I wanted to get into Unix when I was studying computer science, but Linux never really clicked with me. I tried a few distributions back then, but none felt quite right. Slackware was too hardcore, while SUSE and Mandrake felt too casual and undefined. Every year was supposed to be “the year of the Linux desktop,” but that year never seemed to arrive.

Thankfully, Linux has changed a lot since then. But at the time I started looking for alternatives and found NetBSD. I have never been particularly hardcore about NetBSD, or interested in the BSD vs Linux politics, but the sales copy on netbsd.org around the year 2000 really convinced me that this was the operating system to choose if you wanted to grow a beard and learn Unix.

I never grew the beard, and I never really learned Unix on a beard-level either, but setting up NetBSD back then was a great mix of frustration, success and leveling up. There was frustration, vi. There was success, wow, it actually works, you just type in :q!. And there was the feeling that you were learning something a little deeper: this was Unix, “real Unix.”

Anyway, NetBSD is famous for running on a huge number of hardware platforms, and one of them is the 68k Amiga. For years I had wanted to install it on one of my Amigas and see what NetBSD was actually like on real 68k hardware and so this weekend project started.

I decided to install NetBSD/68k on my Amiga 1200 with a TF1260. One of the main reasons was that I was curious about how fast X would be on the AGA chipset. Teaser: it is slow.

The first thing I did was add a Compact Flash adapter to the Amiga 1200’s internal IDE port. My normal Workbench CF card is connected to the IDE port on the Terrible Fire 1260, so this gave me two separate CF cards: one dedicated to NetBSD and one for Workbench 3.1.

The first step was to set up the CF card in HDToolBox.

As NetBSD uses its own filesystem, the partition should be set up as a Custom File System. I don’t plan to boot the A1200 directly into NetBSD, so there is no need to make the partition bootable.

I’m using a large partition for the NetBSD root filesystem and a smaller one for swap. I also went back and added an FFS partition for the NetBSD installation files, since I didn’t have a NIC that worked with NetBSD on 68k Amiga hardware.

An interesting detail I didn’t know before starting this project is that, when launching NetBSD from AmigaOS, the kernel itself sits on the Workbench partition.

It may work differently if you configure NetBSD to boot directly, but I wanted to start it from Workbench, so I created a NetBSD drawer on the SYS: partition and placed the kernel and boot tools there.

Then I copied the NetBSD/68k Amiga installation files to the FFS installation partition, which I called Temp:.

Having the Amiga 1200 access a shared folder on my workstation over the network made this part really smooth. I could download and prepare everything on my PC, then simply drag and drop the files into the right folder in Workbench on the Amiga.

Then it was time to actually start the installation. It didn’t work at first, so I had to boot into a clean Workbench environment. After quite a bit of troubleshooting, I traced the problem to Roadshow and some of the 060-related settings in my user-startup.

Finally, some progress. Things were scrolling by on the screen, and the actual installation process could finally begin.

Those .tgz files from the previous window are being unpacked here. I think this part of the installation took around two hours on the Amiga.

And after a few more configuration steps, we are finally greeted with a successful installation message!

It’s up and running. At this point it’s still pretty much raw Unix, with only the base system installed, but that’s a milestone reached!

X was actually smoother to set up than I expected. I just had to use a kernel with wscons support, and after that it started up without much trouble. Performance is another story though, it is really slow on AGA. I want to compare it with my graphics card-equipped Amiga 4000 at some point, since that setup should be quite a bit faster.

Still, even if it is slow, it is very cool to see X running on an Amiga with a basic window manager. I think it is some variant of TWM.

And that’s it for now. The next step is to get networking working, install the usual shell tools and utilities, and maybe set up a service or two.

But before I could call this little weekend project finished, I had to make it feel a bit more integrated with Workbench. Since I’m starting NetBSD from AmigaOS rather than booting directly into it, I created a proper icon for the startup script.

The script first shuts down the Amiga networking setup, which turned out to be necessary to avoid problems when handing the machine over to NetBSD. It then launches loadbsd and starts the NetBSD kernel. So now, instead of opening a Shell and typing commands manually, I can simply double-click the NetBSD icon in Workbench and let the script take care of the transition.

It is a small detail, but somehow it makes the whole setup feel much more complete since I do not need to boot into WB without any startup sequence to kick off NetBSD to boot.