OS4.1 questions and strange things

Hi guys,

First of all - OS4.1 is great. It is very stable and it runs fast and nice on this micro.

However, I have some - well, a lot - questions that I hope you'll be able to answer...

1. I really - REALLY - like those transparent windows. So I want to keep them on despite just having the Radeon 7000.
- So I have made my Workbench run on a nice 1280x960 at 16 bit.
- I have set the window redraw to simple in GUI prefs.
- Realistic bitmap-shadow is set to OFF, while Layers is set to ON.
- In Workbench prefs I have reduced the quality of icons from "best" to "good"

Now, can I do more to save Video mem without losing my nice screenmode and the transparent windows? Or is some of my changes needless?

2. I still have strange behavior from my internet connection. Sometimes it doesn't connect right and tells me it can't find the host.
- If I then go to internet prefs and first uncheck DHCP and check it again it resets my connection and everything is fine.
- However, after reboot all is wrong again.
- This behavior was there all saturday. Then it worked perfectly at boot sunday morning and midday. And now it's back acting strange.
- Never had this behavior with OS4.

3. I'll be moving to a new apartment in november and it looks like I might have to use wifi on the AmigaONE.
- What options do I have?
- I did check Amigakit but they didn't seem to have solution at hand.

4. Also, I never really bothered to connect a joystick to the micro as I heard AmigaInput was a bit flaky.
- Now it's back in OS4.1. Can I just buy a USB joystick from an Amiga dealer and expect it to work with UAE and other games?

5. Okay - the last one - and a strange one. Before installing OS4.1 I put some more ram in the Micro. It only has a basic cd-rom drive so I decided to put a pioneer 105 DVD-RW in there instead.
- In uboot it was recognise perfectly - pioneer and everything.
- However, in Workbench it would load ANY discs at all.
- I tried to run the update from the DVD - it booted fine until the new bootscreen - then it gave up and loaded OS4 and again it couldn't read the disc.
- The old cd-rom got back in and that worked, of course.
- What's wrong?

Well, I guess that's all for now! I'll thank you in advance for your always nice and clever answers!

@Skov
Quote:

I'm also experiencing problems with a dialup connection.

If I've been online for more than a few minutes and select "Disconnect" in the Dialer window:
Dialer window won't execute my shutdown script that plays a notification sound and won't close the window. It will iconify but won't close.

AmiFTP won't upload large files to my WEB space. It send's about 25k and then just sits there. If I select "Abort" it takes a couple of minutes for AmiFTP to throw up an error requester but that may just be a timeout issue. After the upload failure, Dialer definately won't close it's window when I select "Disconnect".

When I reset my?A1 and boot with my OS 4.0 boot CD, AmiFTP will upload large files and Dialer works properly.

@xenic

Weird - I am not using dialer though. This is ethernet through a router so dialer isn't needed...

@Skov

Q3:

http://www.amigans.net/modules/newbb/ ... 001&forum=4&post_id=12072

Still 26 left! (I wonder how many they have sold to Amiga owners? Probably most of their stock I should think )

I've been using mine for well over a year and it is rock solid with the prism2.device. Occasionally it fails to connect to the network on startup (even though wifiSignal shows full strength and the correct name), but a soft reboot sorts that out.

Chris

@Chris

Great - I will probably invest in one of those come november!

You still just use roadshow for setting it all up, then?

@Skov

Yes, exactly the same as setting up the on-board Ethernet, just with prism2.device instead of eth3com.device.

You'll probably need to add SetPrism2Defaults to your startup-sequence as well.

Chris

@Chris

Great - and easy!

Now, do you wanna give one of the other questions a go?

@Skov

Q4: Yes.

That's the only other question I can answer.

Chris

@Skov

Quote:

Be aware that you can only use WEP, not WPA or WPA-PSK or whatever, with these cards (or rather with this platform/OS). I personally don't feel safe downgrading our WiFi LAN in this respect (my wife runs her XP laptop and another older Win2k machine on it with WPA), so I have decided to hold off on deploying the card I bought already a few years ago.

I may be paranoid, of course (which doesn't mean they're not out to get me )


Best regards,

Niels

@nbache

Quote:

AFAIK WPA requires both the card and the driver to support it. These old cards never will, and just adding WPA to the driver won't work.

Whether you see WEP as a security risk or not probably depends on your specific circumstances. Here I can see numerous wireless networks, at least one of which is open. I don't have anything worth hacking into on my LAN (broadband is unlimited as well), it's not as if I'm running a bank. With MAC address filtering and a hidden SSID along with WEP, I figure that's enough to keep casual observers out - they'll just connect to the unencrypted one near by.

The convenience of not having trip hazards running around the house outweighs the security risks, and it's far cheaper to get one of those PCI cards than an alternative more secure option.

Chris

@Skov

I can help with the pioneer drive problem. The drive firmware and UBoot don't get along.
You must change UBoot settings to downgrade the drive, and you can raise them again from user-startup after everything gets going.
If you don't do this, it may be unable to find your hard drive even.. the problem can affect the entire IDE bus.

It's been a long time, but I find this in my user-startup:

idetool -i a1ide.device 2 1
idetool -x a1ide.device 2 66

assuming "2" is secondary master (where my pioneer is)
Look up the idetool docs for the rest.

Have Fun,
LyleHaze

@LyleHaze

This sounds a bit tricky to me, but I am willing to give it a try.

I have the hd as master and the cd-rom as slave. I put the dvd in as slave instead of the cd-rom.

Could you - or someone else - perhaps make a step by step guide to doing this in uboot and in user-startup.

REALLY don't want to mess things up!

@Chris

My wired internet connection under OS4 also does not always come on when I switch on.

A quicker solution for me is to disconnect the network and then add it back again

In Shell

NetShutDown
AddNetInterface FastEthernet

Obviously replace FastEthernet with your own equivalent.

@Skov

Sure! We can do this.

All my instructions come from a 4.0 install. I don't have 4.1 yet. I hope they match.

You said the Pioneer is in the slave position.
Assuming it's in the same cable as the HD, that makes it the "Primary Bus", unit 1. Your HD would be primary bus, unit 0. That will come in handy shortly.

I had to disconnect the Pioneer completely to get booted up. Do this if you need to.
Boot the machine. Open your workbench, open Prefs, open "UBOOT". Click on the "IDE Ports" tab.
find the "Primary Bus, Unit 1" box, set the transfer mode to "Best PIO". Turn OFF "Use IRQ" for that device.

Press "Save" in the lower left corner. Power down, reconnect your pioneer drive and it should boot up just fine.
The only problem now is that your DVD drive is running a lot slower than it should.

Open your s:user-startup file from notepad and add the following two lines:

idetool -i a1ide.device 1 1
idetool -x a1ide.device 1 66

The -i line turns "Use Interrupts" back on for this drive
The -x line turns up the transfer speed to the correct setting.

the second letter of that device name is a one, not an El.

Let us know how it works out for you!

LyleHaze

@LyleHaze

It didn't work - in fact it gave quite a scare!

I couldn't change to "Best PIO". That option wasn't there. Only a list of DMAD 1-5 or something

I did change the IRQ to off for that device.

After reboot the Amigaone went straight to insert disc-screen!!!

After putting the old cd-rom back and restoring factory settings all was fine