Hello from South Wales

[gkb]

Hello all.

I am a new joiner to this website, so I thought I would introduce myself.

To give my background story, I owned an Amiga 500 through the nineties — and to this day it is still my favorite ever computer. As a kid growing up in the South Wales Valleys, the summers were great as you had the countryside to explore; but the viciously cold winters meant you had two options — play rugby or hang around street corners. Neither of these options appealed to me, so getting an Amiga gave me a third option.

I had to decommission it when I went to university, as the labs ran IBM-PCs with Windows NT (showing my age now!) ; so I had to have an IBM-PC at home to run the same software the labs had. So — I bought the parts, built the PC and installed Windows 95 oh it. Oh dear. Workbench on my Amiga 500 with the 1 MB RAM expansion and hard drive was much more responsive, stable - and had smoother multitasking.

I tolerated Microsoft’s finest for my first year, but when I got to my second year two of the lecturers introduced me to Linux. It looked promising (this was 1998); so after a weekend involving 2 Linux CD’s, 4 boot floppies and a lot of swearing I had a dual boot Linux/Windows PC. I quickly found myself spending most of my time in Linux, and only using Windows for gaming — Quake, Carmageddon, etc.

I have been using Linux as my daily driver for many years, but the recent explosion in retro computing and the corresponding resurgence in the Amiga scene has made me want to revisit my misspent youth. I have been researching the various Amiga hardware platforms that can be bought now, and they are all either too expensive or are currently not available.

My research has found one cost effective and practical way to get an Amiga on my desk again; and that is to buy an old Acer Aspire ZG5 and install AROS One on to it. I have purchased a reconditioned ZG5 on ebay, and AROS One is on a USB stick waiting for its arrival.

I need a big indoors project to get me through the winter — and mastering AROS One is it.

With this in mind, expect a lot of questions from me!

Gavin.

[Amiwell]

your are welcome i use also i aspire one ZG5 with icaros desktop 2.3 whit some fix and run fine

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Cio Gavin and welcome to the forum, I'm glad you enjoyed my Distribution AROS One, I own almost all Amiga models that I haven't used for 30 years, some time ago I had also created a Distribution OS 3.9 BB4 called AfA One.

AROS One is up to date and soon there will be a new version, please report me any anomalies you find on AROS One !

[Amiwell]

amigasystem works steelstorm-ep1 on your distribution?

http://archives.aros-exec.org/share/game/action/steelstorm-ep1.i386-aros.tgz

[AMIGASYSTEM]

On Acer Aspire One ZG5 the game starts and gets to the menu, then while the game loads it reboots, probably you need to have a Video Card supported by the Game.

[Amiwell]

on my acer works with icaros desktop 2.3

[gkb]

Thank you all for the welcomes.

I had a lot of trouble getting an installation USB key set up, as Icaros desktop would hang with a "waiting for boot medium" message, and Aspire OS would crash with a "not enough memory" error.

AROS One seems to have burned to USB correctly; and it looks like the trick to it is to:

- Install qemu on a linux host.
- Insert the USB key into the host.
- Attach the USB key to the qemu session.
- Boot the ISO file in qemu (as root user!)
- Run the install AROS command. The install has to be run once to create the partitions on the USB key, reboot the virtual machine, and then run it again to copy the data over.

I have tested this on a borrowed laptop that is an older Windows 7 machine - so close to the ZG5 hopefully; and the USB key boots just fine.

Glad to have gotten over this hurdle; as I spent a whole day:

- Fiddling with burning ISO files to CD, and creating the USB key via the booted CD.
- Trying different virtual machines, and tinkering with the settings.
- Using the linux dd command to write the ISO to USB.

Thought I would post the procedure that worked, as it might save someone else a day of annoyance!

[Amiwell]

ok start icaros desktop and on grub choose Advanced Menu Option and after Icaros Desktop with alternate ata device

[AMIGASYSTEM]

gkb the procedure is correct, I however run it on VM (VMware), to Clone and Burn the USB image, on Windows I use Rufus, one of the best software for this kind of operation, the developer was an old Amiga 500 user.

Other great software to burn the ISO Image is "Etcher", anyway on AROS One, for cghi using Windows there are instructions on how to create a Pendruve Live with VMWare.

I am not a Windows Fan, but in the early 90's for work I had to use Windows, then thanks to the Amiga experience I became a Windows expert as well, then someone thought to exploit me in the Company, and I managed 2 Servers and hundreds of PCs and users in local network and many business software.

Now I am in Retirement I am 68 years old but always passionate about computing, at the moment I carry on only the project AROS One x86 and AROS One 68k, to be honest I never liked Linux, to each his own taste

AROS One is everyone's and everyone can collaborate, if you create something I will be happy to put it on AROS One

[gkb]

Amiwell - Thanks for that point - I have to admit that I did not try that.

I got AROS One booting off USB at the end of a long and frustrating day, and since my blood pressure was high enough by then I stopped working - as I had won the battle and got a booting USB key on my desk.

When the laptop arrives I will attempt the next challenge of getting AROS One installed. Since it has quite a large hard drive, and is coming with Windows 7 ; I am going to attempt to set up a dual boot between Windows and AROS, as this will make the laptop a one stop retro machine - Windows for all the games such as Quake, etc ; and AROS for all my Amiga needs. I might post my progress on this thread.

I have never liked Windows - I have found that every release of it has some huge flaw that makes it a pain to use.

Don't get me started on Apple!

Linux when I first started was very difficult to get installed and set up, but I persisted with it - and I have a good level of knowledge now.  The thing with Linux then and now is that when you get the install and setup done it gives you trouble free computing for years. Linux is very easy to install now - just download an ISO,. burn it to USB, boot the USB key and click through the wizard. Quite a change from when I tried to install version 0.98!

[Amiwell]

ok

All Best

[AMIGASYSTEM]

gkb, installing AROS One from a Pendrive is convenient is fast, DVDs are too slow and in many cases errors are generated on some files.

However, there is no need to create the USB image, on my site, there is already the ISO image for USB devices

Yes as you say Windows is complicated, but in my opinion it is simpler than Linux, for me Windows doesn't have many secrets, Linux on the other hand I don't like it because of too many permissions in some unnecessary circumstances, the be careful when writing commands because of the case sensitive and then the many incompatibilities between the various Distros, which among other things are too many, in my opinion they should have been fewer and compatible with each other.

DualBoot Win/AROS One is super easy, if you can use it there is a comprehensive video of mine, if you need just ask, maybe open a dedicated thread or post here:

https://ae.amigalife.org/index.php?topic=775.0

[AMIGASYSTEM]

amigasystem works steelstorm-ep1 on your distribution?

http://archives.aros-exec.org/share/game/action/steelstorm-ep1.i386-aros.tgz

Safe with old AROS One v1.1 Steelstorm works fine on a PC with an NVIDEA GeeForce Go 6600 Video Card

[Amiwell]

amigasystem yes with the latest Deadwood updates something does not work

[gkb]

Hello again.

The ZG5 has still not arrived (thanks a lot Royal Mail!) , so while I am waiting I am putting together a checklist for things to do - stuff like buy new battery, factory reset the Windows 7 install that comes with it, etc.

I have been thinking about the step of partitioning the 120 GB hard drive up, and I was wondering if anyone could recommend a partition size for AROS One?

I plan to have three partitions in total:
- Windows 7
- AROS One System - DH0
- AROS One Data - DH1

Any recommendations of sizes would be welcome.

Gavin.