MorphOS is an Amiga-compatible computer operating system. It is a mixed proprietary and open sourceOS produced for the PegasosPowerPC processor based computer, PowerUP accelerator equipped Amiga computers, and a series of Freescale development boards that use the Genesi firmware, including the EFIKA and mobileGT. Since MorphOS 2.4, Apple’sMac Mini G4 is supported as well, and with the release of MorphOS 2.5 and MorphOS 2.6 the eMac and PowerMac G4 models are respectively supported. The core, based on the Quarkmicrokernel, is proprietary, although several libraries and other parts are open source, such as Ambientdesktop.
The project started in 1999, based on the Quarkmicrokernel. The earliest versions of MorphOS ran only via PPC accelerator cards on the Amiga computers, and required portions of AmigaOS to fully function. A collaborative effort between the companies bPlan (of which the lead MorphOS developer is a partner) and Thendic-France in 2002 resulted in the first regular, non-prototype production of bPlan-engineered Pegasos computers capable of running MorphOS or Linux. A busy promotional year followed in 2003, with appearances at conventions and exhibitions in several places around the world, including CES in Las Vegas. Thendic-France had financial problems and folded; however, the collaboration continued under the new banner of „Genesi„.
After some bitter disagreements within the MorphOS development team in 2003 and 2004 culminating with accusations by a MorphOS developer that he and others had not been paid, the Ambient desktop interface was released under GPL and is now actively developed by the Ambient development team. Subject to GPL rules, Ambient continues to be included in the commercial MorphOS product. An alternative MorphOS desktop system is Scalos.[5]
On April 1, 2008 the MorphOS team announced that MorphOS 2.0 would be released within Q2/2008. This promise was only kept by a few seconds, with the release of MorphOS 2.0 occurring on June 30, 2008 23:59 CET. MorphOS 2 is commercially available at a price of 150 EUR per machine (111,11 EUR as a special promotion within the first two weeks of its release). A fully functional demo of MorphOS is available, but without a keyfile, its speed is decreased significantly after 30 minutes of use.
Following is a (probably incomplete) list of changes made between the 2.7 and 3.0 release of MorphOS to the ROM (boot.img) based components.
Quark and Related Modules
PowerBook G4 Aluminum support, targeting following models:
System ID
System Name
Model
PowerBook5,6
PowerBook G4 Aluminum 15“
A1106
PowerBook5,7
PowerBook G4 Aluminum 17“
A1107
PowerBook5,8
PowerBook G4 Aluminum 15“
A1138
PowerBook5,9
PowerBook G4 Aluminum 17“
A1139
Fixes in memory mapping for systems with more than 1GB of RAM.
Added support for Dynamic Frequency Scaling.
Enables USB2 mode for onboard NEC chipsets in PowerMac FW800.
Fixed to map Cardbus units of PowerMac and PowerBook computers.
Fixed a crash in Quark’s timer (affecting ABox timers).
Battery [NEW]
Module providing a battery sensor.
CDrive
Fixed cdromtime->DateStamp conversion leap year bug.
Fixed volume re-mounting.
Ext3 filesystem
Improved disk inserted/removed handling.
Fixed timestamps.
Fat filesystem
Improved disk inserted/removed handling.
Fixed timestamps.
HFSPlus filesystem
Fixed timestamps.
I2C [NEW]
Support for the I2C found in PowerBooks.
Keylargo [NEW]
Module handling Keylargo units found in PowerBooks.
Layers
Fixed rare refresh issues.
MAC filesystem
Fixed boot file blessing support.
Fixed timestamps.
NTFS filesystem
Fixed timestamps.
PFS3 filesystem [NEW]
Native support for PFS3, making it possible to boot MorphOS from PFS3 formatted media. This product includes software developed by Michiel Pelt.
PowerBook [NEW]
Module controlling special keys, power saving, LCD backlight, fans, etc on PowerBook computers.
SATA
Fixed SATA cards support on PowerMacs.
SCSI
Fixed Symbios SCSI cards support on PowerMacs.
Sensors [NEW]
A library providing simple trigger->notification system meant to handle all sorts of sensors.
SFS filesystem
Fixed handling of delayed notifications.
Fixed seeking in files larger than 2GiB.
SGIXFS filesystem
Fixed timestamps.
RAM filesystem
Fixed ACTION_FH_FROM_LOCK handling.
