4 ms·

Amiga Unix, Again

138 points by doener 13d ago

teddyh 13d ago
I mean, Debian 3.1 (sarge) supported Amiga hardware. The support was dropped in 2007 (the next release), because not enough people were maintaining it. I would assume that it would be easier to re-start that effort, unless compatibility with actual Amix was important for some reason?
- rjsw 13d ago
  NetBSD still runs on Amiga.
  - mrweasel 13d ago
    Other than for the fun of it and the possible identification of obscure bugs, is running NetBSD on an Amiga actually useful? I love that they still support it, but once you've installed it, what would you do with NetBSD on an Amiga.
    - actionfromafar 13d ago
      Not that anybody needs to in this day and age with heaps of old laptops and raspberry pis and whatnot, but I knew someone with an Amiga running BSD for their mail server. A simple web server with static pages, or anything which is low volume would work just fine.
    - classichasclass 13d ago
      Probably the same things you do with NetBSD on a Macintosh IIci. In my case, it handles internal print services, AppleShare, DHCP and DNS.
nullc 13d ago
I get pet-cemetery vibes from these AI powered resurrections. As in ... "the AI brought it back to life, but it came back /wrong/".
- CursedSilicon 13d ago
  I mean, that Peri Fractic clown "owns Commodore" now and tried to sell people a phone that was rendered entirely using AI. Maybe Amiga people are ready to drink from that chalice too?
  - qmr 13d ago
    Why do you feel he is a clown?
    - CursedSilicon 13d ago
      His behaviour, mostly
      - self_awareness 13d ago
        He's primarily an entertainer, doesn't mean he's a clown. I think there are worse clowns in corpos without careers on YouTube.
    - snvzz 13d ago
      Because he's seeing success and fame, while the parent (most frustratingly) isn't. If it didn't matter to them, they wouldn't have commented what they did.
      - CursedSilicon 13d ago
        Success and fame in...selling an AI slop phone? If that's something to be jealous of, I guess?
  - samplatt 13d ago
    Wait, what? I'm on the waitlist for that phone as I thought it was a great idea in general, regardless of the renders. Have I been had? I've never (ever) bought a phone because of what it looks like in marketing material.
breput 13d ago
I ran NetBSD 0.8 on my Amiga 500 (with a 68030 w/MMU, 68881, and SCSI hard drive sidecar), which co-existed in the same timeframe as Commodore's release. Other than just than "we can" and historic interest, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4 over 4.4BSD, especially since the latest NetBSD 11 release still fully supports Amiga[0] [0] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/
- cryptonector 13d ago
  > Other than just than "we can" and historic interest, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4 over 4.4BSD Nostalgia is my guess. SVR4 on Amiga was the first SVR4 commercial release IIRC. Solaris 2.x came later, but not much later. At Sun we had a saying for referring to garbage from the SVR4 that we had to fix, rewrite, or terminate with prejudice over time (think STREAMS, XTI, and all that, but also much of userland): 'it came from New Jersey'. So, yeah, I wouldn't want to run SVR4 for any reason other than nostalgia, and honestly not even nostalgia. For me nostalgia is for OpenSolaris and such.
- jimjimjim 13d ago
  Your 500 had a 030?
  - code_duck 13d ago
    You could buy accelerator boards for the 500 and 2000.
    - jimjimjim 13d ago
      Ah, good point. I had a 500 and a 1200 but I can't really remember the wider scene.
- vidarh 13d ago
  As an Amiga user, I don't even get the nostalgia for Amiga Unix. I don't have nostalgia for early versions of the various Unix versions I've used. It doesn't hit nearly the same as using AmigaOS on the Amiga did. Partly, I guess, because it's not different enough from what I use now.
jchw 13d ago
My eternal advice to anyone doing heavily LLM assisted projects is to do them a bit less LLM assisted. You should still use LLMs, in my opinion, they're wonderful tools. But I know reading this page that this text is mostly LLM-generated, and that leaves there to be little hope that much else of the project isn't. It's one thing if your code is really truly "co-authored by" Claude. It's another thing if it isn't even really co-authored by you. Evidently the majority of people see no problem with LLM prose, but me and many others think it is some of the most annoying crap possible. Please consider speaking in your own voice. I know this gets repetitive, but it is important.
- tim-projects 13d ago
  I don't think its important. I think these comments are more annoying than ai prose. You are fighting a losing battle and annoying everyone in the process. Adapt.
  - canelonesdeverd 13d ago
    Really sad to reduce ourselves to meat-proxies.
  - UpsideDownRide 13d ago
    If people can't adapt then they will get left behind. There is little value in providing a username for LLM to speak instead of you.
  - wolrah 13d ago
    > You are fighting a losing battle and annoying everyone in the process. These comments are even more annoying. Sides that are winning don't have to constantly tell their opponents that they're losing. I have no idea why you and so many others seem to have attached their ego to the use of a tool that you feel the need to attack people who have complaints about the output it's often used to generate.
  - peder 13d ago
    Hacker News is so annoying about this. It really feels like sour grapes that people are shipping cool projects without one of the Y Combinator-type software engineers blessing the project with their handwritten code.
steve1977 13d ago
This project might run into some trademark issues.
- snvzz 13d ago
  Do you think an AMIX owner is going to surface?
  - steve1977 13d ago
    I primarily mean because of UNIX. And possibly also Amiga.
alescalaios 13d ago
[dead]
OCTAGRAM 13d ago
Being an owner of Apollo V4 ITX UEB, I wondered what about 68080. With 64-bit and AMMX vector extensions. But the website briefly mentions "and on today's accelerator hardware". MiniMig is also not mentioned, but at least PiStorm is. With regards to 68080, the toolchain that can make use of all features of 68080, is based on some old GCC and currently hosted on Linux amd64 which is a shame. And if original Amiga target is desired, this toolchain can do it too, and it is told to be more optimal than other compilers, especially self-hosted ones. GCC first lost ability to run on Amiga, then lost ability to generate m68k code.
jrmg 13d ago
I like that the screen recordings are ‘Real time, with the long waits taken out.’
Haunt1000 13d ago
Would it be possible to just focus on the project rather than on LLMs?

