smbfs, everything else was out of the box. OWB is included so suddenly you aren't restricted to a browser that can't really handle this website, and SGrab is included so that you can prove it. Someone thought that out well

So, that was enough excitement for one day. I'm looking forward to getting it "just right" in the next few days, then I'll see about installing the SDK.