Amiga *nix n00b

[Matt_H]

I believe the ability to select Amix from the 2620/2630 boot menu was removed from later revisions of those accelerators' ROMs. If you have Kickstart 2 or higher you can simply select the Amix boot partition from the regular old Early Startup menu.

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by idrougge

What version numbers top left?

The system resources are listed top left. Each one has "V", short for version, and a number, indicating which Version the resource is.

Little screens often confuse.

[idrougge]

Why are you posting a thumbnail of a V34 Sysinfo screen? Are you trying to troll or something?

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Why are you posting a thumbnail of a V34 Sysinfo screen? Are you trying to troll or something?

No, I am correcting your posted disinformation that there was never a 1.4 Amiga.

http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/os_versions.html

If I was trolling, I would be posting fictional references about you, of a personal nature.

Plenty of times I am wrong. The adult thing to do is admit the fact, rather than view it as a problem with the person correcting me.

[idrougge]

As the link you posted states, V34 is Kickstart 1.3, not 1.4. There was no 1.4 outside Commodore's offices and that is irrelevant to this thread.

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by idrougge

As the link you posted states, V34 is Kickstart 1.3, not 1.4. There was no 1.4 outside Commodore's offices and that is irrelevant to this thread.

It's totally relevant if that is what was supplied with Amix machines and Amix will not run without the code in it.

More likely, the original was dependent, and subsequence releases were not, but I think CBMs problem was, they were very limited in WHO they could sell Unix equipped Amigas to. I think the limit was educational and scientific establishments within the United States.

There were heavy restrictions on supplying high end IT equipment at the time. Even things like CD-RAM drives came with restricted access stickers, warning of export restrictions.

[LocalH]

Originally Posted by idrougge

There was no 1.4 outside Commodore's offices and that is irrelevant to this thread.

It is irrelevant to this thread, but yes there was. From http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_20.html (emphasis mine):

Originally Posted by Workbench Nostalgia

Workbench 2.0 required a (hardware) v1.4 ROM to get the A3000 booting before 2.0 could be softkicked. Rodney Hester notes that the A3000 tower ROM was actually 1.4 beta 3.

SuperKickstart A3000 hardware ROM is rev 36.016, I forget whether it indicates 1.4-ness in the startup when you quit out of the 1.3/2.0 selection screen (click in the upper left like you would a regular window, it will fail to boot WB from the HDD as it will try to use WB_2.x:)

Also, 1.4a15 (KS 36.15, WB 36.1) was also distributed to developers at an Amiga dev conference in June 1989 (source). So even discounting SuperKickstart A3000 hardware ROM as a true 1.4, Commodore did give at least one version of it to developers, outside of their offices.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

It's totally relevant if that is what was supplied with Amix machines and Amix will not run without the code in it.

But it wasn't, and AMIX will run.

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

More likely, the original was dependent, and subsequence releases were not, but I think CBMs problem was, they were very limited in WHO they could sell Unix equipped Amigas to. I think the limit was educational and scientific establishments within the United States.

I think the limit was Commodore's weak marketing and foothold on the market.

Originally Posted by LocalH

It is irrelevant to this thread, but yes there was. From http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_20.html (emphasis mine):

SuperKickstart A3000 hardware ROM is rev 36.016, I forget whether it indicates 1.4-ness in the startup when you quit out of the 1.3/2.0 selection screen (click in the upper left like you would a regular window, it will fail to boot WB from the HDD as it will try to use WB_2.x

That's what's usually called SuperKickstart, and the 1.4 denomination was never official.

Originally Posted by LocalH

Also, 1.4a15 (KS 36.15, WB 36.1) was also distributed to developers at an Amiga dev conference in June 1989 (source). So even discounting SuperKickstart A3000 hardware ROM as a true 1.4, Commodore did give at least one version of it to developers, outside of their offices.

That's more than I knew. Has any copy of this alpha ever surfaced?

Still irrelevant for the UNIX topic, but nevertheless interesting.

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by idrougge

I think the limit was Commodore's weak marketing and foothold on the market.

I think you seriously underestimate how anaemic unix on a 030 was compared to the rest of the market

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Locutus

I think you seriously underestimate how anaemic unix on a 030 was compared to the rest of the market

You're forgetting that Sun still sold 68030 based Unix workstations at that point in time (at a much higher price, too), and so did HP/Apollo.

