Angus (and others)
First, please do not forget that this is a public list and anything published on it gets read by non-A1 enthusiasts, misinterpreted, severely mangled and reposted to the gossip lists almost immediately. This then takes a disproportionate amount of our valuable business time to try to rectify. We (I) have been open in the past and have learnt lessons the hard way!

Secondly anyone who ordered a developer board - dealer or end user - was subscribed to a closed list under NDA. This allows us all on the list to be very open, even democratic, in the way the boards are shipped and packaged. Several people on this list are on the closed a1g3dev list have boards and some - but not all - of them have boards. I certainly have not had any adverse feedback from them either in private or public as to how things are being handled from the dev board perspective.

What I will say is that inevitably some people on the list have far more experience than others when it comes to installing linux. Since the dev group voted to initially standardise on SuSE PPC Linux - and the A1 boards are NOT the same as the Teron CX boards (which run Turbo Linux) - the group decided to let a select few of the real experts to make an easily installable distribution of SuSE Linux PPC and UAE-PPC first.

Given this - and although the remaining dev boards have already been manufactured - it was/is in my view, unfair to ask the remaining, less Linux-centric developers to pay for their dev boards until this SuSE/UAE release is finalised. Progress has been very good and this is expected to take place - without fanfare - shortly.

In parallel with this Hyperion are making good progress with sorting out the OS4 boot process, and the help that they have received form the Linux experts on the A1G3 dev list has been significant.

Oh yes, and the release by Gentle Eye was strictly speaking outside the A1G3dev list NDA, and I will be having a word with them about this today.