Amiga *nix n00b

[Locutus]

Just because you are so annoying about this:

[Pat the Cat]

So, your "How to run Amix on an Amiga is" definitive guide is - just use WINUAE.

Thank you for your input. I'm so glad I kept the hard drive from my A3000.

[Locutus]

I'll just stop from posting right here.

[Pat the Cat]

I was being genuine grateful, and the issue has been bugging the hell out of me for 20 odd years. Why did Amix stop working?

Give me a little space, place. To you this is trivial, to me it is a big unresolved issue.

You have given me some help towards resolution. That is why I am grateful.

[Shadowfire]

The earliest A3000's ALL HAD 1.4beta IN ROM.
Commodore had not yet re-christened the OS as 2.0.
Later machines had 2.04. 2.04 machines do not have superkickstart menus and cannot boot alternate OS's from superkickstart disks or kickstart image files.
1.4 supported loading the OS in from a Superkickstart disk or from the devs:kickstart file. Commodore did not recommend using the built-in 1.4 ROM for anything other than booting another kickstart because of the very beta nature of it.
If you turn on an A3000 and cold boot from a floppy and get a blue/white/orange color scheme, its running 1.4.
If you hold down both mousebuttons while turning on an A3000 and you get a menu that only asks if you want to boot 1.3 or 2.x, and from DF0: or from hard disk, its running 1.4.
I know. I owned one.
As for AMIX, I never looked at it, but I don't believe it used the Superkickstart method of booting; that would have been to bring up regular Kickstart, which would have started the AMIX kernel.
I have an A2630 which has the "Amiga Unix" boot option. It is an expansion card; it probably just bumps the priority of the Amix partition so that AmigaDOS boots from the Amix partition.
The A2000 never had a 1.4 option, yet the A2630 clearly permits booting Unix. This should put to rest any nagging suspicions that 1.4 was needed to boot Amix.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by idrougge

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

The DEVS:Kickstart image (be it 1.3 or 2.x/3.x) is the actual SuperKickstart. Super, because it has a short bit of bonus code tacked at the end. This bonus code can actually be cut out and added to any 512k sized A3000 compatible kickstart image to make it work in an old bootstrap A3000.

The "1.4" ROM is called a bootstrap ROM, it uses the most stable kick modules they had, but is otherwise not meant for actual use. It special in the way that it for example has two exec.libraries, the latter of which mainly loads the kickmenu (shows the 1.3 / 2.x selector if no partitions found or mousebuttons held) or kickad module (no boot menu, just loads the superkick and kicks into it).

Sure, you can exit out of kickmenu with the top left hidden close gadget, and it jumps back to the exec in the beginning of the ROM for the duration of that session. Then you see what the state of 1.4/2.x was when the A3000 first shipped. :-)

Since the special bootstrap kick already talks about 2.x, I would say the official version bump had already happened by the time that ROM was built.. The latter exec has the timestamp 16.3.1990, kickmenu 20.3.1990 and kickad 16.3.1990. It is left to speculation whether the modules in the bootstrap ROM were "1.4" era or "2.x" era, as they are a lot older than any of the 2.x releases that shipped with the A3000.

Originally Posted by rhester72

No, you couldn't put "normal" 2.04 ROMs in them because of the ROM towers.

Yes you can, you swap the 2.04 ROMs into the tower and plug the tower back in. Alternatively you can use the other two "rear" ROM sockets and burn the KS image onto 27C220 chips for those.