installing gentoo to Amiga 500

dilandau · Guru Joined: 24 May 2003 Posts: 485 Location: germany

this is serious. it has a 50 mb ide harddisk that can be exchanged to a larger one if requried. it must be possible to get a little linux environment functioning on it. even xorg or such must be possible. what whit gentoo? can i manage to compile everything on my pc and download it then to the old home computer as a ready to be used set of files? it would require a serial null modem link and some networkign over it, then its possibly possible to have only the xserver output on the amiga side... or let some compilation be done by the pc, while ready binaries go to amiga hd. btw, was it possible to see the xserver output on a pulldown screen on amiga side? or would any xserver there run exclusively?
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Daemonax · Apprentice Joined: 30 Apr 2004 Posts: 211

You'll want a bigger harddrive but apart from that it should be possible, you may also be interested in tinyX

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hensan · l33t Joined: 26 Jun 2003 Posts: 868 Location: Sweden

My view is that this is pretty much impossible with a standard Amiga 500, I mean, come on, 512k memory, no FPU, no MMU, 7.14MHz 16-bit processor. Now if you can get hold of a Viper 530 accelerator board or something similar, then maybe.

And even if you decide to give it a go, Gentoo doesn't support the m68k architecture. Debian, on the other hand does, but only on 68020 and up.

Edit: Well, there actually seems to be a m68k profile in Gentoo as well, but I couldn't find a single ebuild keyworded for it, so it's a pretty good guess that it's completely untested.

dilandau · Guru Joined: 24 May 2003 Posts: 485 Location: germany

but .... it's an amiga and as it just got infected with the bsg9 linkvirus, still acitve after 10 years, you possibly can do with it! currently i spend time to teach the a 500 to access a 2db ide via teh ICD adide interface (rare). my a 500 has 2.3 megs ram. it must even be possible to hack a pci ethernet card to the slot on the left or the inside. they have got a similar amount of pins!
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gentoo linux - amd duron stalebred 1600 - elsa gladiac 311 (nvidia) - elitegroup k7s5a (sis, lan) - 256mb ram - wintv pci fm - airstar2 dvb-t pci - ide cdwriter - hp psc 1110

LordBug · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Jan 2003 Posts: 88

Even if you could mangle the pins together, you'd still have to write a driver by hand.

You may want to give thought to building this on an A1200. At least then you'd have a 68020, 2MB RAM, IDE hookup, and PCMCIA slot for an Ethernet card.

Personally, I'd like to see you pull this off with an A500. Might give me a reason to dig mine back out

dilandau · Guru Joined: 24 May 2003 Posts: 485 Location: germany

nics for pcmcia aready exisist. i want to make one for the a500.
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gentoo linux - amd duron stalebred 1600 - elsa gladiac 311 (nvidia) - elitegroup k7s5a (sis, lan) - 256mb ram - wintv pci fm - airstar2 dvb-t pci - ide cdwriter - hp psc 1110

Locarius · Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 3:57 pm Post subject:

You may want to think about donating it to a museum instead

Actually I just wanted to tag along this thread and see if you are successful.

porodzila · Posted: Thu Dec 16, 2004 6:15 pm Post subject:

you may get more help in alternative architectures forum at the very bottom
( when you get to specific installation issues )
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darkn0th · Posted: Fri Feb 04, 2005 3:33 am Post subject:

Dilandau. you're going to get nowhere with a A500, even with at least a 68030+MMU+68882 FPU or a 68040. the problem is there's no support within the kernel for the graphics chip and the whole architecture is 16 bit. It's a complete waste of time with anything less than a heavily boosted A1200 (with the above processors), A3000 or A4000. Minimum spec is 68030(not EC models, they don't have an MMU and you can't do linux or *BSD without one), 8 Megabytes of RAM, and about 100Megabytes of HD. Check the NetBSD requirements, they're very similar to Linux ones. You can pick up cheap amigas off ebay anyway, and you can use amigaOS 3.1, 3,5 etc on them unlike an A500.

You can get X running with A1200/A3000/A4000 but it's going to be awfully slow in anything above 4 colors (maybe 16 but I doubt it) unless you have a gfx expander board (and amiga A1200 users, any expansion that uses the clockport is totally unsupported. Use your Zorro III and pcmcia ports, and remember pcmcia is 16bit so not quite as fast as you'd hope) based on a PC 3D chip like S3 ViRGE or Permedia2 ( PhaseV Cybergrafx, Picasso II or IV...) for example. Remember, theses are 1992 machines. How many 1992 PCs can run current software properly? Even SGI stuff can't that well and that was state of the art back then.

If you want something really loony for your A3000/A4000, try hunting down the AMIX OS (Commodore's original port of System V / R4 to the Amiga platform, originally for the Amiga 3000UX ) and install it. It comes with an X server and everything, but don't expect any gnu stuff to run and the included drivers will only work with Commodore gear ( which means Zorro2 dead slow 10BaseT or even coaxial Ethernet cards). At least you can use it as an X terminal (should be X11R5 IIRC).

darkn0th · Posted: Fri Feb 04, 2005 4:01 am Post subject:

Taking a look over at Aminet I found hidden away in the gfx/x11 directory a X11 server for the AmigaOS ( v3.0+ minimum and 68020+ cpu). That may be the ultimate answer once you work out getting the network card to work ( Xami needs TCP/IP even for local operations) .

Chewi · Posted: Mon Jul 11, 2005 6:55 pm Post subject:

I booted into 2.6.12 on my Amiga 1200 the other day. I have a DKB Cobra with added FPU, which gives me 68030@33Mhz + 68882 + 128MB RAM. That's more RAM than most of those old expansion cards allow, I'm quite that proud of that bit. :wink:

It's 128MB on a single 72-pin SIMM as well, those are quite rare! Unfortunately I didn't manage to boot past the kernel because there was some problem with initrd (I bet amiboot is too old for 2.6.12) and I didn't have an initrd that would work on m68k anyway. I had the Tux boot logo though! That was the best part. :lol:

Progress shall be made soon, you'll see.

