Sunday, October 27, 2013

This is my Amiga, part 4

Backdrops!

San Francisco at Night, Nikon D300 by Bill Borsari
This part of my Amiga is about the backdrops.  The backdrop is one of those area's that offers the biggest and most visible statement that this your machine.  Nothing else on your system is more an expression if you.  When ever I get a new PC or Mac I always set the backdrop to one of me favorite photos, San Francisco at night:





On my Amiga's I want to express more of my Amiganess so I've used the default backgrounds, then I setup STRICQ's random backdrop changer.  Then Guillaume Boesel (zzd10h) released his flippaper app.  This MUI based app is a visual tool for managing lists of photos and settings around when the WBBackdrop changes.  You can the tool here: Flipaper (flippaper.lha)

Flippaper in action


http://os4depot.net/share/graphics/misc/djnick-hd_wallpapers_02.zip

For the images I found some great ones on OS4 depot searching for  Backdrops and find ones like this:







 On the site Amiga-look.org like this one:









I'm sure there are more places out there where Amiga artists have posted their creations.  Share them in the comments please!



Cheers,
Bill "tekmage" Borsari


Monday, September 23, 2013

HTML5 test vs the AmigaOS

A brief pause from the "This is my Amiga" series to show some quick results of html5test.com against the browsers I have installed on my Amiga1XE.

First, OWB, my go to browser:

Next I fired up Ibrowse:


The Aweb PPC:


After AWeb was NetSurf:

 Then QTweb:
 And last was Timberwolf:


As you can see the older browsers could not handle the CSS or the HTML5 at all, which is totally understandable, they nearly 20 years old at this point!

NetSurf mastered the CSS but does not include any javascript support.  Makes it very secure and fast but not as compatible.

When we look at OWB, QTweb, and Timberwolf, we start to see results.  Of course Timberwolf is the best of the bunch being based on Firefox.  OWB edges our QTweb but a little bit to come in 2nd.

Overall we have a fair amount of work to see an exceptional Amiga Browser but the options we do have are starting to hold their own.

Thanks for reading!

Monday, August 12, 2013

This is my Amiga, part 3

Welcome, Dropbox!




A few folks have asked how I got dropbox on my Amiga. The route was a bit circuitous but worked out well in the end.  This allows me to directly access those files on Dropbox from all my Amiga apps.  This method uses a Windows (or MAC) system, a Linux system ($35 for a raspberry PI would do well) with samba setup, and you're best system, an Amiga.

The flow is as follows:
1)Share your "Users" folder from your PC or MAC
2)Next mount your dropbox folder from your PC onto a linux server
3)Next share the Dropbox mount on Linux to your network
4)Finally, mount this new share on to your Amiga

Boom!  Dropbox on your Amiga!



Getting down to business:

1) Share your Users folder, just right click and select "share."

2) From your Linux system mount that PC share.  We use linux since the Amiga smbfs does not support smb3 shares from Windows while the Linux system does.  If you're new to Linux you can use something similar to this to mount your share:

  As root:
  #mount -t cifs //<IP of your Windows system>/Users/<username>/Dropbox /dropbox -o username=<usename>,password=<your   Windows user password>

  You can also add the following to the fstab:
  //172.16.0.107/Users/tekmage/Dropbox /dropbox   cifs    username=tekmage,password=<your Windows   user password> 0 0

3) Now, you'll want to share /dropbox to your network so your Amiga can mount it:

Edit smb.conf then restart smbd.
  [Dropbox]
          comment = Dropbox location
          path = /dropbox
          valid users = tekmage
          admin users = tekmage
          read only = No
          guest ok = No

4)Finally, mount your Dropbox on your workbench using smbfs:

  alt-wb:otherc/smbfs domain=workgroup user=tekmage password=<your Windows user password>  device=nas2 volume=Dropbox //nas/Dropbox >nil:'

Enjoy!

Bill "tekmage" Borsari

Bonus:  Here is the icon I built:  dropbox-disk.icon









This is my Amiga, part 2

Howdy All,



This time I'll cover the world of Synergy.

The idea for what Synergy does is as old as two computers next to each other but according the current Synergy website the original code was created in 1996 to work between Windows and Irix. The idea is you have two computers, why can't they share the keyboard, mouse, and clipboard? Simple enough but still requires software to make it work. Enter the current version of Synergy supporting OS X, Windows, and Linux. Big thanks to Doug McLaughlin for creating a port that supports AmigaOS 4 and can be found here on OS4Depot!

The way it works is strait forward.  One system acts as the "server", this is the system who's keyboard and mouse are used to control the others. The other systems run a "client" that allows them to receive that information via the network. For the Amiga port only the "client" exists which means you need to have an OS X, Windows, or Linux System to act as a "server".

On the "server" you configure a physical relationship between systems. In my case I have my Amiga1XE on the left of my PC and my Amiga4K on the right. I've the Synergy server this configuration so all I need to do is simply move the mouse to the left and it jumps from the Windows system to the Amiga. At one point I had a Mac laptop on the left of my Amiga1XE and was able to keep moving the mouse to the left to jump again. Fun stuff!

