Amiga.org member Coder shares his experiences with the receipt and installation of his AmigaOne.
After a long period of waiting my A1 SE finally arrived at Thursday January 9th. I did not order it directly at Eyetech but at my Amiga dealer Computer City in Rotterdam. I ordered it assembled, so it came in a tower case with memory, gfx card (ATI Radeon 7000), hard drive (Maxtor 40GB), floppy drive and cdrom. Also I ordered a 17-inch Novita monitor.
After unpacking the present I saw that everything was there. I turned it on and there was PPCBoot. With the A1 came an installer cd for Linux and another cd containing Suse Linux 7.3. And also a nice manual to set it all up.
After setting some environments in PPCBoot it was time to boot the installer cd. And there it all stopped. When I typed the command to boot the cd I got the error “Bad magic number”.
Since I am on the mailing list for the A1 for many months I knew it could be the installer cd. I re-burn should fix it. Lucky enough I had gotten that iso file from the Hyperion site some weeks ago. After burning a new cd it was time for a new try. still not working. I still had the same error. So I tried it with another cdrom drive but still it did not work.
Since it was already late I gave up and went to bed. The next day in the evening after my work I had another go at it. I really thought it must be the memory after some time.
The setting FSB was set to 133 so I changed that to 100. I typed the command to boot and there it was. It worked! The feeling I had was really great. I did not went on with the installation of Linux because like the day before it was already late. So Saturday I tried to install Linux. I typed the command to boot the cd. “Bad magic number” it said.
Arghhhhhhhhhhhhh.
How was that possible? After some thinking I saw that instead of the day before were I used my own burned installer cd I used the installer cd from Eyetech this time. So that installer cd from Eyetech was also a bad one. So I used that re-burned one again to install Linux.
The manual explaining the installation is very good. If you follow it you should have no problem getting it running. Normally I do not follow a manual and just go my own way but this time I did follow it just to make sure it would go perfect.
After the installation Linux booted fine and I could login and work at the prompt. Next was the X window system. That is also described in the manual. But when starting Sax2 the screen would go black and the monitor would go in powersafe. I knew it had to do with the driver for my graphics card. After getting a working one I could setup the X window system and as desktop environment KDE. I did have some problems in KDE, which I fixed by updating KDE. After this I tried UAE. I still have some problems with getting UAE to run. I do get some weird problems with that. I will have a look at his at another time.
I also wanted to give Debian a try on my A1. Ross Vumbaca made a bootable cd to install Debian. The installation is not so hard and Debian works really fine. I have not installed the X Window system and a desktop environment yet. I will do that in the coming days. So far I think Debian is the better one of the both (Suse and Debian) distro’s I tried. I soon hope to be able to use Yellow Dog on my A1. That’s the distro I prefer.
The end conclusion. Since OS4 is not ready yet you are stuck with Linux for the moment. If you are a Linux fan and do not mind to dig deep into it I certainly would buy the A1. But I would advice to check out very good which hardware works with Linux at his moment. It’s not a very long review I wrote but I at least this gives a good impression about my A1 adventure. If you have questions mail me at a1questions@flyingpaper.com and I will be glad to answer them. I will have some pictures on my website soon.
Coder