Temperature [NEW]
Delivers support for 4 temperature sensors in a PowerBook and 1 in a PowerMac.
Touchpad [NEW]
Library to support raw touchpad input to cursor movement conversions.
USB
Uses touchpad.library to support PowerBook USB touchpads.
Added support for special keys on PowerBook keyboards.
Utility
Fixed UnpackStructureTags.
RELEASE 3.0 DISK CHANGES
Following is a (probably incomplete) list of changes made to the disk based components of MorphOS. While not mentioned for every component translations were updated for most of them. Also various cosmetic fixes were applied here and there.
Some of the new components were already made available as part of the MorphOS 2.7 SDK distribution.
Ambient
Added support for global actions when multiple files/dirs are selected.
Improved links handling.
Fixed not to crash when launching apps from very long paths.
Fixed a deadlock in Rexx cmds handling.
Default view mode and submode are now configurable.
Added video preview support in icon and list views, in thumbnails mode.
Applications/Flacapella [NEW]
FLAC/Wav CDDA ripper based around cdparanoia.
Applications/Jalapeno [NEW]
Simple CD/DVD authoring & copying utility.
Applications/Kryptos
Updated crypto engine to TrueCrypt v7.0a.
Uses mount.library for mounting.
Applications/OWB
Updated to WebKit r114842 (April 2012).
Updated to Cairo 1.12 and Pixman 0.24.4 (40% speedup).
Updated to OpenSSL 1.0.0j.
Updated to Curl 7.25.0.
Updated to FFMPEG GIT from 13.05.2012.
Updated to SQLite 3.7.11.
Updated to libXML2 2.7.8 and libXSLT 1.1.26.
History completion popup is now multithreaded.
Implemented form filling completion (see privacy settings).
The „add bookmark“ button now has two states, to indicate whether the current URL is already bookmarked or not.
Many other changes and fixes, see Applications/OWB/OWB.readme
for the exhaustive changes.
Applications/Scribble [NEW]
Powerful text editor built around Scintilla, a port of a widely used text editing component. Includes developer support and UTF file handling.
Applications/Transfer [NEW]
FTP/SFTP client application.
Applications/VPDF [NEW]
A new PDF reader application.
C/Battery [NEW]
Command to display current battery status.
C/Eject [NEW]
Simple command to eject CD media.
C/Eval
Fixed quad output.
C/Iprefs
Nicer boot splash when booting from CD.
Support for PowerBook module settings.
C/List
Fixed return code on errors or CTRL-C.
C/Textconv [NEW]
Text conversion utility.
Classes/Data/iso639.class [NEW]
ISO 639 language code class.
Classes/Datatypes/J2K
Updated image decoder to the most recent version.
Classes/MUI/Calltips.mcc [NEW]
An utility class to display calltips.
Classes/MUI/Scintilla.mcc [NEW]
MorphOS port of the current Scintilla text editor as a MUI class.
Classes/MUI/PowerTerm.mcc
256 color support.
Faster resizing routines.
Reduced memory footprint.
Doublewidth character support for Asian languages.
Fixes in search support.
Misc fixes.
Classes/Reggae/aiff.demuxer
Removed artificial 65 536 Hz sampling rate limit.
Classes/Reggae/audio.output
Class reworked, fixed a few bugs and a possible crash.
Full handling of POST requests including tag based POST request builder for text and binary data.
Added handling of „ICY“ response to support receiving streams from Shoutcast servers.
Fixed response length bug triggered by some HTTP/1.0 servers.
Classes/Reggae/id3tag.demuxer
Basic handling of ID3v2 (2.2, 2.3, 2.4) tags.
Classes/Reggae/iffdeep.decoder [NEW]
Decoder for IFF DEEP images.
Classes/Reggae/iffdeep.demuxer [NEW]
Demultiplexer for IFF DEEP images.
Classes/Reggae/iffilbm.decoder [NEW]
Decoder for IFF ILBM images.
Classes/Reggae/iffilbm.demuxer [NEW]
Demultiplexer for IFF ILBM images.
Classes/Reggae/jpeg.decoder [NEW]
Decoder for JPEG images.
Classes/Reggae/jpeg.demuxer [NEW]
Demultiplexer for JPEG images.
Classes/Reggae/degas.demuxer [NEW]
Demultiplexer for Atari Degas/Neochrome images.
