Amiga Unix returns: community project brings Amix to 68040/68060 and modern accelerators
Amiga Unix, Again
Amiga Unix (Amix), Commodore's System V Release 4 from 1990–92, is being revived by amigaux.org. The community project supports 68040/68060 machines and modern accelerators, with a modern toolchain, package manager (apkg), and new drivers. Installation boots from floppy and CD-ROM, and the work is documented in a grimoire. Early packages include grep, gzip, less, patch, and zlib; Quake runs as a benchmark.
Part of this work is done with generative AI in the loop — models reading the old kernels in binary, as no source is available, and writing drivers and notes — with people setting direction, reviewing every change and testing on real hardware, where it either boots or it doesn't.
- jchw
My eternal advice to anyone doing heavily LLM assisted projects is to do them a bit less LLM assisted. You should still use LLMs, in my opinion, they're wonderful tools. But I know reading this page that this text is mostly LLM-generated, and that leaves there to be little hope that much else of the project isn't.
It's one thing if your code is really truly "co-authored by" Claude. It's another thing if it isn't even really co-authored by you.
Evidently the majority of people see no problem with LLM prose, but me and many others think it is some of the most annoying crap possible. Please consider speaking in your own voice.
I know this gets repetitive, but it is important.
- breput
I ran NetBSD 0.8 on my Amiga 500 (with a 68030 w/MMU, 68881, and SCSI hard drive sidecar), which co-existed in the same timeframe as Commodore's release.
Other than just than "we can" and historic interest, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to run System Vr4 over 4.4BSD, especially since the latest NetBSD 11 release still fully supports Amiga[0]
- steve1977
This project might run into some trademark issues.
- teddyh
I mean, Debian 3.1 (sarge) supported Amiga hardware. The support was dropped in 2007 (the next release), because not enough people were maintaining it. I would assume that it would be easier to re-start that effort, unless compatibility with actual Amix was important for some reason?
- nullc
I get pet-cemetery vibes from these AI powered resurrections.
As in ... "the AI brought it back to life, but it came back /wrong/".