HKvalhe's AmigaOne 500 Blog: AmiCygnix on AmigaOne 500


My AmigaOS 4.1.5 Black Camaro Desktop

In this blog i want to show you AmiCygnix - the X environment used in Linux running on AmigaOS 4.1.5 on my AmigaOne 500 system! Installing AmiCygnix went like a charm, along with many applications that are made for AmiCygnix and not the native AmigaOS4. Many of these applications have also been configured to run standalone without relying on AmiCygnix. I will explain this later on.

AmiCygnix running the X environment

Running the main AmiCygnix will take you to an X desktop environment seen on the picture to the left. Looks familiar, doesn't it? Yes, from Linux.

I'm not a big fan of this environment, but it's quite handy if you need to work on applications that are not yet available to AmigaOS4 platform. Luckily, most applications can now run standalone, so what does it actually mean? Allow me to explain carefully.


Duplicating and editing standalone scripts

In my AmigaOS group on Facebook, some members were extremely kind to provide a direct link to a blog an AmigaOne X1000 owner wrote about running AmiCygnix applications standalone. That guide was very helpful. As seen on the picture to the right, that program had to be installed into AmiCygnix, as this is where the whole idea to duplicating and editing standalone scripts happen. It's easier than what one might think. The guide explained very well how this was done step by step.

The first program to show off is AbiWord - an open source wordprocessing very similar to Open Office's Writer. It supports a wide range of formats, including the Open Office document format (odt)! This is extremely useful if you have done a lot of serious stuffs at your work, and want to continue at home without having to start from scratch, no matter what computer system you originally used, as long as the common program was Open Office or a wordprocessing program that save documents in Open Office and Microsoft Word formats, which AbiWord actually does. In the future, AbiWord could be ported straight to AmigaOS4.

Wordprocessing in AbiWord is cool!

That's why i love to run such an application standalone. Using AbiWord is very handy for me as i can keep working on important stuffs both at home and at work. This is probably the closest thing you come to having Open Office on AmigaOS4!

It's amazing what you can do on the Amiga nowadays! No kidding, really!

The second program is the well-known picture editing program GIMP, which is open source. Designed primarly for AmiCygnix, but configured to run standalone, as done with AbiWord.

What is GIMP? Well, take a look at Photoshop, then you will see many similarites to them. GIMP has adopted many of Photoshop's unique picture editing features, and because GIMP is open source, porting it to other platforms allows other systems than Windows to use clones of Photoshop. Not bad, eh?

My GIMP, there is a naked woman over there!

I remember that last autumn, i was trying a graphic design job, which was very interesting, running Photoshop on a Mac. Using GIMP on my AmigaOS 4.1.5 system on my AmigaOne 500 helps me improving what i have learnt. It's a really fine picture editing program. It's very powerful and flexible. I'm really happy to have installed this program along, and i can run it standalone in AmigaOS4!

Third program is Gnumeric for AmiCygnix, which is the open source version of Excel and similar to the one you find in Open Office. This program has also been configured to run standalone. Very handy if you want to keep track of your economy, bills and other payments. Perhaps you even want to make a list of what food and stuffs to buy, how much they cost and more important, how much money you will have left after buying and/or selling stuffs. Very useful and important. A must-have program to have!

Gnumeric, XCalc and ROX-Filer in one shot!

As seen on this picture, both Gnumeric, XCalc calculator and ROX-Filer were all configured to run standalone. I would say just about all important AmiCygnix programs and tools have been configured successfully to run standalone.

Another fine AmiCygnix program is NetSurf (which has also been ported to AmigaOS4 in own version). Not as powerful as TimberWolf and OWB, but a fast open source browser anyway for easy surfing. NetSurf for AmiCygnix has also been configured to run standalone, as seen on the picture below.

NetSurf, Xpdf and GPicView in one shot!

This picture shows NetSurf, Xpdf and GPicView all running standalone. Last one is a useful picture viewer.

Next up is a flexible open source messenger called Pidgin, which supports about all different messengers! I made myself a new MSN Live account, and have just started to get some of my old contacts over to my new account. My new MSN account will only be given to my true friends, family and loyal contacts who are all on my Facebook profile's friend list, and will be used for messenging ONLY, NOT for emails!

Along with Pidgin, i also managed to get SabreMSN for AmigaOS4 working with my new MSN Live account. Even though that few are using MSN now that Skype and Facebook Chat have become extremely popular, these messengers still come in handy, especially as long as Skype or something similar is not yet made for AmigaOS4. I suppose this will happen in a forseable future. We will see.

Chatting with Pidgin Messenger

Chatting with SabreMSN Messenger

Before i end this blog, i will only show you the scanner program XSane for AmiCygnix and a couple of board/card games for AmiCygnix.

These programs run best under the X desktop environment of AmiCygnix.

As i have experienced myself, not all AmiCygnix programs are developed to run standalone, even if you duplicated and edited a standalone script for it. XSane and the XGalaga game are two applications i couldn't manage to get a standalone script for them working. Perhaps a future version of these programs will provide a working standalone script, but for now they are best run into the AmiCygnix X desktop environment.

Well, another fine blog completed, so i hope you enjoy the read and the new pictures. Feel free to leave a nice comment into this blog if you liked what you have read here. See you soon!

Written by:

Helge Kvalheim, Norway