Classes/Reggae/degas.decoder [NEW]
Decoder for Atari Degas/Neochrome images.
Classes/Reggae/mpegaudio.demuxer
Optional frame scanner for precise frame count and bitrate calculation.
Classes/Reggae/multimedia.class
Optional logging to the system debuglog.
Time to frame and frame to time 64-bit conversion functions for audio.
Optional reduction of the decoding tree of MediaNewObject() to demuxers only. Useful when Reggae is only used to recognize streams and obtain their properties.
Fixes in metadata handling.
Classes/Reggae/multiread.buffer
Fixed error reporting.
Fixed case of peeking 0 bytes.
Classes/Reggae/pcx.decoder [NEW]
Decoder for PCX images.
Classes/Reggae/pcx.demuxer [NEW]
Demultiplexer for PCX images.
Classes/Reggae/png.decoder [NEW]
Decoder for PNG images.
Classes/Reggae/png.demuxer [NEW]
Demultiplexer for PNG images.
Classes/Reggae/rawaudio.filter
Added support for unsigned 16-bit PCM formats (both endians).
Classes/Reggae/rawvideo.filter [NEW]
Wrapper class for processing raw PCM video streams in different formats.
Redesigned the Screens section of the window border menu, adding the possibility to move an application to a new temporary screen.
Fixes in Dirlist.mui, List.mui, Title.mui.
Fixes in fixed width fonts handling.
Fixed several race conditions in Process.mui.
Datamap.mui class built around btree.library.
Slave.mui class to simplify multithreading.
Network/NetStack
Fixed a crash when closing bsdsocket.library.
Fixed a timer related crash.
Use a more frequent timer for timeout handling to improve performance.
Utilities/Jukebox [NEW]
Simple Reggae based music player.
Utilities/MiniCalc
Minor fixes.
Utilities/Multiview
UTF8 clipboard support.
Extended user settings.
Utilities/SSHCON
Updated OpenSSL to 1.0.0d.
RELEASE 3.1 BOOT.IMG CHANGES
The following is a (probably incomplete) list of changes made between the 3.0 and 3.1 release of MorphOS to the ROM (boot.img) based components.
DOS
Fixed booting via bootimage parameter when the source ISO file is on a usb disk.
Intuition
Opening the laptop lid always enables the backlight and stops the screensaver now.
The battery information in titlebar was sometimes bogus.
Layers
When a screen was smaller than the display area, the bottom part of it was in some cases trashed/blinking.
Mount
Changed to disable write reordering to improve filesystem stability.
PFS3 filesystem
When formatting volumes, sets file name length to 107 characters.
PowerBook
Special keys are only handled for the internal keyboard, this also fixes swapped keys on external USB keyboards.
RELEASE 3.1 DISK CHANGES
Following is a (probably incomplete) list of changes made to the disk based components of MorphOS. While not mentioned for every component translations were updated for most of them. Also various cosmetic fixes were applied here and there.
Ambient
Fixed not to trigger ‘Double click on desktop opens MyMorphos window’ on specific doubleclicks.
Fixed untranslated strings in Ambient toolbar panel preferences.
Fixed wrong dimensions of windows remembered on exit.
Applications/Jalapeno
Fixed burn progress display for drives that do not report buffer fill.
Applications/Transfer
The handling of sftp links was improved.
Minor user interface changes were added.
The path history feature was improved.
Applications/VPDF
Debug messages are disabled by default.
Blankers/Sproingies
Fixed memory leak on blanker exit.
Blankers/Feathers
Fixed rendering issues introduced in 3.0 version.
C/ConvertText
SHOW parameter now works with no FILE param passed in.
C/Route
Fixed argument parsing.
Classes/Screenbars/Volumecontrol
Fixed a memtrash in MUIM_Setup which randomly caused some screen operations to fail.
Classes/Multimedia/multimedia.class
Logging cleaned up.
Improved handling of dynamic object reconnection.
L/MUICON
Fixed .info filter in filename completion.
Libs/cairo.library
Fixed stability issues when multiple applications were using the library simultaneously
Libs/fontconfig.library
Fixed default font dirs to include _pcf.
Updated to fontconfig version 2.9.91 (fixes exotic characters in OWB).
Libs/tinygl.library
Fixed a crash on machines with no AltiVec unit.
Fixed trashed textures when using bitmap->texture functionality.
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