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AmigaOne From The Beginning
By Douglas McLaughlin
Although I did not start using the Amiga computer
until 1991 when I bought a second-hand Amiga 3000 Desktop, I
had always been a Commodore and Amiga fan. There is, of
course, a good reason for being late. You see, I had
originally bought a Commodore 64 in the summer of 1984 and I
still owned that C64 in 1991. Not to mention a large pile of
Commodore accessories, including a couple Commodore 128s.
However, after the purchase of my 3000, the C64 and its
friends quickly moved to the side. I sold all my Commodore
equipment to the VFW group of Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1993.
Now let's skip forward a few years, it's now
March, 2002, and Eyetech has just announced that the AmigaOne
G3 SE is now for sale. Not one to be late a second time, I
jumped on the chance that very moment. In fact, I was in one
of my Computer Science classes when I actually placed the
order, I couldn't wait the few hours before I would arrive
home!
Having written a number of Amiga programs, the
most famous being STRICQ, I was eager to start programming for
the new Amiga OS4 as soon as possible! Well, let's skip
forward another year. Patience is something I have plenty of
according to many of my friends. And, to make a not so short
story not so long, let's jump to the good part.
It's now May 8, 2003, and I arrive home from work
with a wonderful package waiting for me to rip open! Only.my
wife has already opened it.no matter, IT'S HERE! Quickly
removing all items from the dining table, I spread all the
parts I had acquired over the past year across the table.
Following the directions provided by Eyetech, I soon have my
AmigaOne built and standing majesticly before me. At first
power-on, all seems to go well until I realize that there are
problems with the IDE bus. Two to be exact. After taking a day
out to purchase a new harddrive and CD-RW drive, I am now able
to jump right into UBOOT. Unfortunately the installation of
the provided Debian Linux will not work. After several
frustrating days, the new RAM that I ordered from Eyetech
arrives. With the installation of the recommended RAM, I
quickly installed Debian without any further problems.
Once I had Debian up and running, I notice that
some programs are not running in a stable manner. After some
(more) helpful discussion on the A1 mailing list, I decide to
clock back the CPU to 733 MHz. After this one final
adjustment, Debian finally runs rock solid!
Now that the hardware is good, I starting learning
Debian. That apt-get thingy is quite a tool, very dangerous
too. After having to reinstall Debian one more time, I've got
it all figured out. My Debian installation is now at the
unstable version, which seems quite stable to me, I've not had
any crashes in several weeks. In fact, I've run the A1 for a
couple weeks without a reboot, and yes, I was using the
computer daily.
Since then, I've set up Apache, Jakarta Tomcat,
Exim4, and a number of other network servers so that I can
even play with the A1 while I am at work. In fact, June 19, I
even brought my A1 to the NCSCAUG (North Carolina-South
Carolina Amiga User Group) and showed it to several other
Amiga fans living in the Carolinas. Follow the link to see a
show report by one of the members.
http://www.freewebs.com/ncscaug/meetings.htm
Now I'm looking forward to the imminent arrival of
Amiga OS4. I have several programs that I use quite often,
though I have never released them, that will be updated to OS4
as soon as I get the chance. One of which, a picture
thumb-nail cataloger will see a dramatic increase in its
picture resizing capabilities with the PPC processor.
So, that is my story. I hope to see everyone at
AmiWest 2003!
Douglas McLaughlin
STR Programming
Services
Fayetteville, NC
stricq@owlnet.net
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