Amiga Linux (1993) | Hacker News Reader

Amiga Linux (1993)

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37 pointsmarcodiego22 comments

I did see Debian on YT being booted up on an Amiga. It was, to say the least, a painful-looking experience. It seems sacrilege in a way. If you're going to use an Amiga you might as well use AmigaOS.

Amazingly, Aminet is still up-and-running with frequent uploads.

https://www.aminet.net/

I contributed a package to that once.

I also made an animation on the Amiga, "Sadistic Circus". A circus dog jumps through a hoop a few times, then gets set on fire. What a sick, sick little puppy I am. I submitted it to a PD disk collection one time.

The dog was an image I got off of a magazine disk, which I mucked around with to create my animation.

Pretty rubbish really, but whatever. Happy days.

Ah, nostalgia ain't what it used to be -- source contested

I'm noticing a decent spike in Amiga content on Hacker News. I hope this trend continues!

This link quite capture the internet 1993 vs 2023

It really did.

1993: Respectable, academic in nature, genuinely helpful.

2023: Random garbage, musings about the prices of cryptocurrency, more garbage.

We never recovered from Eternal September.

The internet, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age... before the dark times, before the aol.

There was garbage on the internet in the 90's. Lots. I was there, and I occasionally made the pile bigger. But I think 2025 garbage is of a different nature (and magnitude). 90's garbage was low effort and low quality. Think Geocities and pointless Usenet arguments. 2025 garbage is malicious, exploitative, industrial brain rot. And it will only get worse.

(Never did run Linux on my A4000/40/Retina, got a PC for that)

I remember the early 90s when there wasn't DNS working at our university for everything and we exchanged IP addresses of FTP servers like the one from the thread:

     ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de 137.226.112.172 /pub/Linux

ah the memories (studying engineering in Aachen two decades ago), that was the B subnet my dorm was on..

Studied in Ulm three decades ago.

Linux was big back then.

Nowadays, you'd have a better experience on Netbsd, which still has developers who care about its Amiga support.

PCMCIA network cards work (whereas Linux got rid of PCMCIA entirely) and so does X11 (currently dead on Linux).

Running Netbsd current on my A1200 with 030@50, 128MB RAM.

Is that kind of setup still usable for some kind of desktop computing or only for command line stuff ?

128MB RAM sounds huge for the early 90s - win 3.1 and word / excel of the time could fly with much less. Is the lack of hardware floating point support an issue to run modern apps ?

The speed difference with current systems is mind boggling. The original A1200 CPU is 2,000 to 5,000 times slower than a random N100 setup. one second wait nowadays means one hour delay on the A1200. This shows how much software bloat accumulated.

Not gonna be running chrome or firefox there, that's for sure.

But there are otherwise thousands of X11 applications to run.

Yes, the bloat is unfathomable. Relative to how fast and clean AmigaOS and emuTOS are, on the same hardware.

X11 isn't even remotely dead on Linux. It's being used all over the place.

Certainly not on Amiga hardware.

Loads of people use it on x86.

If you re-read above, you might figure out this is about X11 on Linux on the m68k Amiga platform, specifically.

Which is broken, and has been for years now.

Whereas it works on Netbsd, thanks to patches written by Netbsd developers.

I am hopeful they will eventually be upstreamed to XLibre.

I have memories of running BSD on my Amiga 1200. The 680ec30 had no MMU, so the kernel had to relocate all executables before running. Nothing more than a prompt, but what an achievement!

I ran a Linux distro on my Amiga 1200 in 1997 or something like that. It was really slow, but it worked. It took me something like 48hours to compile the Enlightenment desktop manager

The irony is that GCC improved so much since then that now the 48h may be reduced to 30h on the exact same hardware.

I used to run Debian Hamm on a 040. Worked a treat.

I remember running Linux on it A4000 shortly after that. What a pain, but also what a reward that was !

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