I recently got the idea to have an update log on my A1-XE so I added the command 'Uptime > dir/uptime.log' ,where dir is where you want the log kept, to ssolie's excellent Docket application. I have it set to execute daily at midnight so that I can have a running log of my longest update times.

Does anyone else have small ideas like this that help with running your Amiga?

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@Valiant

NIce one. Maybe those harmless tricks that speed up the boot time by editing S: Startup sequence and such small tips could go here. Sadly beside >NIL: unneeded I don`t recall any that would be applicable to new OS 4 systems

Honestly, I have been a bit dissapointed in Hyperion when I have leared that every Kickstart file for OS4 loads a lot of unneeded stuff for end system (since Peg, A1, SAM 440, SAM 460 and A1k boards do differ) and school how to improve this (as it affects boot time more then S: startup sequence) would be useful, even its dangerous.

Or hope Hyperion will do it. I mean, they sell CDs for different hardware to separate earnings but yet very little target optimization seems to be done: this is good example of something not hard to do. If you add SIL SATA controler SAM 460 onboard SATA module is unneeded, SIL one goes up.

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@vox

I think this is more due to getting the balance right between noobs and experienced OS4 users (I'm counting experienced classic users as noobs because there are a lot of differences betweend OS3 and OS4). One thing you don't want is a noob editing the kicklayout file so it's better to load all possible sata/ide drivers etc. loaded which uses a bit more ram and slows the startup by around a second. Also remember that unlike windows or osx you can easily edit the kickstart when you have the experience to know what your doing. Amiga OS does not hide things from the user.

To be honest I think all this moaning about boot times is pointless. spending hours fiddling about to strip a few seconds off the boot time is a waste of time, say you spend half an hour tweaking your startup-sequence and user startup and save a second booting. You would need to do 1800 reboots just to break even time wise. just knock down the timers in uboot/cfe as they're the biggest slowdown and defrag sys occasionally.

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@Severin

Quote:

I think this is more due to getting the balance right between noobs and experienced OS4 users (I'm counting experienced classic users as noobs because there are a lot of differences betweend OS3 and OS4). One thing you don't want is a noob editing the kicklayout file so it's better to load all possible sata/ide drivers etc. loaded which uses a bit more ram and slows the startup by around a second. Also remember that unlike windows or osx you can easily edit the kickstart when you have the experience to know what your doing.

You're absolutely right there!

Quote:

To be honest I think all this moaning about boot times is pointless. spending hours fiddling about to strip a few seconds off the boot time is a waste of time, say you spend half an hour tweaking your startup-sequence and user startup and save a second booting.

But, but it's soooo much fun! I even came to the point that I dismissed the user-startup from active service! Saves me the time loading a file and hence, a split second in boot speed. It's the fiddling that makes for half the fun on an Amiga! This simply is not possible on any other OS, so I'd say: take your chance and go for it!

OldFart

EDIT: small ypo's
EDIT: Selfreflection due to observation: seem to be suffering from "Shift+1"- syndrome...

Last edited by OldFart on 13-Aug-2012 at 12:33 PM.
Last edited by OldFart on 13-Aug-2012 at 12:30 PM.

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@Severin

Quote:

I think this is more due to getting the balance right between noobs and experienced OS4 users (I'm counting experienced classic users as noobs because there are a lot of differences betweend OS3 and OS4). One thing you don't want is a noob editing the kicklayout file so it's better to load all possible sata/ide drivers etc. loaded which uses a bit more ram and slows the startup by around a second. Also remember that unlike windows or osx you can easily edit the kickstart when you have the experience to know what your doing. Amiga OS does not hide things from the user.

OK, but at least some info "what is what" would be useful, not name guessing.

Approach is OK for 1GB RAM: its not only about saving boot time, its about saving resources. WHat about OS 4 Classic users or those with 256*512MB?

Idea is not just snobism for it.

If you have better idea of what could be OS4 tips and tricks that is not dangerous
or elitist, lets talk bout it!

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Roots Taking Over The World

@vox

Valiant's post was about uptime, not boot time. Uptime is how long the computer has been running. My uptime is currently 2 days and 10 minutes.

@Valiant

I have also made a program for tracking uptime. I called it TimeShow. But I can't find it online so I probably never uploaded it anywhere. Anyway, I put it in user-startup and logs everytime the computer (re)starts. It has a command for showing the current uptime or a list of all start events. And it calculates the average uptime.

@vox

Now after writing this post my uptime is 2 days and 18 minutes

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Uptime is included in the OS, just type Uptime in the shell no extra software required.

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@djrikki

OK we know OS4 can be stable. But I don`t intend to do a burnout or system stability check, what about small tips and tricks how to additionaly improve OS, yes improve boot time ...

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Roots Taking Over The World

@vox

This thread has nothing to do with boot time, its already been pointed out to you.

