Linux?

[Albannach]

Hi Everyone,

I was wondering what sort of functionality one could get out of an Amiga running Linux.  Take a 4000D running on PPC 604e (read that as Max Classic PPC hardware), mediator equipped with voodoo3, sb128, loaded with RAM and all that good stuff.

1.  What Linux Distros could be installed?
2.  Once installed what sort of linux software could be run, do you even get a GUI?
3.  How would it compare in performance to a similar spec PC running linux (is a 200Mhz Pentium in the same ballpark?)

My motivation for asking is because I want something to do with my miggy until the Amiga "supporting" pseudo-companies pull their fingers out.  Also I was wondering to what extent I would be able to tap into the pool of Linux software available i.e. Open Office and Firefox.

Thanks guys.

[MrZammler]

Albannach wrote:

1.  What Linux Distros could be installed?

Check out Linux Apus.

2.  Once installed what sort of linux software could be run, do you even get a GUI?

Of course. KDE/Gnome, everything. However, you should first check if linux supports the mediator (I'm not sure if it does).

3.  How would it compare in performance to a similar spec PC running linux (is a 200Mhz Pentium in the same ballpark?)

Should be quite similar. The more ram you let it have, the better.

My motivation for asking is because I want something to do with my miggy until the Amiga "supporting" pseudo-companies pull their fingers out.  Also I was wondering to what extent I would be able to tap into the pool of Linux software available i.e. Open Office and Firefox.

Open Office could be a problem. IIRC it wont compile without large amounts of ram (>1G) and it does take a while to do so, even in recent PC's. Firefox should be less of a problem.

[Failure]

As MrZammler stated above, although the kernel bits are getting a little old it works fine.  I ran Debian on my A4000T CSPPC for a while and found the speed to be acceptable.  The only somewhat tricky part is getting the damn thing to boot in the first place.  Once you're past that hurdle it's pretty much gravy (if you've used Linux, particularly Debian, for a while).  It's been a while but I don't think Mediator is supported, it can use native Amiga chipset though.

You should find this page on the Debian project website to be helpful.  It also contains a link to the Linux-APUS website.  You might also find packages.debian.org useful if you want to see if a particular software package is available precompiled for PPC.

*edit Above I stated the kernel bits were old.  It looks like there was work being done on 2.6 somewhat recently judging from CVS at the Linux-APUS project.

[humppa]

Of course. KDE/Gnome, everything. However, you should first check if linux supports the mediator (I'm not sure if it does).

Unfortunately, there is currently not a single distribution that supports the Mediator.

If I remember correctly, Adam Kowalzcyk (ACK, the PV-guy) was working on it, but dropped it for unknown reasons.

Does anybody know what happened to that project (no, I am not referring to the Powervixxen)?

[Piru]

@MrZammler

Open Office could be a problem. IIRC it wont compile without large amounts of ram (>1G) and it does take a while to do so, even in recent PC's. Firefox should be less of a problem.

Excuse my stupidity, but why would you need to compile anything?

[EDIT]Ok, checked it out, and indeed there is no openoffice for m68k, it seems. However, the problem is not amount of memory (linux has swap after all).

Also, found this journal entry
[/EDIT]

[hppacito]

The problem with openoffice is two or three-fold:

You need quite a bit of new libraries.
It is not native compiled, it uses some jvm (slow).
Uses lots of memory.

Even the 1.x versions eat loads of memory, and run somehow "slow" for a recent machine (Athlon 2 GHz).

I'd strongly recommend something lighter, thought for a slower machine (Like Ami Pro form the win 3.1 days), sadly no such thing exists for linux, unless Abiword is really fast (I don't know)...

OTH, wy using current apps in such a machine ?, sadly even linux is bloated nowadays (I use it as my primary, sec, and ter systems, at work and at home since 2000 or so).

I'd stick with some 2.4 kernel, X 3.x (look if the Voodoo is supported in X 4.x), some new glibc, and so on, but don't expect it to run as fast as OS 3.9 runs. X is nice but slow compared to other graphical systems, due to its "networked" nature, if you don't care about eye-candy, there are plenty off fast window managers, some derived from openStep, that are quite fast to load, simple and very functional.