Some reflection
In 2024, it was very quiet on my blog. I have only written one blog post (about configuring my recently acquired Amiga 4000 machine) and I was not happy about my progress. This year I have managed to improve my cadence by breaking up some of my projects into smaller chunks and trying not to multi-task too much.
Amiga development
In 2025, I resumed my Amiga-related fun projects. After configuring my second hand Amiga 4000 in such a way that I find it acceptable, I have also decided to install and run Linux on it -- running Linux on an Amiga has always been a fascinating use case to me. Already in 2001, I gathered quite a bit of knowledge about Linux, its internals and its portability aspects.
Since 2001 I have been curious to see how it would work on an Amiga machine, rather than a standard x86-based PC. Unfortunately, until 2022 I only had access to an Amiga 500 that is incapable of running Linux -- an Amiga 500 contains the first generation Motorola 68000 processor lacking a memory management unit (MMU) which is a hard requirement for running Linux. After obtaining my Amiga 4000 that has a 68040 CPU (with an MMU) I could finally see how it would work in practice.
It turns out that running Linux on an Amiga is quite a challenge. There is some information available on the Internet and a Linux distribution that (somewhat) supports it: Debian. Unfortunately, much of the relevant information that I need is scattered, sometimes outdated, and not always well-written. As a result, I have decided to write a blog post about my experiences, so that all information can be obtained from a single location.
I was only expecting a handful of people to find such a blog post interesting. At first, it did not attract that many visitors. A couple of months later, it appeared on various news web sites, such as Amiga News, Hackernews, Reddit, and OS news. As a result, it not only reached the Amiga community, but also a broader development community.
Thanks to this wide exposure, my Linux/Amiga related-blog post is now one of my most frequently read blog posts. I am quite happy to see such a broad exposure -- although the Amiga is nowadays mostly an obsolete platform, the Linux kernel still supports it. I hope my blog post makes Linux on Amiga more useful to people who want to explore or improve it.
In 2022, I also learned that in addition to Linux, NetBSD (another UNIX-like operating system) also supports the Amiga and substantially improved its Amiga support. After experimenting with Linux on my Amiga 4000, I have also decided to give NetBSD a try and report about my experiences. This blog post was also covered on the same news sites and also attracted quite a few visitors.
Another interesting Amiga project that I worked on was the ability to mount my KCS PowerPC board-emulated PC hard-drive in AmigaOS and Linux so that I can conveniently exchange files (to clarify: my Amiga 500 contains an extension card making it possible to emulate a PC and run PC software).
Previously, I had to rely on floppy disks or a null modem cable to exchange files with my KCS PowerPC board-emulated PC installation, which is slow and inconvenient.
In 2025, I got quite frustrated by this limitation. Contrary to my emulated PC instance, it is possible to easily exchange data with my Linux and NetBSD installations from AmigaOS and Linux -- there are ext2 and Berkeley Fast File system modules for both operating systems.
Already in the 90s I was convinced that these problems could be solved because AmigaOS is flexible enough to support many kinds of file systems through external AmigaDOS drivers. There are also several kinds of FAT file system DOS drivers for AmigaOS, but none of them work with my emulated PC drive. Unfortunately, in the 90s I had neither the knowledge, nor the resources to fully solve that problem.
In 2025, I revisited the problem and wrote two blog posts covering my solutions: an AmigaOS Exec driver and a network block device (NBD) driver for UNIX-like systems, such as Linux.
Building a retro PC
After completing my Amiga projects, I became motivated to build a retro PC with late 90s hardware, supplemented with a couple of modern peripherals (such as a CF2IDE and a GoTek floppy emulator device) to make data exchange more convenient.
The motivating reason to build this retro PC is because I learned that the ability to run old games on modern computers is not as good as I thought it would be. Furthermore, I also think it is good to preserve some significant historical computer technology.
Conclusion
I am happy to have seen some improvements and that some of my writings had some impact.
I have plenty of ideas for 2026, so stay tuned.
The last thing I would like to say is:
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!