To give you an idea how powerful this is for me; I am using this tool constantly while write this blog.  All the screen grabs and text pasted below happen with Synergy.  I just move my mouse to the left and it jumps to my Amiga screen.  From there the mouse and keyboard from the PC are at my finger tips and ready to go.  I can use sgrab to create screen shots or directly highlight text and copy it to the PC.  No more switching between mice and keyboards for each system!

Here's a video example:

Amisyngery-demo

Here's how the configuration looks on the Windows side:





















On the Amiga side I've downloaded the AmiSyngery client and placed it in my "Alt-wb:OtherC" location (More on that in the future).  Next I modified I changed the "s:Network-Startup" script by adding this line:

OS4:>alt-wb:otherc/asynergyc homemedia windows


You can also run the command from the CLI to test and make sure it's working before committing it to the script.  The asynergyc take two arguments, the "IP" or "Name" over the server and the type of "server", "Windows" or "Linux".  At present OS X as a server it not supported by the Amiga client.

Another note, above is the name of the system, I'm running my own internal DNS server so that all my devices have names on the network, you could also place an entry in to the "sys:prefs/internet" "hosts" page like this:



To test the above open a new cli, I like to use L-Amiga-E and type "newcli" or click the dock icon, and execute a ping: "ping homemedia".  You'll see something like this:


13.OS4:> ping homemedia
PING homemedia.home.local (172.16.0.107): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 172.16.0.107: icmp_seq=0 ttl=128 time=0.498 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.0.107: icmp_seq=1 ttl=128 time=0.488 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.0.107: icmp_seq=2 ttl=128 time=0.481 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.0.107: icmp_seq=3 ttl=128 time=0.491 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.0.107: icmp_seq=4 ttl=128 time=0.486 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.0.107: icmp_seq=5 ttl=128 time=0.475 ms

--- homemedia.home.local ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 6 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 0.475/0.486/0.498 ms

The trick to ending the ping command is to press "ctrl-c".

Next up I'll explain how I get my Dropbox to appear on the workbench :)

Keep the Party Going!



Tuesday, August 6, 2013

This is my Amiga, part 1

Recently I realized what I've gotten my Amiga setup almost perfect. I figured since I've gotten my Amiga setup running tight I felt it was a good time to share what I have done to get there. This is the part 1 of many to describe my setup and how I got there. For this first part I'm going to start on my AmiDock.

Looking at my app dock there are two dockies I can't live without. First is the network monitor, second is the cpu monitor. Along for the ride is Granite. The way I have setup my AmiDock is with an icon doc and an app dock. The idea is all app dockies are placed in the upper right hand corner where the icons are centered at the bottom of the screen. This allows me to better control the visual layout of my workbench.

The network doc is newer and written by Guillaume Boesel and can be found on os4depot. I like the network graph view to let me know if there are any downloads off screen, and the performance of my samba setup (more on samba later). The utility has several features and I prefer the vertical view with a transparent backdrop. Here are the settings used to create this look from the docky's icon:
(DEBUG=ON)
(LEFT_VBAR=ON)
(MIDDLE_VBAR=OFF)
(RIGHT_VBAR=ON)
(INTERFACE=RTL8139)
(BACK_RGB = 000000)
(VBAR_RGB = 3264AA)
(IN_UP_RGB = FF0000)
(IN_DOWN_RGB = 640000)
(OUT_UP_RGB =6400C8)
(OUT_DOWN_RGB = 3264FF)
(TEXT_IFACE_RGB = FFFFFF)
(TEXT_IN_RGB = FFFFFF)
(TEXT_OUT_RGB = FFFFFF)
ORIENTATION=V


The CPU monitor has been around a long time and was written by Jörg Strohmayer. You can download the tool here. It provides a display with CPU temperature, Date, Time, and the CPU performance. I've found this to be very helpful to find when my programs are behaving badly or if the system gets hung up. Here are the settings used to create this look from the docky's icon:
DONOTWAIT
TOP=26
LEFT=2000
(STARTICONIFIED)
(SETENV)
(TEMPOFFSET=10)
(TEMPFACTOR=1.5)
FAHRENHEIT
(NOGUI)
(WARNTEMP=65)
CLOCK
(IGNORETASKS=CPUInfo.CPUTask|CPUClock.CPUTask|dnetc crunch #1)
SHOWDATE
UPDATESPEED=2


The final icon in the App dock is not a docky but an application icon. The application Granite (download) is a firewall of sorts for the Amiga. What this does is allows or denies programs access to the Internet. In this way I can know when a program ones to access an online resource. The tool is very simple to use, when running any program that attempt to access the internet will cause granite to pop a requestor to allow or deny. As you can see from the screenshot:
All are great tools to spice your AmiDock and I highly recommend them!