The Amiga Experience (cont'd)
by Ross Vumbaca

Having never owned a very powerful classic Amiga and not wanting to sink my money into ancient hardware, I was excited about the AmigaOne, and was one of the first people to order one from my local dealer. During this time, the opportunity arose for some developers to get their boards early, in order to help with the firmware and with porting Linux, so I took the opportunity to get my board early Uh, I mean, "volunteered to help"

The board finally arrived in late October 2002. At the time it arrived, I was sleeping in, and didn't know I was about to receive a visit from my dealer - my brother had reliably forgotten to tell me about a phone call we had received the day before.

The board is a standard ATX board. Having built PCs a few times before, it was pretty easy to place it into a standard PC case, plug in a PCI video card, some RAM, connect a floppy and hard disk, and power it up. Nothing happened though, there was no firmware present!

I used the spare time to check out the hardware. I was impressed at how thin and small the CPU was. After letting the machine run for a minute, I decided to see how cool the CPU ran. The searing pain in my finger eventually subsided. I decided to order a heatsink.

A few days later I received a little chip in the mail. Flipping the chip over, I saw a smiley face had been stuck on to the chip - definite proof that I had received my AmigaOne's firmware.

I popped the chip in and powered it up. After a short delay the PPCBoot prompt appeared. It was alive! I was then informed that I was going to debut the AmigaOne in Australia at our next Amiga user group meeting. I was to have Linux running on the machine within a few days. Great!

The next few days and nights were spent catching up on what other developers had been doing with their board, and building a cross compiler, so that I could build a PowerPC Linux kernel on my x86 Linux box. Since we were using the new PPCBoot firmware, instead of the original Softex firmware that developers had previously used, it was a whole new ball game. Eventually I managed to boot a kernel, not much to look at, but a bit of a milestone for me. The night before the debut, I was trying to get a Linux boot disk to work with the kernel (since IDE was not working at the time), it wasn't going too well. Luckily in the early hours of the next day, a fellow developer from Australia (actually the only other one) came to the rescue! He sent me a disk image he had built, and it worked!