A WEEK WITH MORPHOS AND AMIGA NETWORKING FAILURE


              adolfopa@{sdf,sdfeu,twenex}.org


Last  week  I used my MorphOS laptop (a PowerBook G4) almost
exclusively as my daily driver.   For  an  operating  system
with such a small community and so few developers working on
it, it is surprising how good it  feels.  With  some  excep-
tions,  I was able to do everything I wanted to without much
pain.

     The only bad experiences I  had  were  related  to  web
browsing.   And  I believe the sites themselves are to blame
here.  Seriously, the amount  of  bloat  in  some  sites  is
ridiculous.   Reddit  in particular is a joke. The amount of
crap you have to download, and the CPU  power  necessary  to
load  what  is  essentially a page of comments is absurd.  I
can understand things like Youtube being slow, but Reddit?

     Anyway, this good experience with MorphOS made me  want
to  connect  to  the  network with my Amiga 1200. For things
like SDF and downloading stuff from Aminet  my  030  machine
should  be  enough.   The  Amiga has a PCMCIA expansion slot
which makes it relatively easy to connect to  the  internet,
as long as you have a supported card.

     I  have  a NE2000 compatible card that should work, but
it doesn't.  My machine either freezes on boot or  complains
with  a  cryptic error message depending on the device I use
(cnet/cnet16).

     I  bought  an  additional  Ovislink  that  didn't  work
either.   Being positive, the Ovislink card was pretty cheap
(10 euros), and I may be able to make it work in the  future
--  I  believe  the problem is in the dongle -- In any case,
I'll probably look for another  compatible  card.  I  really
want to put my Amiga online.