Does Linux have an Amiga feel?

[AmigaBruno]

No, Linux doesn't have an Amiga feel, I think it's too much like Windoze.

AFAIK, I first heard of Linux while reading Amiga Format magazine. After Amiga Format closed down, its Editor Nick Veitch became Editor of Linux Format.

I was persuaded to buy a PC to get Internet access at home, because of the prices of upgrades to my Amiga A1200 system and various stories about the Amiga dying, not much support, as well as someone saying "You don't know about computers, only the Amiga".

Before buying a PC I decided to install Linux on it as a dual boot system. The results with various distros weren't much like the Amiga. They looked and felt too much like Windoze. I installed amiwm, but it seemed to be just a joke hack showing a blank Workbench screen with a bar you could use to pull the screen down. It didn't do anything else!

The directory and file hierarchy of Linux is quite like the Amiga, as well as various libraries and concepts such as Exec, pipes, and some shells which are available. I think that Linux was originally based on Minix for the Amiga and Atari ST.

Nowadays, there's a system called Aeros, which is AROS hosted on Linux. This seems to be Linux with an Amiga feel, which can run Amiga, AROS, and Linux software, so it seems to be just what I wanted years ago. I'm looking forward to installing it, but I haven't managed this so far.

[AmigaBruno]

But there was UNIX for the Amiga, that was sold with some A3000s, but requires an MMU so wouldn't have worked on the original 68k machines.

Plus X Windows is terrible even today.

This is an amazing thread!

I recently bought an A1200 from someone who had studied and used UNIX on an A3000. He told me that UNIX wouldn't run on an A4000. Is this correct? If so, then why? Did the A3000 come with an MMU, but the A4000 didn't? I later exchanged a few SMS messages with him, but he just said he'd programmed in ARexx, then I couldn't get any more out of him.

Of course, Amicygnix as used on AmigaOS 4.1 is a type of X Windows.

[AmigaBruno]

Gentlemen!!

Amiga OS and Linux are both off shoots of Unix, no they aren't exactly the same, but underneath in the hardware they use the same principles, they give instructions to the hardware to do certain stuff while the processor only comes into use when the hardware is over run with instructions. You have to remember back in the old days Unix was the only OS that was multi tasking and it did that by instructing the hardware to handle functions like video and sound. Other systems that said that they were multi tasking actually were time sharing where the cpu gave out the instructions or commands and time shared between programs. This is what made windows so slow at first compared to the smoothness of the Amiga.
Don't know if I really explained that right, I am tired from working on a roof all day putting up a TV antenna, yep out with the new (cable) and in with the old ( Airwave) I came down to the point where I got sick and tired of paying for commercials and infomercials when I receive better movies and shows on antenna TV.

That sounds interesting! AmigaOS and Linux are both offshoots of UNIX. That's what I thought.

As for your TV viewing, I wonder what channels you can get with your new old setup? How about a listing? I recently found this video about accessing TV on demand services not usually accessible where you live using a Smart TV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho5HQKr54Tg . This is about how to access BBC iPlayer and ITV Player in Germany, but the principle should be the same anywhere. The video does say the Smart TVs sold in North America may have hardware issues, but I have heard that at least one US satellite TV package uses the European broadcast standard DVB instead of digital NTSC. I also found a USB dongle on eBay called "TV Anywhere", which is described mainly as giving access to UK TV streaming services around the World, but if you look closely near the bottom it says it can also access TV from other countries http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/CATCH-UP-TV-AND-MANY-MORE-FROM-ANYWHERE-IN-THE-WORLD-ITV-PLAYER-BBC-iPLAYER-/390617014404?pt=UK_Home_Garden_CD_DVDStorage_SM&hash=item5af296a084 . This is mainstream TV, not thousands of channels that not many people want to watch.

[AmigaBruno]

This is an amazing thread! I'm going to have to do some research into the other operating systems mentioned here, such as UNIX, DEC, and VAX. What hardware would I need to run any of them, though?

[AmigaBruno]

Some of them can be emulated.
 
A lot of the hardware either doesn't exist anymore, or are in museums.
 
