Amiga Unix - awesome!

[Honey Badger]

Unix on an Amiga!! This is awesome. I downloaded Amix just to see if I could get it to work ... and yes, sure did ... within WinUAE.

Can relive some of my old university days ... command line Unix, C programming etc

[Pyromania]

Cool, I'm going to try it this weekend too.

[Honey Badger]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

Cool, I'm going to try it this weekend too.

The install instructions are well written & not terribly difficult - a bit of basic familiarity with partitioning a drive for Unix-type OS helps

and it is a full-fledged Unix system

[Pyromania]

Nice, I’m a Linux Admin or so they say. I’ll figure it out, thanx for the tips.

[hooverphonique]

FYI, you can get linux running on an Amiga as well - I set it up on my A4000 in the late 90's ;-)

[Honey Badger]

Originally Posted by hooverphonique

FYI, you can get linux running on an Amiga as well - I set it up on my A4000 in the late 90's ;-)

Yup! that would be cool as well ... imagine it would be roughly comparable to running slackware around 1995ish

[MartinW]

Originally Posted by Honey Badger

Yup! that would be cool as well ... imagine it would be roughly comparable to running slackware around 1995ish

Please no! I'm having palpitations just thinking back to that, let alone reliving it!!

[nogginthenog]

I too ran Linux on my A4000 in the 90's. At the time there were no distributions. All I had was an old bootable image from an Atari user. Using that I formatted my drives and slowly built a more modern Linux from source. Great learning experience!

X-Windows was perfectly usable. Even apps like GIMP worked.
Debian/68k is available now but it's probably outdated.

68k is still supported in the mainstream kernel. A guy called Geert Uytterhoeven keeps the fire burning!

[Pyromania]

I wish I had run Linux on my Amiga 4000 in the 1990’s.

[redblade]

Yes but installation of a mix takes a long time because of the decompressing. I think installation takes 60 minutes. It did for me but it is great

[hooverphonique]

Originally Posted by nogginthenog

I too ran Linux on my A4000 in the 90's. At the time there were no distributions. All I had was an old bootable image from an Atari user. Using that I formatted my drives and slowly built a more modern Linux from source. Great learning experience!

X-Windows was perfectly usable. Even apps like GIMP worked.
Debian/68k is available now but it's probably outdated.

68k is still supported in the mainstream kernel. A guy called Geert Uytterhoeven keeps the fire burning!

Yes, Geert was also behind lots of the stuff back in the 90's. I too assembled my installation from bits from here and there - compiling a kernel took like a whole day or something..



I remember trying the "Lightning" window manager on the Amiga - slow as hell. On the other hand, I used 'AmiWM' as window manager on the Sun workstations at the university, which ran really well

[Leffmann]

It's neither Unix nor Linux, but if someone is just looking for a Unix-like experience, then NetBSD supports Amiga and is actively developed:

https://netbsd.org/

[nogginthenog]

Originally Posted by hooverphonique

Yes, Geert was also behind lots of the stuff back in the 90's. I too assembled my installation from bits from here and there - compiling a kernel took like a whole day or something..

It certainly took a while I was lucky as I had a 'fast' 060 with SCSI.

Originally Posted by hooverphonique

On the other hand, I used 'AmiWM' as window manager on the Sun workstations at the university, which ran really well

I used a 68030 Sun Workstation in 1993/4. Chatting to Amiga nerds across the world on Usenet was great. It didn't have a floppy so transferring Aminet downloads to my A500 was tricky.

[Hewitson]

Can only assume everyone who used Linux had a graphics card as I have tried it on an 060 with AGA and even the console output was painfully slow. Completely unusable.

[hooverphonique]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Can only assume everyone who used Linux had a graphics card as I have tried it on an 060 with AGA and even the console output was painfully slow. Completely unusable.

Nope.. Never had a gfx card, just A4000 with A3640 and AGA.

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Can only assume everyone who used Linux had a graphics card as I have tried it on an 060 with AGA and even the console output was painfully slow. Completely unusable.

likely, modern kernels spawn a ~640x480 256 color fb, it wasn't so bad back in the day with a 1bpp or 4bpp fb.

[alpine9000]

I tried to run the installer but it failed at the last step when patching the kernel. Wonder what I am doing wrong,

[kolla]

Originally Posted by nogginthenog

68k is still supported in the mainstream kernel. A guy called Geert Uytterhoeven keeps the fire burning!

Not just him, though he is the m68k git repo maintainer and all 68k related submits must be acked by him to slip through to main kernel repo.

Before he jumped to Linux, his main reason for fame in Amiga land was MuFS.
http://aminet.net/search?readme=Uytterhoeven

[Honey Badger]

still enjoying the unix Amiga port ... it's actually a full fledged port of Unix System V release 4 .... MOST impressive they got it working in Amiga

[mousehouse]

I have it running on my A3000... I love it for nostalgic reasons as it gives me the same feeling I had when I was at Uni on HP9000s. Too bad I cannot find MOTIF for Amix even though I read somewhere that the Atari Unix version works. Ah well, I sold my completed 3000UX that I collected over many years to fund the family so I do not have a proper graphics card for MOTIF anyway.

I switched from my 2000 to Linux on a 486 in ~93 as I could not afford an Amiga 3k or 4k or any good accelerator. Found out about this guy doing a free Unix version, bought a generic PC, downloaded SLS 0.98 and had an awesome cheap Unix workstation.