Brief introduction. My name's Matthew Garrett. I was a heavy Amiga user 
until 1998, when I mostly migrated over to Linux. I've spent time in 
recent years as a professional Unix and Windows sysadmin, and now I do 
cross-platform development work for the <a 
href="http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher">Dasher project</a>. 
Recently, Debian developers were offered the opportunity to get a 
PegasOS at low price, which I took. I'm working on the port of Debian to 
the NetBSD kernel, which so far doesn't seem to have been ported to the 
PegasOS, so it seemed like a good idea. MorphOS is probably more of 
fringe interest to me than the hardware itself, but I'm planning on 
playing with it for a while.
<p>
First impressions. It's small. Really, really small. And insanely tidy - 
the only ugly feature is the April hack. There's a tiny amount of logic 
on the board itself, though there's space for more in the bottom left 
hand corner - I guess it's for debugging. All the contacts are gold. 
It's probably the most attractive motherboard I've ever had my hands 
upon. If it was offered in colours other than green, I'm sure there'd be 
takeup.
<p>
Ooh, some Vulcan games. Wasn't expecting that.
<p>
No IDE cables. Bah. Ought to have some spares, but I think they're all 
40 conductor. Never mind.
<p>
I'm building this machine mostly out of spare parts. The case is an old 
discarded desktop one - the PSU in it seems to have completely died now, 
which is a pain but not unexpected. I've got a Voodoo 3 3000 that was 
swapped out of my desktop when I put a Radeon in, a Deskstar 75GXP that 
was replaced by Dell under warranty and then brought back to life with a 
firmware upgrade, and a stick of cheap Kingston registered PC133. Only 
the best.
<p>
Spend some time looking for bag of screws. Find bag of screws.
<p>
Motherboard fitted to case. Still not quite sure what to do about PSU. 
Will cross that bridge when I need to.
<p>
Cut self on case.
<p>
Discover that case has a 3 pin wide connector for the power LED, and 
PegasOS has a 2 pin wide space. Oh well. 
<p>
Rapidly remembering why I hated this case so much last time I put a 
motherboard into it.
<p>
Decide to go for the "external PSU" look
<p>
Boot machine. Firmware prompt and message complaining about the lack of 
keyboard. Consider celebratory glass of whisky.
<p>
Add keyboard and reboot. Open Firmware greets me. I even vaguely 
remember how to drive this stuff.
<p>
Discover that I have two (2) spare serial mice, one (1) spare Sun mouse, 
one (1) spare Amiga mouse and no (0) spare PS/2 mice. "Borrow" one off 
another machine.
<p>
Boot off CD. Pretty boot screen. Pretty desktop. Mouse wheel works. All 
very nice.
<p>
Hm. Attempts to format disk have failed. There are dire warnings in the 
Readme about an 80 conductor cable being required. I'll prod a bit and 
then run to Maplin before they close...
<p>
Failure. Maplin it is.
<p>
Return both significantly poorer and in posession of the appropriate 
cable. Replace cable. System fails to boot. Brief panic until I realise 
that I've managed to dislodge the graphics card and CPU card in the 
process.
<p>
Create partitions. The instructions tell me to make a small FFS 
partition and a big PFS/SFS one, and then boot off the small one - this 
loads boot.img and then stops. Just making a single big FFS partition 
does the job. But format didn't give it an icon. Ah, I see - the 
checkboxes look like they're selected even when unselected if you're not 
used to them. Silly. The lack of consistency in style between 
different applications provided with the OS is really quite irritating. 
Why do half of my buttons look different to the other half? Silly. I see 
things haven't improved much since 1998 in this respect.
<p>
Whoops. Changed a bunch of settings at once and the screen's flashing 
all over the place. It's decidedly non-happy. A reboot and it's fine, 
and I'm running at a sensible resolution. It's tiled my backdrop, 
though. Can't see how to fix that off-hand.
<p>
No TCP/IP. Knew that that NetConnect 2 CD would come in handy. Right, 
the installer falls over. Hrm. Ah, it's a bug with the installer. Right. 
Copy a classic icon over it. Tricky without networking - I don't have a 
floppy drive in here.
<p>
Of course, there's a pile of them on the CD I'm installing off...
<p>
Still not working. Oh, do the same in env:sys. Tch. It's all coming back 
to me.
<p>
Install works, type in registration, select Rhine driver. Prod Genesis a 
bit. It claims to be online, but nothing can get DNS. Reboot. It works. 
Hurrah! Try IRC, note Genesis brokenness in choosing root as the default 
Ident response. Create a "user", use that. Cripes. It works. Voyager 
does too. I'd forgotten how clunky Voyager of that vintage was.
<p>
So far, it seems to be an Amiga with prettier icons. It's obviously not 
quite ready yet, but it certainly seems usable. I'll try more 
interesting software later on.