138 points by doener 13d ago

I mean, Debian 3.1 (sarge) supported Amiga hardware. The support was dropped in 2007 (the next release), because not enough people were maintaining it. I would assume that it would be easier to re-start that effort, unless compatibility with actual Amix was important for some reason?

rjsw 13d ago
NetBSD still runs on Amiga.
- mrweasel 13d ago
  Other than for the fun of it and the possible identification of obscure bugs, is running NetBSD on an Amiga actually useful? I love that they still support it, but once you've installed it, what would you do with NetBSD on an Amiga.
  - actionfromafar 13d ago
    Not that anybody needs to in this day and age with heaps of old laptops and raspberry pis and whatnot, but I knew someone with an Amiga running BSD for their mail server. A simple web server with static pages, or anything which is low volume would work just fine.
  - classichasclass 13d ago
    Probably the same things you do with NetBSD on a Macintosh IIci. In my case, it handles internal print services, AppleShare, DHCP and DNS.

nullc 13d ago

I get pet-cemetery vibes from these AI powered resurrections. As in ... "the AI brought it back to life, but it came back /wrong/".

CursedSilicon 13d ago
I mean, that Peri Fractic clown "owns Commodore" now and tried to sell people a phone that was rendered entirely using AI. Maybe Amiga people are ready to drink from that chalice too?
- qmr 13d ago
  Why do you feel he is a clown?
  - CursedSilicon 13d ago
    His behaviour, mostly
    - self_awareness 13d ago
      He's primarily an entertainer, doesn't mean he's a clown. I think there are worse clowns in corpos without careers on YouTube.
  - snvzz 13d ago
    Because he's seeing success and fame, while the parent (most frustratingly) isn't. If it didn't matter to them, they wouldn't have commented what they did.
    - CursedSilicon 13d ago
      Success and fame in...selling an AI slop phone? If that's something to be jealous of, I guess?
- samplatt 13d ago
  Wait, what? I'm on the waitlist for that phone as I thought it was a great idea in general, regardless of the renders. Have I been had? I've never (ever) bought a phone because of what it looks like in marketing material.

