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NetBSD - Linux - Amiga-Unix - Minix

Currently there are four possibilies to run Unix on the Amiga.

The first one is Amiga-Unix. This is a commercial unix from Commodore. It is neither sold nor supported any more.

The second unix on the Amiga was Minix from A.S. Tanenbaum, a very famous operating system professor. It runs on every Amiga and does not support memory protection and some other features needed to get the real unix feeling. It is commercial, too. It's major aim is to be an operating system to play around with. It was developed for the computer science students Tanenbaum held lectures for.

The third available unix on the Amiga was NetBSD. It gives you almost anything you might want to expect from a free unix clone. It is being developed on several platforms, and therefore has a reasonable amount of developers supporting it. It was designed to be as portable as possible, as all machnine-dependent code is separated. Currently there are ports to the Amiga, Intel-based PCs, HP-300 (680x0-based), Macs(680x0-based), Sun3, Sun-Sparcs and some other platforms. NetBSD-Amiga has a binary-compatibility-mode for Sun3-SunOS-binaries. Of course, this means only binary-compatible with static linked binaries, unless you have the original SunOS shared-libs available. The far end aim is, that all NetBSD-implementations will be binary-compatible on the same processor. That means, that there will be NetBSD-m68k-binaries, that run on the Amiga, the Macs, the HP-300 and the Sun3. This shows some of the possibilities of NetBSD. NetBSD-Amiga is part of the NetBSD-current sources, so any platform independent improvement will be an improvement for NetBSD-Amiga as well. The new features from 4.4BSD are already incorporated into NetBSD. NetBSD contains a lot of other fancy features, other unix-based operating systems are missing, e.g. cpu-time- or disk-quotas. NetBSD is copyrighted software, but you are free to use, modify and distribute it. Note that it is NOT under the GPL (General Public License, the Gnu Copyright (-left)) and the developers of NetBSD want it to keep this state. Therefore it is not possible to include any software which is under the GPL into the kernel. NetBSD is available in source, but anybody is free to take the current sources and provide them together with his own binaries, i.e. you don't have to provide the sources of your own work. This offers the opportunity for software developers to keep the source of the programs they sell. This is not possible under GPL, where you must provide the source. However, it is appreciated if you also release the source of your derived work to the public. If nobody releases his sources, the free software will soon disappear.

The fourth available unix on the Amiga is Linux. It was designed to run on Intel-based PCs. However, Hamish MacDonald did a major rewrite of the sources, so that it is now possible to run Linux on the Amiga. It is now quite useable, but it is not as stable and mature as NetBSD, but this situation might change in the future. The major-drawback with Amiga-Linux is, that it isn't incorporated in the Linux-source-tree. That means that every change, made in the Intel-PC-Unix, must be ported to the Amiga, whereas most of the changes in the NetBSD-source are made to the unique source-tree for all platforms.

Everybody has to decide by themselves, which unix is best for them. For now I can say, that using NetBSD is the best way to go, as Linux still has some more nasty bugs in it and is missing a lot of the functionality you might want to use, but this can change in the future.