Category Archives: 3rd Party

FUSE and NTFS for AmigaOS

Posted by on February 10, 2014 Comments Off on FUSE and NTFS for AmigaOS

280px-FUSE_structure.svgFUSE is short for Filesystem in Userspace. FUSE was created to enable non-privileged users to run file systems outside of the kernel which is a big deal for Unix-like operating systems. In AmigaOS, everything runs in userspace so FUSE is not nearly as important for Amiga users. What makes FUSE valuable is all the file system implementations which use FUSE such as NTFS, ext2, ZFS, etc.

The Amiga Operating System implementation of FUSE has been realized via a project called Filesysbox by Leif Salomonsson. A special thanks goes out to Leif for allowing his hard work to be utilized.

Amiga programmer extraordinaire Fredrik Wikström was then commissioned to port Filesysbox over to AmigaOS. Fredrik took the original code and updated it to AmigaOS 4.1 standards. This work included utilizing advanced DOS features such as object notification and the new file system API which seeks to completely avoid the esoteric DOS packet interface. Colin Wenzel is the main man behind the advanced DOS features.

Master_500pxIn order to test whether Filesysbox was working properly we needed a file system to go with it. NTFS-3G by Tuxera was chosen for this purpose. Fredrik also ported a full suite of tools to go along with NTFS itself.

Both Filesysbox and NTFS-3G are contributions being offered to registered AmigaOS users via AmiUpdate. The software licenses require that the source code be made available so registered users can download the matching source code from Hyperion’s web site in the downloads section.

blog_devIt is hoped that 3rd party developers will become interested in porting more file systems in the near future whether they are via the FUSE API or the new DOS file system API. The upcoming SDK will include everything you need. In the mean time, please feel free to utilize the provided source code and the AmigaOS support forum for assistance.

Finally, a big thanks needs to go out to the AmigaOS beta testing team for risking their hard drive partitions while testing NTFS-3G and Filesysbox. It is demanding and potentially destructive work that should not be taken for granted.

Ready for Music!

Posted by on December 12, 2013 Comments Off on Ready for Music!

blog_softwareThe convenience of AmiUpdate has also allowed a few additions to your AmigaOS system. Camd.library was quietly added a few updates back. This contribution provides a common interface for programs that work with music in the MIDI format to connect with MIDI interfaces or to interconnect between applications. Now programs like Bars&Pipes Professional, AudioEvolution, HD_Rec, Dg-midi-monitor, Horny and CamdPlay will no longer require the user to go download and install camd.library. It will also ease installation of newer programs like Andy “Broadblues” Broad’s Line6PodEditor and his Perl to CAMD Link (Perl Amiga::CAMD).

Now, to make things even easier for the end user, the USB driver for MIDI devices is being added to the default AmigaOS installation as well. This means that if a user plugs in any MIDI class compatible USB device, AmigaOS will recognize the device and make it available to any program.

These additions together make programs for music much easier to install and run, so you can get right in to making music without worrying about the libraries and drivers to install.

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Bars&Pipes Professional and camd.library are maintained by, and the USB MIDI driver for camd was written by Lyle Hazelwood. Lyle accepts donations for his software at Lyle’s web site.

Timberwolf: Progress on an important project

Posted by on March 28, 2011 Comments Off on Timberwolf: Progress on an important project

Note: Since this blog is a channel for OS4 developers to tell about their projects, I think it’s a good idea to post something about Timberwolf here, even though it’s not related to Hyperion Entertainment or a specific AmigaOS development.

I think it’s safe to say that Timberwolf (i.e. the port of Firefox to AmigaOS) is an important project for AmigaOS 4, since today, a system that wants to be taken seriously will have to have Firefox in its software repertoire. A lot of people argue that OWB fills in the gap of a modern web browser and think that we should rather concentrate on that and ditch Firefox. However, the Mozilla software is more than a web browser. It’s technology. It offers a platform independent way of writing applications, and AmigaOS can very much profit from all the developments going on in the Mozilla community.

As a web browser, Firefox is cutting edge technology, offering things like html5 and WebGL, In fact, Firefox has become part of the definition of the World Wide Web, driving it’s development. Its importance in that respect matches or surpasses any other browser. It is also still actively developed by a large group of individuals.

As a technology, Mozilla allows the creation of applications that run on a variety of platforms. One such application is, for example, Thunderbird, an email client that also became the de-facto standard on most systems.

 

So, what about Timberwolf ? After the release of the early alpha preview last year, we’ve been working on getting the source code updated to the new version of Firefox, 4.0. Early versions (up to beta 6) produced rendering errors within the box layout on Windows (I didn’t test the Linux version at that time). Therefore, we decided to wait until a version came out that would at least render correctly (since that is basically what we would have to implement ourselves). When beta 7 came out, the layout seemed correct,  so we started with the Firefox 4.0b7 source code and applied our code changes to it.

This weekend, I got 4.0b7 to fully compile, although the implementation of the rendering code is still a stub. Since the final release version of Firefox 4.0 came out just recently, we decided to try to update from 4.0b7 to 4.0 final. The update worked quite well, although a few kinks need to be ironed out.

This means we now have all the code that will make up the final release of Timberwolf. In the coming days (time permitting) we will start the implementation of the actual rendering engine. We’re not able to give time estimates, but I would guess that we will be able to come up with the next preview version sometime in early summer.

For more information about Project Timberwolf (including screenshots and updates on the progress), visit the page on AmigaBounty.