AmigaOS 3.X, Windows 10, and AmiKit 8

Early in 2017 I started having issues with my ASUS laptop. About three months after an upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, the touchpad stopped working. I reported the issue to Microsoft in one of their feedback options, all the while not expecting any resolution. I worked on the laptop with a wireless mouse, but that was annoying having to have an external pointer device. Eventually I stopped using the laptop and switched to using my wife's old MacOS X 10.6 laptop.

About two weeks ago I had decided to downgrade from Windows 10 back to Windows 8.1 on the ASUS laptop. I was hoping that the touchpad would still work under Windows 8.1 like it did before the upgrade to Windows 10. The reason for deciding on the downgrade was that I was wanting to try out AmiKit 8 on my laptop. I had installed AmigaOS 4.1 PPC on the ASUS laptop early last year, but OS4 ran slower than what I was wanting, so I installed OS4.1 onto my desktop workstation instead. The laptop has an i3 processor and it wasn't enough for PPC emulation. Moving to the desktop provided a significant boost in OS4.1 PPC performance.

But I wanted AmigaOS on a laptop. Similiar to how Trevor Dickinson has been talking of using AmigaOS on his Acer laptop; that is what I was wanting, too. My laptop; however, was too slow for Amiga OS 4, and I already knew of AmiKit, so I decided to try it on my laptop.

Early last week I started the process of backing up my documents in Windows 10. During this backup process I was using the touchpad. Normally the touchpad would work for a few minutes after powering on the laptop and after logging in. Then it would simply stop working. At this point I had not used the ASUS laptop for 3-4 months, and as I was backing up files, I noticed that the touchpad kept working beyond its typical stopping point. And it kept working. I used it for quite a while, performed a Windows 10 update, and low and behold, it kept working. So I abandoned the downgrade as it appeared to be no longer needed.

After a few day of continous use with no touchpad issues, I proceeded with getting AmigaOS working on the laptop again. It already had AmigaForever 2016 and an updated WinUAE client on the laptop. So I retried the AmigaOS 4.1 PPC emulation, and it was still running slower than needed. On the other hand, a previous setup of an A4000 with an 040 processor ran very well. The standard setup in AmigaForever of an A4000 running AmigaOS 3.X was great, but I wanted the bells and whistles with AmiKit.

So I got AmiKit 8.0 working and updated it to version 8.5. And it works well and fast on the ASUS i3 laptop. Version 8 doesn't have the Rabbit Hole feature, but I'm not too concerned with that at the moment. I use the included NetSurf web browser and ALT+Tab back to Windows 10 for Firefox whenever I'm browsing to a site that I'm sure NetSurf cannot handle. Currently I am using AmiKit 8 for some basic word processing and C/C++ programming.

I installed AmigaWriter 2.0 from an Amithlon CD that I had in my media case. AmigaWriter 2 is definitely dated now, but it has basic word processing abilities for creating rough drafts for blogging and for basic documents. I plan on trying to get Final Writer '97 copied over from my old A1200 computer, and that will be better, I think, for adding images to documents and for having a good spell checker.

One of the good things about using AmiKit 8 is that it, along with WinUAE, can run on multiple computers. And by saving work data to a jump drive, I'm able to take my work with me and plug it into another instance of AmiKit on another computer. I can even run AmiKit directly from the jump drive on multiple computers if I wish. I prefer having Amikit installed and running from the host computer in order to backup the files from the jump drive to each host. This way there are multiple backups of my work.

In time I will upgrade to AmiKit X, but for the time being version 8 is adequate for my needs.

Perhaps in a future blog entry I will mention my current software development project for AmigaOS. It's nothing earth-shattering, for sure.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AmigaOS Aros clone on Icaros Desktop version 2.2.5

Image
 Icaros Desktop New Install I had some extra time recently, so I decided to try out the Icaros Desktop  2.2.5, which was released in December 2018. Icaros Desktop is an AmigaOS clone that runs on x86 hardware. Icaros is based upon Aros. Aros in an operating system that can be installed on an x86 computer and it requires no host operating system to run. Most AmigaOS emulators require a host operating system such as Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. Aros, however, eliminates the need for a host OS.  OWB web browser running on Icaros Desktop It took maybe 10-15 minutes to install Icaros into a Virtual Machine (Oracle VM Virtual Box, to be precise). During the install I selected to install the Extras as well as the Developer tools. I tested the default web browser, OWB, soon after installation. It handled many website adequately. However, I was unable to compose this article using Icaros because I was unable to login to my blogging website, blogger.com, with OWB. And, oddly eno
Read more

FreeBSD and OpenBSD in Hyper-V - First Attempts

Image
So I wanted to try out the  new FreeBSD 13.1. Rather than installing it onto a physical computer, I decided to try creating a virtual machine in Hyper-V.  Hyper-V is a Microsoft product, and it was all I am able to use in the work environment that I am in. In a previous experiment I was able to create a Linux Mint virtual machine in Hyper-V with no problems.  However, I did encounter problems setting up FreeBSD 13.1 in Hyper-V. I eventually gave-up on getting FreeBSD 13.1 to work in Hyper-V. I tried a few different ideas, but I was never able to get X-Windows to recognize the keyboard. The keyboard worked fine to type in startx, but once X started, the keyboard wouldn't work.  It was a little disappointing not being able to get FreeBSD working in Hyper-V, but alas, some times such things happen. To stay within the BSD family, I decided to try out OpenBSD. I had very little knowledge of OpenBSD, but I decided to get it a try in Hyper-V. Unlike FreeBSD 13.1, X Windows inside OpenBSD
Read more

Recent AmigaOS 3.1 Word Processor Experiments

Image
  Recently I have been experimenting with word processing programs under AmigaOS 3. Years ago, back in the 90's, I used my A1200 with Final Writer to create term papers for college. Before I bought my A1200; however, I was using a Gateway 2000 computer running Windows 3.1 on an Intel 386DX/33 processor. For my old Gateway computer, I had landed on a word processor called Breeze. It was a simple, DOS based word processor that was free (shareware), which is the right price for a college student, and did everything that I need. None of my term papers needed graphics or clip art, so a basic word processor was all that I required. I still used Breeze on MSDOS even after I bought my A1200. A year or so after purchasing my A1200, I finally decided on buying Final Writer 5. It did word processing along with graphics, and it worked with my, at that time, high quality Epson dot-matrix printer. Final Writer did quite well for me. Along with my A1200, I was able to cr
Read more