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NetBSD/amiga

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About NetBSD/amiga

NetBSD/amiga is the port of NetBSD to the Amiga line of personal computers by Commodore and Amiga International and to the DraCo by MacroSystem GmbH.

Development activity on NetBSD/amiga continues at a speed dependent on people's spare time. Currently, NetBSD/amiga runs on any Amiga [1] that has a Motorola 68020 or better CPU with some form of MMU, and on 68060 DraCos. For 68020 and 68030 systems, a FPU is recommended but not required. 68LC040, 68040V and 68LC060 systems don't work correctly at the moment.

Due to the MMU requirement, it will not run on A500, A600, A1000, A1200, A2000, A4000/EC030, CDTV or CD32 out of the box. You must install a CPU board on them to run NetBSD.

The minimum RAM requirement is about 8 MB FASTMEM, the minimum hard disk space needed is about 75 MB, depending on how much system components you install. Check the install document for more details.

Easily installed binary distributions of NetBSD/amiga are available for the 4.0 release, and for snapshots of NetBSD-current.

NetBSD/amiga News

2007-12-19:   NetBSD 4.0 released
NetBSD 4.0 has been released. More information is available in the 4.0 release announcement.
2006-11-04:   NetBSD 3.1 released
NetBSD 3.1, the first maintenance release of the netbsd-3 release branch, has been released with binary distributions for 53 architectures. More information is available in the 3.1 release announcement.
2006-05-09:   binary packages for m68k available

About 1000 packages built from the latest branch pkgsrc-2006Q1 by Greg Oster are now available at ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/packages-2006Q1/NetBSD-3.0/m68k. The packages can be used on all ports based on m68k.

For some more details, see Greg Oster's announcement

2005-12-23:   NetBSD 3.0 released
NetBSD 3.0 released with support for 57 architectures. More information is available in the 3.0 release announcement.
2003-11-12:   Wscons PAL support
Jukka Andberg has added screen types suitable for PAL display to amidisplaycc(4), enabling PAL support for wscons.

Archive of NetBSD/amiga news items

Supported hardware

  • A4000/A1200 IDE controller

  • SCSI host adapters:

    • 33c93 based boards: A2091, A3000 builtin, A3000 builtin modified for Apollo accellerator, GVP series II
    • 53c80 based boards: Hacker, 12 Gauge, IVS, Wordsync/Bytesync, Emplant [2]
    • 53c710 based boards: A4000T, A4091, Magnum, Warp Engine, Zeus, DraCo builtin SCSI
    • FAS216 based SCSI boards: FastLane Z3, Blizzard I and II, Blizzard IV, Blizzard 2060, CyberSCSI Mk I and II
    • Cyberstorm Mk III / Cyberstorm PPC

  • Video controllers:

    • ECS, AGA and A2024 built in on various Amigas
    • Retina Z2 [3], Retina Z3, Altais
    • Cirrus CL GD 54xx based boards: GVP Spectrum, Picasso II, II+ and IV, Piccolo, Piccolo SD64
    • Tseng ET4000 based boards: Domino and Domino16M proto, oMniBus, Merlin
    • A2410[3]
    • Cybervision 64
    • Cybervision 64/3D

  • Audio I/O:

    • Amiga builtin (8bit and 14bit modes)
    • Melody Mpeg-audio layer 2 board [4]
    • Repulse audio board
    • Toccata audio board

  • Ethernet controllers:

    • A2065, Hydra, ASDG LanRover, A4066, Ariadne, Quicknet Ethernet
    • AriadneII Ethernet
    • X-surf Ethernet port
    • Some PCMCIA cards in the A1200 (tested with a few network cards only)

  • ARCnet controllers:

    • A2060 ARCnet

  • ISDN controllers:

    • BSC ISDN Master
    • BSC ISDN Master II
    • ITH ISDN Master II[4]
    • VMC ISDN Blaster
    • Zeus Development ISDN link
    • Individual Computers ISDN Surfer

  • Tape drives:

    • Most SCSI tape drives, including Archive Viper, Cipher SCSI-2 ST150

  • Scanners: With the machine independent PINT interface integrated, these should work:

    • SCSI-2 scanners behaving as SCSI-2 scanner devices
    • HP Scanjet II [5]
    • Mustek SCSI scanner[5]

  • CD-ROM drives:

    • Most SCSI CD-ROM drives

  • Serial ports on these boards:

    • Amiga builtin
    • DraCo builtin, including serial mouse port
    • A2232 (normal and turbo modes)
    • MultiFaceCard II and III
    • HyperCom Z3 (serial only), HyperCom 4, 3+ and 4+ (not the A1200 clockport models!)

  • Parallel printer ports on these boards:

    • Amiga builtin
    • DraCo builtin
    • HyperCom 3+ and 4+
  • Amiga floppy drives with Amiga (880kB/1760kB) and IBM (720kB/1440 kB) block encoding.
  • Amiga mouse.
  • Real-time clocks: A2000, A3000, A4000 builtin; DraCo builtin (r/o); A2000-RTC-clone on some A1200 accelerator boards.

NetBSD/amiga Information

Mailing Lists

Current Releases

Future Releases

Related Links

[1] There has been a report that the GVP '030/50MHz accelerator only works when all memory banks are switched to “Extended” (J12?).

[2] The Emplant SCSI adapter has been reported by a party to hang after doing part of the installation without problems.

[3] No X server for Retina Z2 and A2410, currently.

[4] The DraCo Zorro-2 bus does not recognize a couple of boards (known: Melody Z2, ITH ISDN Master II). Worse: boards in ConfigIn/ConfigOut order behind them won't be found, either. This is not a NetBSD problem, but a design problem in the board (yes, right).

[5] There are reports that the Mustek and HP Scanjet scanners hang if accessed from the A3000. This might apply to other 33C93-adapters, too.