[SGVLUG] Amiga Unix

[Braddock Gaskill via SGVLUG]

Hi folks,
I had some fun last weekend with Amiga emulators and an obscure OS.
Thought it might be of interest to some of you.

In 1990 Commodore released a port of System V R4 Unix to the Amiga
3000 hardware.  I remember a 14 year old future Linux user drooling
over this, but the OS was expensive, was only out for a couple years,
and I never got to see it running.  Until now!

I spent $30 to buy the Amiga Forever collection, which includes
licensed ROM files for all the Amiga models.  Amiga Forever is
unfortunately for Windows using the WinUAE emulator, but with Wine you
can run an included tool to extract the disk images.  From there I
fired up FS-UAE for Linux (the UNIX Amiga Emulator, although it now
runs on everything).  My intention was just to play a game of Populous
- which I did.

Then I thought about that beautiful Amiga 3000 running Unix in the old
issue of Amiga World.  Did Amiga Unix survive?  A google revealed a
nice wiki devoted to the Amiga Unix and a few forum threads where
people got it running in UAE in just the past few years!

Well, I had to try that.  Some trial and error was involved - needed
the latest FS-UAE, not the one in the Ubuntu repos, needed some custom
magic configuration settings.  But after a couple hours, voila!, boot
and even launch X Windows.  I used a configured hard disk image found
online - you can also supposedly install it fresh from a "tape drive"
but I couldn't get that to work.

Some folks have even back-ported an older GCC and the GNU tools for
it, and collected a few books of documentation and schematics.  I
could not get networking to function - it might be the weird SysV
syntax of route and ifconfig holding me back.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting.  If anyone wants technical
details just ask.

-braddock