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, then left where 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, with a modern toolchain, a package manager, and drivers for cards that never had any. The work is done in the open, and written down as it happens in the grimoire.
Soon: install it yourself
The install medium boots from floppy and CD-ROM on real hardware — floppy image and ISO under emulation — and takes care of the whole installation, interactively or unattended. With supported hardware, getting Amix onto a machine comes down to following the prompts. The classic tape install follows later.
From there the network takes over: apkg installs packages straight from pkg.amigaux.org — grep, gzip, less, patch and zlib to start with, and more GNU and BSD tools as they are built and tested.
# apkg update catalog updated: 39 packages # apkg install less downloading extra/less-704.pkg ... installed less-704
Where we are
Working today
- 68040/68060 support — Amix 2.1 on a real 68060, with or without FPU; an MMU is mandatory. The kernel: asokero/amix-040-060-port
- Z3660 accelerator — native SCSI and ethernet drivers, proven on real hardware
- A4091 / A4092 — a Zorro III SCSI driver and an auto-detecting kernel
- Installation — from floppy + CD-ROM on a real machine, or floppy image + ISO image under emulation, interactive or unattended; the classic tape install follows later
- apkg — a remote package client with a hosted repository (catalog, dependencies, upgrades), and the first modern GNU tools packaged: grep, gzip, less, patch, zlib
- A cross toolchain — Linux-hosted
m68k-cbm-sysv4, building all of the above - An OpenLook desktop that comes up ready on a fresh install
- Quake — runs; a benchmark more than a game, for now
In progress
- RTG graphics for the Z3660 (ZZ9000-compatible) — running under emulation, real hardware next
- Ethernet throughput in the accelerator firmware
- X11R6.3 and Mesa as packages, from the community ports; the wider userland after that
- A read-only CD filesystem (ODFileSystem port)
- Install-media polish: a repair path, guard rails; the tape version
Next
- A native, modern gcc on the box
- RTG on the real accelerator
- The packaged X11R6.3 / Mesa stack
- The firmware ethernet fixes
- Then the full launch here: packages, source, instructions and manuals
How it's built
Part of this work is done with generative AI in the loop — models reading the old kernels in binary, as no source is available, and writing drivers and notes — with people setting direction, reviewing every change and testing on real hardware, where it either boots or it doesn't. Other parts are done the classic way. The grimoire records both, confidence-tagged, so you can see what is verified and what is still a guess.