This evening we had Charlie Boas, Don Kassebaum, George Wyche and Keith Sterzing. The program was an introduction to George Wyche's AmigaOne assembled by Software Hut around the motherboard by EyeTech of England. George took one side off so the insides were viewable. This particular unit is 800Mhz with 512 Megs of memory and an 80 Gig harddrive divided into several partitions; two large ones as /hda5 and /hda6.

George demonstrated that Debian Linux indeed did boot up. Both popular desktop environments were available: KDE and gnome.

After a bit we started up the UAE and recognized the old 3.1 desktop. We showed that it could play some games. I had to show that the AGA did NOT work as you would expect, though since no one is an expert it seems we didn't know if it even should work. Rumor has it that ethernet capability is definitely not there, nor is floppy drive access. Getting data of any size, in and out, is done with the Debian side. UAE certainly has no trouble seeing files placed in its "harddrive" by Linux. There are special "floppy images" that UAE maps to as DF0: 1, 2 ... and see and treats them a floppies. Quite a sight. UAE also does not use all of the screen. It is a window within the screen. There is trouble with meta language when it comes to the mouse cursor. Both UAE and Linux try to obey the motions. You finally go with the flow and use a function key button to force it to be recognized only by UAE and when you are done, toggle that same key to allow the mouse to move out of the window and control the Linux side.

All in all, George says he'll be waiting for AmigaOS4, which will come, "When its ready".

Broke Don and Charlie and George took in Conan's Pizza for the PigSIG. We always seem to get there just a "little too late" for the "by the slice buffet", but this way we got to chow down on a Savage.