[Locutus]

well....

The Sun3/80 had come out in 89 already and that got you proper vendor support and a ecosystem of software vendors, it was also by that point a last-stop system while SUN started selling SPARC's.

The pricepoint is all a bit less important, places buying UNIX workstations in 1990 were far less price sensitive.

[nogginthenog]

Originally Posted by idrougge

You're forgetting that Sun still sold 68030 based Unix workstations at that point in time (at a much higher price, too), and so did HP/Apollo.

Back in 93 I was living in Eindhoven (NL) as a student working for Philips Research. My workstation was a Sun/030 box. Display was mono, but high resolution. Most employees used SPARCstations.

I had no floppy so I used to pop into another office to transfer my Amiga downloads for my A500 at home

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by idrougge

But it wasn't, and AMIX will run.

Glad to hear it. Some people seem to be having problems with doing that.

A3000s all have a Superkickstart, AFAIK. Idea is, the shadow kickstart OS is loaded from drive, floppy in the case of 1.3, or from hard drive if you want 2.0 or later (hence the x in 2.0x) and mapped with the 68030. So yes, plenty of machines out there with SuperKickstart chips Which version of that they have, I don't know. I certainly didn't get a Unix option when booting up with both mouse buttons held together. But then, I never owned a Unix Amiga.

I haven't got an A3000 with a Superkickstart anymore. but at least I saved the drive, so half a cup full is better than nothing.

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by Locutus

I think you seriously underestimate how anaemic unix on a 030 was compared to the rest of the market

Very chuggy in some respects when using 24 bit graphics cards and whatnot, that's why I never bothered trying on a stock 25MHz A3000 even without one. Just because as OS is viable doesn't mean it is going to do what you want it to do.

[rhester72]

I'm quite confused about the Kickstart 1.4 confusion. Yes, (many) early A3000 production models shipped with Kickstart 1.4 and loaded both the 1.3 and 2.x Kickstarts from hard drive (in DEVS. Yes, it was software-upgradable via Superkickstart floppies. No, you couldn't put "normal" 2.04 ROMs in them because of the ROM towers. Yes, AMIX runs on both the early Superkickstart models and the later true ROM models.

And yes, if you have the Kickstart 1.4 ROM image for the A3000, even the WinUAE Quickstart option will boot from it, and if you do so without a virtual hard drive, you can click the invisible close gadget in the upper left hand of the boot screen and see the 1.4 designation yourself.

Rodney

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by rhester72

I'm quite confused about the Kickstart 1.4 confusion. Yes, (many) early A3000 production models shipped with Kickstart 1.4 and loaded both the 1.3 and 2.x Kickstarts from hard drive (in DEVS. Yes, it was software-upgradable via Superkickstart floppies. No, you couldn't put "normal" 2.04 ROMs in them because of the ROM towers. Yes, AMIX runs on both the early Superkickstart models and the later true ROM models.

And yes, if you have the Kickstart 1.4 ROM image for the A3000, even the WinUAE Quickstart option will boot from it, and if you do so without a virtual hard drive, you can click the invisible close gadget in the upper left hand of the boot screen and see the 1.4 designation yourself.

Rodney

The $64,000 question is, does Amix need 1.4 to operate, or will Amix operate with any version of KS? Or are some versions of Amix dependent on 1.4 and others do not care?

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

The $64,000 question is, does Amix need 1.4 to operate, or will Amix operate with any version of KS? Or are some versions of Amix dependent on 1.4 and others do not care?

He just wrote:

Yes, AMIX runs on both the early Superkickstart models and the later true ROM models.

[Pat the Cat]

Great. How do you do that? I think that was the goal of the thread.

[idrougge]

It was before you derailed it.

[Pat the Cat]

I derailed it? Lot of people waffling about why it should work. Nobody came in with the "I did X/Y/Z" to get it working.

You reckon it works. You post a how to.

I'm assuming it can be made to work somehow, but I have yet to see any evidence that Amix ever ran on anything but a Nix ROM'd Amiga. OK, in theory anything 2.04 and above should work. In practice, who ever saw one? Who ever bought one?