A few months ago I started playing with the new Dopus 5.9 Magellan II Beta for AmigaOS4 on the X1000. Work has continued on a daily basis on improving the software, with kas1e and others working hard on it! I downloaded the latest nightly update version of Dopus 5.9 this week and played around with it this weekend to see what has improved:

I am pleased to report that a number of bugs and issues have now been addressed, with this process ongoing - you can see the progress in this forum thread on amigans.net here. There is also some good tips on how to get things some things working better.

You can always download the latest daily build of DOpus5.9 from www.dopus5.org.

My initial blog entry here explains the installation process and initial configuration needed to get it up and running. Once this is done, I have done some more stuff with Dopus 5.9 to make it integrate a bit better with AmigaOS 4.1 on bootup, without losing the functionality of AmigaOS 4.1 by running DOpus in Workbench Replacement Mode. I can simply close DOpus 5.9 at any time that I want to return to standard AmigaOS 4.1.

In order to do this, first it is necessary to tell Dopus 5.9 to use the Workbench screen. To do this, right click on the Settings Menu at the top of the DOpus screen and select Environment. This will then bring a screen which you need to select Display on the left hand side. You should then see a window like this:

Make sure Workbench:Use is selected, then click on Save.

When you run DOpus 5.9 in this way, the AmiDock will disappear whenever you open DOpus 5.9! There is a fix for this (thanks Severin for the tip on the amigans.net forum thread I linked earlier), which I will show you now.

Next, let's go into the SYS:Prefs folder and double click on WBStartup:

When WBStartup Prefs launches, it should look a bit like this (you may have other things in your wbstartup so it probably won't look identical):

Highlight the SYS:Utilities/Commodities/AmiDock module, and select Information. You should then get the screen below:

Click on the Icon tab:

We need to change the priority of AmiDock to make sure it loads AFTER DOpus5. This allows AmiDock to load correctly when DOpus 5.9 is placed in WBStartup (which we will do shortly). To fix AmiDock, click in the Priority section, and change 0 to -128 and click on Save:

 OK, now we need to add Dopus 5.9 into the WBStartup. You should still have the WBStartup window open - select Add to add a new module. You need to browse to where you installed Dopus 5.9 on your X1000, browse to the WBStartup folder underneath and select Opus5_Startup - in my case this is located in SYS:Utilities/Dopus5/WBStartup/Opus5_Startup. WBStartup prefs should now show a new module as below:

This will now ensure that Dopus will run at higher priority than AmiDock. Click Save, and then click Save again to save the settings in WBStartup prefs.

(I know there are other ways to do DOpus5.9 loading via Workbench replacement mode via loadDB, renaming loadwb etc - but I like this way the best as I can easily close DOpus and return to AmigaOS4 if needed - the amigans.net forum details some more details of these other methods if you are interested)

Now the next part, we need to add an assign for DOpus5: to our installed Dopus 5.9 folder location (in my case SYS:utilities/DOpus5) to the s:user-startup file. This is so the Opus5_startup program knows where to find the main executable for Dopus 5.9. I use Notepad to edit s:user-startup and inserted the lines as highlighted below near the top of the file to ensure it exists before DOpus is run:

Once this is saved, we are then ready for a reboot! After rebooting, I get the following Workbench screen, now running Dopus 5.9, with AmiDock loading correctly (click to expand):

(Note that I also subsequently modified the priority setting for FuelGauge in wbstartup to -120 so it would run after DOpus too - you will see Fuel Gauge working in screen shots later on)

Next I wanted to modify the boring default Workbench Titlebar display in Dopus 5.9 to include most of the information I was using on the normal AmigaOS 4.1 Workbench screen before. To do this, go into the Settings Menu (right click on Workbench title bar) and select Environment. Scroll down the items on the left hand side and select Miscellaneous.

If you click on the gadget next to Custom Screen Title in the Miscellaneous as above, you can see the codes shown on the right. You can then type these codes into the Custom Screen Title field to display versions of Workbench, DOpus, free memory, etc, in your title bar. Simply insert what you want into the Custom Screen Title field, pressing Enter when done. Then select Save and the Workbench title bar should update with your changes - mine looks like this (click to expand):

Now you can use DOpus 5.9 on the X1000 as your Workbench! If you encounter trouble you can always right click on the title bar, Select Opus Menu, then Quit to go back to standard AmigaOS4.1. It is still a BETA version and as such is not completely stable, although I have not encountered any issues so far. I am not a big DOpus 5.9 customisation guru and I haven't scratched the surface of what this powerful file manager can do...

The main issue I found so far is that large hard disk and USB partition sizes are not displayed correctly in Workbench windows. This is a known issue and hopefully should be addressed soon. It doesn't appear to affect file operations in limited testing so far.

Below is another screen shot of Dopus 5.9 on my X1000 in action, showing source and destination windows in name and icon mode, floppy disk window and cd image windows older icons rendering correctly, A-Tunes, TuneNet, SMTube and DiskImageGUI (click to expand):

As I have mentioned previously, it is great to be able to run DOpus 5.9 Magellan II on AmigaOS4.1 and I am very grateful for the efforts of kas1e and the testers for all their hard work in making this happen for all X1000 and AmigaOS4 computer owners. (I know it is being worked on for MorphOS, AmigaOS3 and AROS as well)

It is stable enough to try out and decide if it works for you, so if you are interested please give DOpus 5.9 a go!