The lonely world of Amiga UNIX

[Failure]

Catchy title, no?  :-)

Well I am still plugging away with AMIX.  I have been able to do some things with it now that I had not been able to do before, largely due to the positively ancient gcc compiler bundled with 2.03.  I kept trying compilers until I got...I think it was 2.4.5(?) to compile with AMIX gcc.  Then I worked my way up the chain until I got to 2.7.2.3 and could not get anything further to compile.  It was always a problem with "collect2".

With this I am having much better success compiling things.  I  have for example wget and apache, which I could not compile with AMIX's old gcc.  But frustratingly, other things I would really love to have...like gettext, perl, and lynx, failed at various stages.  Even amiwm -- which is kind of funny...

Basically the software either won't configure at all, or if it does configure, it compiles all the way through and fails to link.  perl for example configures fine, but unlike most of them only compiles part of the way before erroring out.  I think the core problem is that the C headers/libraries are so old.  Pretty much everything has warnings during compilation.  When I tried to use the C++ includes it was humorous, since the screen filled instantly with warnings about "this method is obsolete yadda yadda".  Suffice to say, I have not been able to get *anything* using C++ to compile.  Including "hello world".

I am not sure how much effort I will put into getting stubborn software to compile, given how dead AMIX is.  But I admit that I am still having fun playing with it!

The system has been pretty reliable, but it panics (for the uninitiated, this is like a flashing red box ;-)) occasionally when linking very large binaries (like gcc).  It is up 5 days at the moment, and has been compiling pretty much non-stop as well as running Apache.

[Failure]

@Dalamar

Hey, I do have binaries of gcc 2.7.2.3 packaged up, and for now they can be found right on the 3000UX here:

http://bfe.homelinux.net/software/

I am looking at redoing the files library at amix.failsure.net so that AMIX machines using wget can fetch the files directly.  Before I had wget compiled I was dling the files on a Linux machine, and using old rcp to copy the files over, so this wasn't a problem.

@Matt_H

Learning to swim by drowning?  I had the same experience, installing Debian in 1997 (my "friend" suggested this as my first Linux distro as a joke).  Everything was easy after that.

I have had A2065 in an eBay favorites search for a couple months now, looking to pick up a spare.  In that time I have seen none come up for sale.  Same for A2410.  I think in terms of X I have settled on using it over the network, but I will still jump at an A2410 if it comes around.  Someone posted on the forums asking for help on one of those cards, and it was I could do to keep from posting "SELL THAT TO MEH!"

@corsavert
Is that a 50MHz 030?  I would be curious if it will boot AMIX at all.  If you are bored, please try the boot floppies :-)  I imagine it might boot but with no HD support.

and finally @DonnyEMU

Unfortunately AMIX uses X11R4.  It does not appear to support MIT shared memory (Xshm is the symbol, I think) and probably many other things.  So far I have not been able to get other window managers to compile.  Someone did a port of X11R5 some time ago but I cannot find it now :-/

[Failure]

@Xand

I believe someone has successfully installed AMIX on a 3.1 ROM'd system.  I personally stuck the old AMIX 1.1 install I had into a 3.1 machine and it booted just fine.

BTW, are you saying you have the AMIX install media on tape?  What release do you have?

Also, the install media on my site will not work for using the tape installation method.  You will want to check the mmhart site for boot floppies...the 2.03 floppies should(!) install 2.1 fine.

[Failure]

I found the site with X11R5 and some other stuff:

ftp://ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de/pub/amiga/amix/

Yay :-)  I am going to try this once I get my installation back up and running.

[Failure]

If that is actually 2.1 release you have on tape, I believe I have the patch disk necessary to bring it up to 2.1c.  That should make it work with all the patches Matt_H has from the Gateway CDs.

Even if it's not 2.1, you at least have the opportunity to install with a functioning package management system -- something my hack does not allow for.

[Failure]

Hmm, are you using the S5 filesystem?  UFS doesn't seem to have a small limit like that, but I remember S5 under 1.1 did.

*edit* Long filename example removed to not screw up forum layout.

I can work with filenames in excess of 160 chrs in length.

No problems here :-)

[Failure]

2.1, that is very cool :-)  Hopefully your tape is still installable.  Due to the way the installer works, you probably won't find out until you are well into the process, when cpio will complain at you and probably bomb the script (or move on to the next archive, don't know for sure).

You might have the install docs, but if not the tape drive needs to be set to ID 4.

Good luck!

[Failure]

bOiNgHeAd wrote:
What's all about this UNIX crap?
Do you have much software/games for this
platform then? I think it's really useless!
AmigaOS rulez!

Hmm.  Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones ;-)  Think about what you are saying here.  I think the main interest in AMIX is preserving it so it doesn't go the way of 286 XENIX for example -- something that exists only as a memory.  In the Amiga world, AMIX is really quite unique and it would be a shame for it to be unusable forever.

And, yes, there is a large amount of high quality, free software available for UNIX.  The problem with AMIX is getting it to compile properly with the old libraries and software.

@Matt_H

It has been a little while since I looked at the install script, but in the default installation via tape you get choices.  The first file on the tape is a header listing all the packages and their order, since I commented all the package stuff out to get my method to work I didn't pay much attention to it but I imagine it just looks for the cpio EOF marker to distinguish them.  If you look in the / directory you will see two files that "don't belong" in a standard UNIX FHS, that's what was in the "header".  I went ahead and left them there.

Since the HD hack more or less just dumps the contents of the tape to disk, which is possible due to the fairly primitive concept of package management present in sysv4, whatever package databases are initialized...aren't.  It should be possible to change the script to use the package management, but it would be marginal benefit, since AMIX packages do not exist in the wild and the only thing you'd get was the opportunity to install stuff you didn't want initially, later.  I may still try it at some point just to see it myself.  My picky side wanted package management, but the impatient side just wanted AMIX installed!

@Dal

Unless the installer changed radically between 2.03 and 2.1, all that would be needed would be to create a cpio archive of the stuff on the 2.1 tape, and the existing script could handle it.  It would still be an HD dump though, so no package management.  It would be interesting to get something that could be dd'd to tape to do the install the proper way though.