Few good words and other info
Posted: Sat May 29, 2021 4:48 pm
Hi all!
The homepage says that feedback is welcome so here I go!
(Sorry for my bad english.)
I just finished exploring/testing KolibriOS (the 28.05.2021 release) and I have to say that I'am impressed of how usable and stable it is (especially the OS core itself)!
Was also nice to see that it even accessed my SATA(native "ACHI") SSD's NTFS system partition, so I could pre-copy some files there for testing - like some MP3's and the "kolibrios" folder with extra stuff.
I used the "NeoGrub" bootloader that come with "EasyBCD 2.2" (what in turn is started by Win7's "bootmgr") to boot into the floppy image on my system partition. Also Grub4Dos is a good way to boot into images.
Even if real floppies are a thing of the past, the fact that the OS is contained in one, makes it super versatile to boot from all kind of media and bootloaders!
The intel video driver also worked fine and allowed to set my good old CRT to pleasant 85Hz
Too bad it (and others, like ATI) is so big, that it have to be separate from the main OS image, but I guess there are reasons.
The main things I missed were FLAC playback and exFAT access
Since FLAC is the second most used format (after MP3) in my music collection and most of my storage media/partitions are in exFAT.
And for future proofing:
* I read that GPT suport is allready there? Awesome in that case!
* NVMe is spreading more and more...
* I also read that support for UEFI only systems (without CSM) are in works?
Can those systems still boot from floppy images with the help of some boot manager/loader?
Yeah I know, the "standards race" or whatever you call it, sucks!
And I hope that old systems/components are still not forgotten! They are still around and usefull for many things, as long as the available software are not boycotting those!
----------------------------------------------------------
And finaly a quick note of few problems I found (I know this is probably not the officially right place to report bugs):
* Starting the "KIW" image viewer allways resets the mouse speed settings to 5, 5
(sidequestion: What on earth the simple image viewer has to to with mouse settings? :O)
* If I change the keyboard layout with ALT+8 for example, then the "numbad" part of the keyboard gets messed up.
* Few times it happened that starting music playback for the first time (after boot) freezed the player app with 100% CPU usage and even task manager was not able to close it. After restart was all fine again (my MOBO is ECS G41T-M7 v1.0 with Intel HDA audio).
* Also wew times happened (I think related to loading network stuff) that my mouse and keyboard (PS2) stopped working - only numlock etc. could still be toggled. The system itself seemed to still run, since the clock on bottom right still ticked.
I have separate PCIE network adapter "PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&SUBSYS_34687470&REV_06".
* I read that NTFS writing supurt is meant to be limited? Litle strange that at first I could make few new text files to it just fine, but later (even after reboot) only modifing allready existing files worked.
* The "Eolite" filebrowser sometimes gets mouse targets in the filelist box messed up for some reason - like I click on file 16 but it opens file 4 or like that. Helps system restart.
* One minor (unusual for text editor) thing that if chose "open file" in the CEDIT program, then it starts a new instance of that program with that the file.
And not so important:
* Quake game starts fine bot after "new game", the sound is lost and after entering the "episode 1" portal, it freezes with 100% CPU.
* Wolfenstein 3D works (very cool that the "Adlib" music is also nicely emulated!) but with "slideshow" FPS.
* FCEU NES emulator runs way too fast!
The homepage says that feedback is welcome so here I go!
(Sorry for my bad english.)
I just finished exploring/testing KolibriOS (the 28.05.2021 release) and I have to say that I'am impressed of how usable and stable it is (especially the OS core itself)!
Was also nice to see that it even accessed my SATA(native "ACHI") SSD's NTFS system partition, so I could pre-copy some files there for testing - like some MP3's and the "kolibrios" folder with extra stuff.
I used the "NeoGrub" bootloader that come with "EasyBCD 2.2" (what in turn is started by Win7's "bootmgr") to boot into the floppy image on my system partition. Also Grub4Dos is a good way to boot into images.
Even if real floppies are a thing of the past, the fact that the OS is contained in one, makes it super versatile to boot from all kind of media and bootloaders!
The intel video driver also worked fine and allowed to set my good old CRT to pleasant 85Hz
Too bad it (and others, like ATI) is so big, that it have to be separate from the main OS image, but I guess there are reasons.The main things I missed were FLAC playback and exFAT access
Since FLAC is the second most used format (after MP3) in my music collection and most of my storage media/partitions are in exFAT.
And for future proofing:
* I read that GPT suport is allready there? Awesome in that case!
* NVMe is spreading more and more...
* I also read that support for UEFI only systems (without CSM) are in works?
Can those systems still boot from floppy images with the help of some boot manager/loader?
Yeah I know, the "standards race" or whatever you call it, sucks!
And I hope that old systems/components are still not forgotten! They are still around and usefull for many things, as long as the available software are not boycotting those!
----------------------------------------------------------
And finaly a quick note of few problems I found (I know this is probably not the officially right place to report bugs):
* Starting the "KIW" image viewer allways resets the mouse speed settings to 5, 5
(sidequestion: What on earth the simple image viewer has to to with mouse settings? :O)
* If I change the keyboard layout with ALT+8 for example, then the "numbad" part of the keyboard gets messed up.
* Few times it happened that starting music playback for the first time (after boot) freezed the player app with 100% CPU usage and even task manager was not able to close it. After restart was all fine again (my MOBO is ECS G41T-M7 v1.0 with Intel HDA audio).
* Also wew times happened (I think related to loading network stuff) that my mouse and keyboard (PS2) stopped working - only numlock etc. could still be toggled. The system itself seemed to still run, since the clock on bottom right still ticked.
I have separate PCIE network adapter "PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&SUBSYS_34687470&REV_06".
* I read that NTFS writing supurt is meant to be limited? Litle strange that at first I could make few new text files to it just fine, but later (even after reboot) only modifing allready existing files worked.
* The "Eolite" filebrowser sometimes gets mouse targets in the filelist box messed up for some reason - like I click on file 16 but it opens file 4 or like that. Helps system restart.
* One minor (unusual for text editor) thing that if chose "open file" in the CEDIT program, then it starts a new instance of that program with that the file.
And not so important:
* Quake game starts fine bot after "new game", the sound is lost and after entering the "episode 1" portal, it freezes with 100% CPU.
* Wolfenstein 3D works (very cool that the "Adlib" music is also nicely emulated!) but with "slideshow" FPS.
* FCEU NES emulator runs way too fast!