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@djrikki

Quote:

This thread has nothing to do with boot time, its already been pointed out to you.

Thread is about tips and tricks, and I assume its not only uptime.

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@Valiant

One of the neatest little tricks I recently discovered came from Spot / Up Rough in the Kids Icons Collection.

In order to make a snapshot of all of the icons on your sys: partition type in a shell:

lha a -a -e -r -x Icon_Backup sys:#?.info

This will create a file named Icon_Backup.lha that, when extracted to your sys: partition, will restore all of your icons in every directory and subdirectory to the state that they were in at the moment the snapshot was taken using the lha command above!
This is a great way to be sure new icon sets don;t mess up your system or can be undone after being applied to your system.

Note, you can use this with all the icons on ANY partition, not just sys!

Scott

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@scabit

Quote:

lha a -a -e -r -x Icon_Backup sys:#?.info This will create a file named Icon_Backup.lha that, when extracted to your sys: partition, will restore all of your icons in every directory and subdirectory to the state that they were in at the moment the snapshot was taken using the lha command above! This is a great way to be sure new icon sets don;t mess up your system or can be undone after being applied to your system

Thanks, this is a great tip!
Does anyone use LZX to archieve these days?

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Roots Taking Over The World

@Deniil715

Sounds like a very interesting program, especially where it calculates an average uptime. If you ever do upload it, please let us know.

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@djrikki

Quote:

djrikki wrote: Uptime is included in the OS, just type Uptime in the shell no extra software required.

True, that's what I use to build my log. Unfortunately Uptime just by itself can't tell you how long the system was up before a crash and reboot, and this is what my log attempts to do, at least up to the last midnight before a reboot.



Edit: clarification

Last edited by Valiant on 14-Aug-2012 at 02:39 AM.

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@vox

Quote:

vox wrote: @djrikki Quote: This thread has nothing to do with boot time, its already been pointed out to you. Thread is about tips and tricks, and I assume its not only uptime.

Yes, any tricks including boot-time, system maintenance, etc...

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mmm, cool trick with the icons, can make something out of it-

@vox

Quote:

vox wrote: Does anyone use LZX to archieve these days?

It's all I use...

LZX is much better compression and faster than LHA (plus LZX it can handle LHA files), never been quite sure why most folk stuck with LHA when it comes to archiving on the Amiga...

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@Valiant
Quote:

Does anyone else have small ideas like this that help with running your Amiga?

Hmmm, 27 years of accumulated tricks all over my system... where to start?

Cosmetic tricks:

One of my favorite cosmetic boot trick on the 4000 with PicassoIV board was to use ShowAmiga96 to display a greyscale snapshot of my very colorful workbench and once booting and loadwb was finished behind it, have ShowAmiga96 melt the greyscale image down making it look like the colors where being poured onto the display.

The light-colored backgrounds I use have a 5 or 6 pixel thick fading shadow on the top edge making the wb title bar look like it's floating above it a little. That makes the shadows under the pull-down menus look more appropriate.
Likewise I have a shadow on both the top and left edges of the bluish gradient background image I use for the drawers so that it doesn't look so flat.

I use 50% alpha transparency on the shadow I added to my 32bit pointers and the busy pointer is like the normal one except its solid portion is also 50% transparent.


Startup and Shell tricks:

As the boot shell isn't visible by default (I have an animation playing and most people have a kickstart/bootimage displayed) the output of commands in S-S and U-S are usually sent to NIL: but I like to have a log of that output in case something went wrong so the first thing I have in S-S is:
Echo >>RAM:bootlog
C:Assign LOG: RAM:bootlog
I also replaced all relevent >NIL: with >>LOG: that way it saves the output in the bootlog file and at the end of S-S I have:
Assign LOG:
EndCLI >NIL:
to free the assign and the lock on the bootlog file so that I can open/delete it later.

As I like my shell aliases to work from any shell including the 'Execute...' menu of Workbench, I set all my aliases during the Startup-Sequence so in my U-S I added:
Execute >>LOG: S:Aliases
and in the file S:Aliases I put all my aliases, some of which are tricks of their own so I'll paste the whole file and add comments below the noteworthy commands:

