New Amigas On The Way

[Jerry Jones]

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2122241,00.asp

Amiga Inc. said this week that the first Amiga computers since the 1990s are "on its way".

Virtually nothing was released as far as the new designs were concerned, other than the PCs will be based on the PowerPC architecture and hit two price points with two different machines: one selling for $500, and the other for $1,500.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Mikele]

Buffff, as an ex amiga user and FAN of Commodore, I don't take it seriosly.
It's Linux time.
What thinks Amiga Users:

http://www.amiga.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=37635&forum=8

By the way, this seem quite interesting:
http://ubuntustudio.org/

[Jessterw]

Ubuntu Studio definitely looks interesting. Now if they can make an as slick one for developers.

[Nowhere]

Meanwhile Pegasos was available constantly for the past few years...

And there's new thing replacing it - EFIKA. Highly integrated, 400 MHz PowerPC CPU, 128 MB of ram, starting from 199$ (with the target price in the long run of 100 AFAIK...it was available at 99$ few months ago in certain places). With suitable case it's 275$, with GFX card 325$ (any Radeon 9000/9200/92500 you can have lying around will do), takes 2,5" HDDs.
Look for info at wikipedia and links there, also by searching "efika" on osnews.com

http://www.genesippc.com/openclient.php

[wkulecz]

Ubuntu Studio seems to just be a place holder as most links on that page just got me 404. Nothing useful to be seen there currently.

If you want to check the state of video/audio editing on Linux download the dynebolic CD at: http://dynebolic.org/ Its a live CD so you don't have to install anything, just boot it and play around.

A long way to go to be ready for prime time, but Kino works well for for cutting out clips from DV source and converting them to H.264 mpeg that can be played back everywhere, 320x240 564kpbs H.262/mp4 provides an impressive compression (~50:1) yet holds up very well when played back in media player at 2X zoom. Kino is usable but a long way from VideoStudio 5 in features.

Cinerella has potential but it can't handle DV unless its in QuickTime *.mov container. Kino can load the DV *.avi (or download from DV camera) and convert to *.mov format DV but until these kind of things are fixed, normal people will stick with Windows or Mag for AV stuff.

--wally.

[Nowhere]

Little update on Efika - it's now available for 99$

http://www.genesippc.com/press.php?date=20070521

I guess that:
1) definatelly better price than the next available option (why pay 175$ for case and power supply?)
2) Low enough that many ex-Amigans are willing to play with it?

edit: But perhaps it's better to wait a bit for Efika built on this SOC chip:

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC512X

It integrates also GFX...and besides, MorphOS 2.0, which is meant for Efika, isn't out yet (and there's not much point running Linux on this thing...)

[Nowhere]

Small update:

http://book.efika.org/

The Efika book is a free multilanguage ebook dedicated to the Efika mainboard from Genesi. It contains information about the Efika hardware, its setup and its supported operating systems (Linux distributions, MorphOS). The latest version can already be freely downloaded in English, French and Swedish. Some older versions can also be found in Czech, Italian and Russian. It will be available soon in other languages such as Spanish, German, Turkish, Greek, Portuguese and Polish. This book follows his previous work on the Pegasos book.

[Nowhere]

http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=18018

Not too long ago, we announced that AmigaOS4 had found hardware to run on. In the weeks following the announcement, the specifications of the two different boards (high and low end) were announced, and ACK Controls, the manufacturer, promised to release the first developer boards mid May. It is now June, and there are no developer boards. No photos, nothing. The community also wonders, has any developer received the developer board from ACK? Believers say that the legal troubles in Amiga land are preventing ACK from releasing the boards, but they forget that ACK has actually promised the boards despite the legal troubles. It seems that they can't fly after all.

So, when it comes to official Amiga Inc., it's vaporware as usual...