There are plenty of photo's online though.
 
http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/PDP-6

I think it's obvious that UNIX is my best bet. This could be AMIX, Free BSD, or Open BSD. I've got an A1200 which I'll fit an IDE CF adaptor and 4Gb CF card to in a few days time. Would I need a RAM upgrade as well? I think I could run Free BSD or Open BSD on my Toshiba Satellite C660D laptop, with an AMD E350 CPU, 2Gb RAM, and 320Gb hard drive which at this moment is divided equally between Ubuntu Linux 13.04 and Windows 7. This is because the installer didn't tell me which partition was which! I suppose I could just resize the Windows partition.

I hope someone on here can tell me the advantages of UNIX compared with Linux. I recently helped to tidy up someone's flat, which was too full of stuff, such as furniture, but also housed a huge collection of UNIX, Linux, Mac, and Windows books which has been kept, not thrown out. I even found two Amiga books there. Unfortunately, someone told me the tenant who owns this collection only accumulated it because "he thought it was cool". I can't help wondering if he was involved with UNIX in the early days. He had had a breakdown or a stroke and I hardly got a word out of him when I last saw him in December, which was before I found out about this collection. The only computer there was a PC with specs that looked several years old and a few old Linux distros installed. These distros were roughly the version numbers mentioned in the book titles, but I think the content of these books would still work in current distros. I couldn't boot it up. Sometimes the monitor said it couldn't display the screen mode.

[AmigaBruno]

Except for the part where it isn't, at all.


Unix comes in a wide variety of vendor-specific flavors - you can of course get free clones (FreeBSD or Linux) that run on any PC, or you could dig up an SGI, Sun, or whatever Unix workstation from the '90s for fairly cheap. DEC wasn't an OS, it was a company; they made multiple lines of computers, and operating systems for them. VMS ran on their VAX hardware; you can sometimes nab a VAXStation for cheap if you're lucky, (or, as psxphill notes, you can run an emulator like SIMH,) and HP (who currently owns VMS) runs the OpenVMS Hobbyist Program, from which you can get a license to install it on whatever you get. It's interesting stuff.

Unfortunately, I have no real idea how old any of the Sun or Silicon Graphics workstation models are, I don't know how long it would take me to find out, or how they compare to a modern equivalent. Earlier tonight, I saw someone using a Sun computer in a news story about the NSA surveillance scandal, so this made me realise that people are still using them and possibly for very demanding purposes. Here's one on eBay, but I don't know how old it is, what kind of keyboard or mouse or anything else I'd need to go with it. Perhaps you can tell me. I know it's no good comparing the specs to a PC, because the CPU is probably more powerful than an Intel x86 CPU of the same speed and any software probably takes up only about 25% of the RAM it would take under Windoze. This is the situation with the classic Amiga.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Sun-SPARCclassic-X-UNIX-Workstation-/290939712355?pt=UK_Computing_Other_Computing_Networking&hash=item43bd5bb363

As for Silicon Graphics workstations, I know they were designed mainly for doing graphics, and then sort of replaced the Amiga in this field for CGI effects. I don't know if they can do anything else apart from produce graphics, though. They may have been "fixed" to do graphics only, like with "dedicated" word processors.

[AmigaBruno]

I can tell you that my Sun Ultra II (2x166MHz, 128MB RAM) is pretty responsive and at a guess I'd say it's faster than a comparable x86 system (disclaimer: I've never used a dual Pentium board, I'm just extrapolating from my experience with comarably-clocked single-processor systems.) The one you linked I'd expect to probably be a little zippier than my VAX, but not especially impressive.

Never used SGI anything myself, but they weren't fixed-function systems; they were full IRIX Unixoid workstations, and they still have a following today. If you really want to get into oldschool Unix workstations, I'd talk to the guys over at the Nekochan forums; the site's specifically geared towards SGI, but the forums cover plenty of other high-end computing solutions of yesteryear.

