Uh oh here he goes again, talking some crazy BS about an old ass platform from the 80’s/early 90’s and trying to make it do something stupid.
EXACTLY
Hello amiga dudes and dudettes, assuming I have that many compatriots. I am trying to do something stupid with my A500. That being, install an OS to its sidecar hard drive. However, no matter what in the bloody fuck I try to do I cannot get my AmigaOS 2.04 disks to work. I have accepted that they are dead. So what have I decided to do instead? Buy cloanto’s software pack and install it over my gotek? No! Look at Unix and Linux!
I’m kind of hoping someone on here has messed with amiga unix or debian 8 on an amiga / M68K (but uh, no bets on the latter) and could walk me through how the install process is supposed to work? I’m overall unsure about what I’d actually DO with the thing after it was set up, but I bet I could think of… well… something.
If none of the 4 people on here have played with this before… F it I’m going on winworldpc and I’m just going to start bashing crap in till it works and I have bash 0.8 on it or something. Maybe I’ll port fish and then never turn the machine on again lol.
AFAIK, most alternative amiga OS require an MMU. e.g., Linux 68k does.
If you’re on an Amiga without an MMU (like the A500), really the best OS will be AmigaOS imho.
If you have an accelerator with an MMU onboard then sure, you’ll be OK, but without one the 68000 does not have the required hardware on board.
The MMU is used for memory protection, virtual memory paging, etc… Linux, being initially written for the 386 with its inbuilt MMU inherently needs one. Most modern 32 bit processors have one. The original 68000 (and some cut down versions of the later models), being originally from the 70s, does not.
If you’re dead set on running Linux on it, you may need to go accelerator board shopping, and make sure the processor you get has an MMU.
Although reading there, there’s a cut down linux with no virtual memory support which you can try. Though i’m not sure how usable it will be… due to memory limitations you’ll be pretty screwed trying to do much of anything with it outside of embedded microcontroller stuff these days.
Well, yeah - but only if there’s a payoff at the end of it.
An amiga for home automation though? Really… keep it running AmigaOS so it can do the things the amiga is good at. Having those custom chips sitting there without even a display or speakers to drive would be sad.
edit:
that said, i kinda know about the MMU issue because i wanted to run Linux on an amiga way back in the 90s… and looked it up back then
