Running Linux or NetBSD on the Amiga 4000

In this blog post, I have described how I have been using Linux on my Amiga 4000. I hope this information can be of use to anyone who is planning to run Linux on their Amigas. Furthermore, I hope that the existing documentation on the Linux/m68k homepage gets updated at some point. May be the information in this blog post can help with that.

Debian 3.1 works decently for me, but everything is much slower compared to a PC. This is not really surprising if you run an operating system (last updated in 2008) on a CPU from the early 90s that still runs at a 25 MHz clock speed:).
↫ Sander van der Burg

The blog post in question is from January of this year, but as soon as I saw it I knew I had to post it here. It’s an incredibly intricate and detailed guide to running Linux on a 25Mhz Amiga 4000, including X11, networking, internet access, file sharing, and so, so much more – up to running Linux for Amiga inside FS-UAE. There’s so much love and dedication in this detailed guide, and I love it.

In fact, Van den Burg has a similar article about running NetBSD on the Amiga 4000, with the same level of detail, dedication, and information density. A fun note is that while X11 for Linux on the Amiga can’t seem to make use of the Amiga chipset, the X Window System on NetBSD does make us of it. I’m not surprised.

Articles like these are useful only for a very small number of people, but having this amount of knowledge concentrated like this will prove invaluable like five years from now when someone else finds an Amiga 4000 in their attic or at a yard sale, and choose to go down this same path. We need more of these kinds of write-ups.