What also amazes me is what you can do with the native OS as well. I managed to compile ssh in it! It took several hours so I usually use the UAE emulator for compiling instead. For some reason, it crashes every time I hit Ctrl+C but I'll have another play with it soon.

atrus123 · Posted: Mon Jul 11, 2005 7:05 pm Post subject:

Kudos if you can get it to work :-)

And if so, you should post a how-to.. I'd love to dust the old amiga 500 off for an experiment like this.

J.

Chewi · Posted: Mon Jul 11, 2005 7:05 pm Post subject:

I should probably add that I do think this is impossible with an Amiga 500 unless there's some extremely strange hardware in existence, though even if there is, it's probably rarer than hen's teeth. As well as m68k, there's a Linux arch called m68knommu but this is not for Amigas. Even if it was possible to run it without an MMU, you'd still need an FPU. There's an option for FPU emulation in the kernel but apparently it doesn't do very much yet and I doubt it ever will. Trying it on an Amiga 600 would be cool though. That's possible.

Edit: Just had a look here and actually there were some accelerators for the 500 that could give it better processors, an MMU, an FPU and more RAM so I guess it is possible but you'll still have to get your hands on one. You're gonna need $$$ for starters!

Maedhros · Posted: Mon Jul 11, 2005 8:17 pm Post subject:

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Gentoo on Alternative Architectures.
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Chewi · Posted: Mon Jul 11, 2005 9:21 pm Post subject:

You know, if you REALLY want to try something impossible, get Linux running on the CDTV! I've got one knocking around. Still gets used once in a while!

By the way, if anyone in the UK needs an 68882 FPU, I've got one spare. Could sell it cheap. They don't come up on eBay all that often.

Chewi · Posted: Thu Aug 11, 2005 7:05 pm Post subject:

I was reading about Linux for iPod and a question in the FAQ made me think. Wouldn't it be possible to run µClinux on an A500!? µClinux does not require an MMU. So I had a look around and apparently there was a project that had it running on an A500 and there was even a project to merge this work back into the main linux-m68k tree, thus allowing Linux itself to be run on an A500. It's hard to tell whether the project is still active since the developer's home page seems to be down. This page is available though...

http://linux-m68k-cvs.ubb.ca/~geert/uClinux-amiga-2.6.x-merging/

JohnY · Guru Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 305

I have an Amiga 3000 with 18mb and a few scsi disks (no nic though). Also an A1000 with 1mb and an A500. Its a temptation to try and get some un*x on it .....

JohnY

Chewi · Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 1:43 pm Post subject:

After some perserverance, I actually got Gentoo more or less running in the end. I get to the bash shell and can do a few things anyway. Portage doesn't work right yet. I need to recompile some things on the Amiga itself. Problem is my network card only has a very experimental driver in m68k-linux and inserting the card makes it crash, despite help from the author. Oh well. The hardware clock is broken too (in AmigaOS as well) and that causes havoc with the startup scripts.

Redhatter · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2005 3:25 am Post subject:

I should point out... even if you do get Linux going on such an ancient beast... I question its usability and maintainability.

You won't be able to run modern apps. glibc for instance needs at least 64MB RAM to build (at least this is the case on MIPS; and it doesn't matter how much swap you have). Today's software needs much more RAM than the software of yesteryear.

Kernels are at least 2x bigger than what was around in 1992. I don't think a modern m68k kernel will even fit in 2MB. Most of the kernels I've seen, are in the neighbourhood of 1.5 ~ 4MB -- glibc will probably eat the remaining 500kB, and there's nothing left for even a shell.
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I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere...

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Chewi · Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2005 2:15 pm Post subject:

You don't have to build on the native machine and besides, my Amiga has 128MB RAM.

This is just for fun anyway, I wouldn't use it for anything serious.

Redhatter · Posted: Sat Dec 17, 2005 2:30 pm Post subject:

Ohh, indeed... and actually, 128MB should be sufficient. I was just pointing this fact out, for the others who are playing along with <16MB.

However, the CPU is of concirn... slowest box I currently run Gentoo on, is my SGI Indy (R4600SC CPU @ 133MHz). I have considered putting it on my 386 for kicks. ;-)

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Stuart Longland (a.k.a Redhatter, VK4MSL)
I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere...

Gentoo/MIPS Cobalt developer, Mozilla herd member.

Chewi · Posted: Sat Dec 17, 2005 3:17 pm Post subject:

For the curious A500 owners (mine is a long way away), the homepage for A500/µClinux is back online!

http://members.chello.be/cr26864/Download/index.html#uclinux

There's actually everything there necessary for booting so you could try it out quite easily. Just grab the kernel, amiboot and the ramdisk image, copy them over to your A500, fire up an AmigaDOS shell, run amiboot and off you go! Copying might be tricky for some of you. CrossDos with a low density floppy maybe? CrossDos didn't come as standard until Workbench 2.04 though.

davidogg · n00b Joined: 07 Sep 2003 Posts: 9

Redhatter · Posted: Sat Aug 05, 2006 7:38 am Post subject:

Dominique_71 · Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2022 9:34 pm Post subject:

My second computer was an Amiga 2000. With a newspaper, I get a CD with a linux distribution compiled for the Amiga. The installation was very easy but the Amiga OS was just so much better at that time than I was reinstalling the Amiga OS 1 hour later. I don't even remember the name of that linux/amiga distribution.