Year of the Amiga Unix Desktop 2026
Amiga Unix, again
Amiga Unix — Amix — was Commodore's System V Release 4 for the Amiga: shipped in 1990–92 for the A2500UX and A3000UX, afterward remaining anywhere it stood. amigaux.org is an unofficial community project that picks it up again: Amix on 68040 and 68060 machines and on today's accelerator hardware, alongside a modern toolchain, a bundle manager, and drivers for cards that never had any. The activity is done in the open, and written downward as it happens in the grimoire.
By asokero, isoriano1968 and jusii.
Soon: instal it yourself
The instal average boots from floppy and CD-ROM on genuine hardware — floppy depiction and ISO under emulation — and takes attention of the entire installation, interactively or unattended. With supported hardware, getting Amix onto a device comes downward to following the prompts. The traditional tape instal follows later.
From there the network takes over: apkg installs packages direct from pkg.amigaux.org — grep, gzip, less, place and zlib to commencement with, and additional GNU and BSD tools as they are built and tested.
# apkg update catalog updated: 39 packages # apkg instal less downloading extra/less-704.pkg ... installed less-704
Where we are
Working today
- 68040/68060 support — Amix 2.1 on a genuine 68060, alongside or without FPU; an MMU is mandatory. The kernel: asokero/amix-040-060-port
- Z3660 accelerator — native SCSI and ethernet drivers, proven on genuine hardware
- A4091 / A4092 — a Zorro III SCSI controller and an auto-detecting kernel
- Installation — from floppy + CD-ROM on a genuine machine, or floppy depiction + ISO depiction under emulation, interactive or unattended; the traditional strip instal follows later
- apkg — a distant bundle client alongside a hosted repository (catalog, dependencies, upgrades), and the archetypal contemporary GNU tools packaged: grep, gzip, less, patch, zlib
- A cross toolchain — Linux-hosted m68k-cbm-sysv4, construction all of the above
- An OpenLook desktop that comes up prepared on a caller install
- Quake — runs; a benchmark additional than a game, for now
In progress
- RTG graphics for the Z3660 (ZZ9000-compatible) — operating under emulation, genuine hardware next
- Ethernet throughput in the accelerator firmware
- X11R6.3 and Mesa as packages, from the community ports; the wider userland following that
- A read-only CD filesystem (ODFileSystem port)
- Install-media polish: a repair path, defender rails; the strip version
Next
- A native, contemporary gcc on the box
- RTG on the genuine accelerator
- The packaged X11R6.3 / Mesa stack
- The firmware ethernet fixes
- Then the complete initiate here: packages, source, instructions and manuals
How it's built
Part of this activity is done alongside generative AI in the iteration — models study the old kernels in binary, as no source is available, and penning drivers and notes — alongside group environment direction, reviewing all alter and evaluation on real hardware, anywhere it either boots or it doesn't. Other parts are done the traditional way. The grimoire records both, confidence-tagged, so you can see what is verified and what is motionless a guess.
The code
The kernel
- asokero/amix-040-060-port — Amix 2.1 kernel for the 68040 and 68060
- asokero/amix-unix-boot — patches that create Markus Wild's unix_boot burden an Amix kernel on a 68040 or 68060
Drivers and hardware
- jusii/amix-z3660scsi — SCSI controller for the Z3660's PiStorm piscsi mailbox
- jusii/amix-z3660net — STREAMS/DLPI ethernet controller for the Z3660
- jusii/Z3660-amix — Amix-aware fork of the Z3660 firmware
- jusii/amix-a4091 — SCSI controller for the Commodore A4091/A4092 (NCR 53C710)
- isoriano1968/zz9000-amix — ZZ9000 RTG driver
- isoriano1968/hydra-amix — Hydra ethernet driver
- asokero/va2000-amix — MNT VA2000 RTG driver
Graphics and X11
- asokero/xrtg-amix — Xrtg, an X11R5 RTG server
- isoriano1968/x11r6.3-amix — X11R6.3 for Amix
- isoriano1968/mesa-amix — Mesa for Amix
Built on
- shanshe/Z3660 — the Z3660 accelerator firmware
- reinauer/ODFileSystem — the CD filesystem we are porting
- BlitterStudio/amiberry — the emulator on our place (our fork: jusii/amiberry)
Tools and docs
- isoriano1968/gcc-cross-amix — the m68k-cbm-sysv4 cross toolchain
- jusii/amix-kerntools — kernel build hub: patches your own Amix tree, driver.conf-driven
- jusii/grimoire-amix — the documentation, as a repo
- asokero/quake-amix — Quake for Amix