Alias A Assign
Alias A2L Addr2line -e [] -j .text
; Used to find the line where a program (compiled with -gstab or -ggdb) crashes
; E.g. A2L MyProg 0x0187
Alias C CD
Alias Cp Copy CLONE
; Keep the datestamp intact
Alias Curl NET:TCP/BIN/Curl -# -O []
; I don't want to add AmiTCP:bin to my path, too much stuff in there
; So I use aliases for the commands I need often
Alias D Dir
Alias DDB DumpDebugBuffer
Alias Del Delete
Alias E Execute
Alias EC EndShell
Alias Ev "RX 'say "
; That's like Eval but with support for floating point so 'Ev 3/2' returns 1.5
; while 'Eval 3/2' returns 1
Alias GUI4 "C:R **>NIL:"
; Displays a GUI using R for commands e.g. 'GUI4 C:List'
Alias HMS Date LFormat="%H:%M:%S"
Alias I Info SHOW SIZE
Alias Ide "ReArg IdeTool a1ide.device 1"
; Makes it easier to send commands to ide drives, e.g. 'Ide -p 0 3' to put unit 0 to sleep
Alias KC KDebug "console serial"
Alias KM KDebug "console memory"
Alias L List
Alias Lib "C:LibList | Grep -i "
; lists matching loaded libraries so 'Lib gl' would show all loaded libs with 'gl' in their name
Alias Log Echo >>DATA:TEXT/Chronicles "[]"
; A quick way to add entries in my log, e.g. 'Log `date`*nToday was a great day!'
Alias Ln MakeLink TO
; When I spend to much time on Linux it's easier to remember the right order with Ln
Alias M Multiview
Alias Md MakeDir
Alias Mv Move
Alias Netstat ShowNetStatus tcpsockets udpsockets
; Produces output similar to what the posix/window netstat does, basically show all open ports/connections
Alias P Ping -c=1
; just ping once
Alias Ports RX "say show('p',,'0a'x)"
; list all ports (not all ports are ARexx ports though so be careful)
Alias Pri ChangeTaskPri
Alias R Rename
Alias Ren Rename
Alias Rexx "RX 'ADDRESS "
; E.g. 'Rexx YAM QUIT'
Alias RF RequestFile
Alias S Status
Alias SSH AmiTCP:bin/SSH
Alias SM ScreenMode
Alias Stack4 "StackUse | Grep -i "
; Lists the stack use of matching program(s) substring, e.g. 'Stack4 IB'
Alias T Type
Alias Task "C:Tasks | Grep -i "
; Lists the task info of matching program(s) substring, e.g. 'Task IB'
Alias V Version


As I have countless assigns I need for countless programs, I use a file S:Assigns which gets loaded in S-S with:
Assign >>LOG: FROM S:Assigns
That way I have all my assigns in one place and it's easy to modify as I keep them sorted alphabetically. Initially the file can be generated with:
Assign TO S:Assigns
Each line contains either a single, multiple or deferred asssignd like:
CDT: SYS:Utilities/Commodities
IMG: DATA:Images DATA:Photos DPaint:Pictures
Cygnix: APPS:MISC/Cygnix DEFER

When I boot the machine I like to have some visual clue as to what is happening until LoadWB so that I can spot odd delays and to that end I disabled the Kickstart/BootImage from Kicklayout, instead in the Startup-Sequence just before SetPatch I added:
Run <>NIL: APPS:VIDEO/VIEW/Viewilbm DATA:VIDEO/BG/Booting CYCLE Q
which displays my animated (color-cycling) boing ball (see ac-bootpic 1.1 on Aminet) and the pixels spinning around the boing ball gives a very good indication of how long it takes to boot and allow me to see the slightest anomaly, even disk fragmentation, as it spins a few degrees further than usual.

I like my shell to be useful and informative so in S:Shell-Startup I have added:
Prompt "*E[44m[%N] %S>*E[0m "
set _title Shell %N %S [%R %W]
The first line gives it a red prompt making it easier to see where the last command was issued and the second line changes the window title so that it show the shell number, path, last return code and fault number.

The truth is, I rarely use the standard CON: for the shell, I like ViNCed better, and these days I have a mostly black background on Workbench and use the ANSI color scheme with VNC: so it also has a black background.
It allows me to seemlessly integrate a tiny non-intrusive borderless shell window in the background which I normally use to display the output of Sashimi, MemGuard or other utility.
To do that I simply added a 'BlackShell' script in S:Shell/ which contains:
NewShell vnc:575//450/80//ansi/back/FONTFixed.7
It gives me a dozen lines of 88 chars without taking much space and using the mouse wheel I can scroll back if needed.

It's getting late so I'll add more stuff at a later time if there is any demand for it

Last edited by AlexC on 14-Aug-2012 at 01:29 PM.
Last edited by AlexC on 14-Aug-2012 at 01:22 PM.
Last edited by AlexC on 14-Aug-2012 at 01:16 PM.
Last edited by AlexC on 14-Aug-2012 at 12:26 PM.
Last edited by AlexC on 14-Aug-2012 at 11:58 AM.

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@Franko

Quote:

LZX is much better compression and faster than LHA (plus LZX it can handle LHA files), never been quite sure why most folk stuck with LHA when it comes to archiving on the Amiga...

Agreed but I remember last 68k versions had some nasty bugs, was this correct to usable level?

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Roots Taking Over The World

@Franko

Quote:

LZX is much better compression and faster than LHA (plus LZX it can handle LHA files), never been quite sure why most folk stuck with LHA when it comes to archiving on the Amiga

Because...

http://xavprods.free.fr/lzx/

#6

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