breput 13d ago

I ran NetBSD 0.8 on my Amiga 500 (with a 68030 w/MMU, 68881, and SCSI hard drive sidecar), which co-existed in the same timeframe as Commodore's release. Other than just than "we can" and historic interest, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4 over 4.4BSD, especially since the latest NetBSD 11 release still fully supports Amiga[0] [0] https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/

cryptonector 13d ago
> Other than just than "we can" and historic interest, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4 over 4.4BSD Nostalgia is my guess. SVR4 on Amiga was the first SVR4 commercial release IIRC. Solaris 2.x came later, but not much later. At Sun we had a saying for referring to garbage from the SVR4 that we had to fix, rewrite, or terminate with prejudice over time (think STREAMS, XTI, and all that, but also much of userland): 'it came from New Jersey'. So, yeah, I wouldn't want to run SVR4 for any reason other than nostalgia, and honestly not even nostalgia. For me nostalgia is for OpenSolaris and such.
jimjimjim 13d ago
Your 500 had a 030?
- code_duck 13d ago
  You could buy accelerator boards for the 500 and 2000.
  - jimjimjim 13d ago
    Ah, good point. I had a 500 and a 1200 but I can't really remember the wider scene.
vidarh 13d ago
As an Amiga user, I don't even get the nostalgia for Amiga Unix. I don't have nostalgia for early versions of the various Unix versions I've used. It doesn't hit nearly the same as using AmigaOS on the Amiga did. Partly, I guess, because it's not different enough from what I use now.

jchw 13d ago

My eternal advice to anyone doing heavily LLM assisted projects is to do them a bit less LLM assisted. You should still use LLMs, in my opinion, they're wonderful tools. But I know reading this page that this text is mostly LLM-generated, and that leaves there to be little hope that much else of the project isn't. It's one thing if your code is really truly "co-authored by" Claude. It's another thing if it isn't even really co-authored by you. Evidently the majority of people see no problem with LLM prose, but me and many others think it is some of the most annoying crap possible. Please consider speaking in your own voice. I know this gets repetitive, but it is important.

tim-projects 13d ago
I don't think its important. I think these comments are more annoying than ai prose. You are fighting a losing battle and annoying everyone in the process. Adapt.
- canelonesdeverd 13d ago
  Really sad to reduce ourselves to meat-proxies.
- UpsideDownRide 13d ago
  If people can't adapt then they will get left behind. There is little value in providing a username for LLM to speak instead of you.
- wolrah 13d ago
  > You are fighting a losing battle and annoying everyone in the process. These comments are even more annoying. Sides that are winning don't have to constantly tell their opponents that they're losing. I have no idea why you and so many others seem to have attached their ego to the use of a tool that you feel the need to attack people who have complaints about the output it's often used to generate.
- peder 13d ago
  Hacker News is so annoying about this. It really feels like sour grapes that people are shipping cool projects without one of the Y Combinator-type software engineers blessing the project with their handwritten code.

steve1977 13d ago

This project might run into some trademark issues.

snvzz 13d ago
Do you think an AMIX owner is going to surface?
- steve1977 13d ago
  I primarily mean because of UNIX. And possibly also Amiga.

alescalaios 13d ago

[dead]

OCTAGRAM 13d ago

Being an owner of Apollo V4 ITX UEB, I wondered what about 68080. With 64-bit and AMMX vector extensions. But the website briefly mentions "and on today's accelerator hardware". MiniMig is also not mentioned, but at least PiStorm is. With regards to 68080, the toolchain that can make use of all features of 68080, is based on some old GCC and currently hosted on Linux amd64 which is a shame. And if original Amiga target is desired, this toolchain can do it too, and it is told to be more optimal than other compilers, especially self-hosted ones. GCC first lost ability to run on Amiga, then lost ability to generate m68k code.

jrmg 13d ago

I like that the screen recordings are ‘Real time, with the long waits taken out.’

Haunt1000 13d ago

Would it be possible to just focus on the project rather than on LLMs?