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Musings from a Notebook

© John Chandler

Okay, as you've probably guessed this article has been seriously delayed. In fact this isn't actually the planned article, but with almost half the month gone I've had to switch. I would've written something sooner but I've been intensely involved with both the daytime job as well as few other projects including KOSH which is finally making steps to get back on track and move from the theory to the practice. Anyone with business and/or legal skills would be particularly welcome right now...

So, here I am on a sunny day in the UK bashing out a few words on something other than my normal Amiga A4000 and copy of Wordworth 7.1. What's this? Have I abandoned the Amiga? Well no not exactly. I've got a 68020 CPU here, AmigaOS 3.1, and a copy of TurboText which I've never used before but seems to be quite a nice little editor. But that's not the real thing, the thing that is quite cool is I'm typing this on a rather dinky little notebook I bought last week. A portable Amiga? Well, yes it is a portable Amiga though I guess I'd better confess that it's really a Chicony MP980 with a 233 MHz Intel Tillamook (Pentium), and a combination of Linux Mandrake 6, the dreaded Windows 98, and a copy of AmigaForever 3.

AmigaForever is the big shock here, having used the Linux port of UAE for the last year I was expecting something similar under Windows with the extras of a nicer front end and TCP/IP support. What I actually got is something more akin to AmigaOS running by itself, it's extremely hard to even realise that behind this full Amiga screen at 1024x600 is one of my least favourite operating systems. The emulated Amiga feels as fast, if not faster, than UAE on a 400 MHz K6-2 box running Linux, though I guess it's mainly an illusion caused by the excellent graphics acceleration. Best of all the entire system comes preconfigured with Workbench, including a nice package of preinstalled software - hence the TurboText. Of course, being a perpetual tinkerer I shall be redoing everything myself from scratch but to get everything set up and working without any effort on my behalf was a very pleasant situation to be in. Cloanto have done a very good job indeed.

My Amiga computing experience has just taken on a truly mobile form, and I must confess to finding that extremely good news. I can only hope that someone will develop a nice, compact Amiga laptop in the future - though I'll settle for running something like Amie or Neutrino on this very machine, which is not in