The Amiga Experience (cont'd)
by Ross Vumbaca

The debut went well, and lots of people turned out to see the board. We even received a phone call from Alan of Eyetech! Quite nice, considering he had to get out of bed at about 6:00 AM on a Sunday morning!

From there, the Linux development took off, and within a couple of weeks, the AmigaOne hardware was supported properly (like IDE hard disks!) I was able to successfully install Debian Linux on my AmigaOne (after having a bit of a fight with the installer). I later modified the installer so that future Debian AmigaOne users would have an easy time of it.

Emulation has always been of interest to me, and I was eager to give MacOnLinux a shot. I downloaded a built package, and tried to run it. It failed to load. After a bit of snooping around in the source code, I found that it wasn't going to work on the AmigaOne, because we were not using OpenFirmware. I reported this to the author, and he told me that the bleeding edge version didn't have this problem anymore. So I grabbed the source code, made a slight modification for the AmigaOne and it worked flawlessly! Speed of emulation was very good - just like a real Mac :) I dutifully packaged it, and placed it on my colorful, exciting website at http://members.optusnet.com.au/amigaone

At this point I went back to playing with the Linux kernel. I saw that not everyone was in sync with each other, each developer was running their own version of the kernel. It would be nice if we could all be sharing code at a centralized location of some sort. At a great suggestion from Hans-Joerg Frieden, I started up the "AmigaOne-Linux" Sourceforge project.

The project would be a place where all the developments on the Linux kernel could be merged. Where end users could just grab a built kernel, and not worry about having all the latest bits and compiling it. If they wanted to compile it however, the merged source tree would be available for download. In addition, they could also read some basic docs, take part in online forums/mailing lists, and keep tabs on the latest developments. The project went up mid December 2002, and the web site was recently completed (http://amigaone-linux.sourceforge.net/).

After a few days, hits to the site were on the increase

Being a bit of a computer geek, I found playing with the AmigaOne and Linux to be a lot of fun. Performance was very good too. But Linux is not the reason why I bought my AmigaOne. I recently read the OS4 features list from the Amiga web site -- wow!

I can't wait to run OS4.