So, based on what you say above, this one http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Sun-Ultra-Enterprise-2-Workstation-UltraSPARC-II-296MHz-128MB-RAM-/230994413805?pt=UK_Computing_DesktopPCs&hash=item35c85708ed also looks "pretty responsive", but I still don't know how old it is or what I may need to go with it. I had a quick look at that forum, but I don't know how long it will take to find out what I need to know. Of course, I have got lots of other expenses. My social life is in ruins at the moment, so it would be a good idea for people on here to tell me why I don't really need to buy a Sun or Silicon graphics workstation.

[AmigaBruno]

You want to hear why you shouldn't buy one? Because Unix is, more or less, Unix (except for AIX which I gather is like Unix as implemented by space aliens from mind-probes of Unix-hacker abductees, but I've never used it.) Solaris is about like Linux or FreeBSD when you get right down to it (though CDE is the only desktop environment/application suite I've encountered on Unixoids that I thought had been at all designed with a serious or professional eye towards a good user experience - but then, it's also a very very 1994-vintage user experience.)

If you do want to pursue this, though (and that Ultra II is a hell of a deal if it works, and not much of a risk if it doesn't,) you will need, at a minimum, a serial null-modem cable so you can run a terminal emulator for console access on your PC or Amiga or whatever. More ideal would be a Sun keyboard, mouse, and a 3W13-to-VGA adapter plus a 1280x1024 display (Sun's output seems to be pretty compatible with modern displays - I had to do some hunting to get one that supports sync-on-green for my VAX, though!) Those don't tend to be terribly expensive, but of course that all depends on just how tight your finances are. You could certainly use it serial-only until you can afford them. You may also need replacement install media if someone removed the OS; I don't know anything about that, you'd have to talk to the Nekochan guys.

Addendum: you'd probably need replacement install media period if the seller doesn't have the root password for the current install.

What I really need is a detailed explanation of why anyone would want to use a Sun workstation instead of some other system. I also need to know all the differences between Linux and UNIX. There's also the Silicon Graphics workstations which don't just do graphics, but some graphics I've found are nice raytaced 3D graphics which remind me of Amiga raytracing. I never got around to or never managed to do any raytracing on the Amiga, even with free software on a cover disk. I plan to try again soon. Unfortunately, in the Nekochan forum they mention using some nasty software which put me off doing graphics when I switched to Windoze and Linux. By this I mean Photoshop and GIMP with their nasty, business like, totally user unfriendly interfaces and ways of doing things. Paint Shop Pro and Microsoft Paint are also crap! If I had to use those on a Silicon Graphics workstation, then there wouldn't be any point. Apart from this, I'm totally against using software such as Photoshop which costs more than the price of a new computer. I don't know what the software Maya or Blender is like, though.

[AmigaBruno]

There is no real "why" to using an oldschool Unix workstation other than that you find the idea cool. As for software, I really have no idea; you'd have to ask on Nekochan. (But as for Photoshop's price tag, I imagine anything you'd be running on an old SGI would be, erm, "acquired secondhand.")

I only understand that I used to hear about these expensive Sun and Silicon graphics workstations and I wondered why anyone used them and what they did with them, but it was too expensive to find out. Now it's not too expensive to find out, but I don't know how old any of the hardware on eBay is because these systems aren't familiar to me. As for being "oldschool" I've recently seen videos of Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations with their nice, custom GUIs and they don't look old school to me. I don't know what the difference is between this and totally up to date Sun or Silicon Graphics workstations. Here's a video I watched yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ3eKYXk9EI

[AmigaBruno]

if you have a spare PC floating around or one that you are willing to partition- you could always try OpenSolaris  http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/downloads/index.html
and avoid having to purchase the hardware in the first place.

N

Great! I'd never heard of OpenSolaris before. I've got a laptop with a 320Gb hard drive and a desktop PC with an 80Gb hard drive, but could fit another hard drive to it. I hope I can install Opensolaris on one of them.

[AmigaBruno]

Rather than buy some old outdated Sun workstation you could try the Solaris fork Open Indiana on any old PC or VM.

http://openindiana.org

Thanks a lot for this! I didn't know that Sun had closed and this has saved me lots of money now. I can also stop looking for Sun workstations on eBay.