It Runs Unix

[itrunsunix]

Remember when this place was semi-active?

Haha good times

[itrunsunix]

The Commodore Amiga? It runs NetBSD.

The story of the Amiga is perhaps one of the most tragic tales of innovation and mismanagement in the history of personal computing. Developed by a team of bona fide American geniuses, the first Amiga computer - the 1000 - made high-fidelity graphics and sound affordable in a time when most of us still ran Apple IIs and Commodore 64s. The OS implemented preemptive multitasking, the custom chipset allowed for unparalleled graphics and sound performance - it could even process raw video signals from VCRs or early digital cameras, as demonstrated here by none other than Andy Warhol. These features made the Amiga especially desirable in the video editing department - Babylon 5 rendered all of its special effects on Amiga hardware.

The line ran strong until about 1992, when the hardware finally started being eclipsed by PCs and Macs. Due to a series of business mistakes and mismanagement of the Amiga division, Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, taking down the Amiga line with itself. No new official hardware would ever be released, while the intellectual rights to the Amiga were sold off to a selection of companies, leading to a confusing situation for the userbase.

Commodore's demise didn't stop the die-hard Amiga fandom from releasing custom hardware and software well into the 21st century, bringing the little computer that could into the internet age. Although pricy, these accelerator boards and expansions allowed Amiga users to prolong the lifespan of their machines by well over a decade. There are still dedicated communities that develop new hardware and software releases, although no hope remains for another official Amiga computer.

Thankfully, the NetBSD project was in its infancy when the Amiga line was killed off. In fact, the Amiga line was one of the first targets for NetBSD! While Amiga users would wait six years for a semi-official update to AmigaOS, the NetBSD project provided modern Unix software to die-hard users.

While the NetBSD port works on any Amiga model, please keep in mind that it does require a fair bit of hardware. It is indeed possible to run NetBSD on an Amiga 500, but it will need to be upgraded with a 68020 CPU and at least 24 MB of RAM. It is also possible to run NetBSD on the UAE emulator.

I can't do enough justice to the story of the Amiga in these four paragraphs, so I would like to direct you to either this excellent video by the Nostalgia Nerd or Jimmy Maher's The Future Was Here. And, of course, please be sure to check out my favourite Amiga game.

On a more personal note, sorry for the unplanned lack of activity on this blog. We're back now. Thanks for sticking around. We're fast approaching 1,000 followers and we're going to do a special series of posts once we hit that milestone.

[itrunsunix]

Happy Sysadmin Appreciation Day from everyone at It Runs Unix!

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The Dingoo? It runs Linux.

The Dingoo is another one in a long series of Asian handheld devices mainly aimed at emulating old systems. Although several original games were released for the device (along with native ports of titles like Doom - because of course It Runs Doom).

For some reason, it came with built-in Flash and RealMedia support. Yes, RealMedia. On a device that came out in 2009.

It was also capable of rudimentary 3D acceleration, allowing it to run games that wouldn't look entirely out of place on the original Playstation. None of them were terribly interesting, thought.

The built-in emulators, ostensibly the raison d'être for this device's existence, were unfortunately all terrible. With the exception of the NES and, oddly, the Capcom CPS-1 arcade board, the device cannot emulate anything in a playable manner. Fortunately, where weird Chinese devices go, Linux nerds swiftly follow. A version of the Linux kernel was developed shortly after the device launched and allowed people to run much better emulators than the ones the device came with (as well as as a better version of Doom, natch).

The console died quietly after selling a couple thousand units,with no further software updates released by the parent company. If you want to see the device in action, I recommend watching this excellent review of the device.

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The EVO Smart Console? It runs Linux.

The EVO Smart Console is another one of those products nobody asked for. Released in 2008, it was a Steam Machine before the Steam Machine was a thing; it's basically a tiny PC, with a controller, designed to be plugged into a television. It ran its own in-house fork of Fedora Linux and was designed as an open platform for easy video game development.

Unfortunately, it failed miserably, because the concept is inherently flawed. What Envizions, the company behind the EVO, failed to grasp is that a console lives or dies by its games. Unless you're Nintendo, you require heavy third party support throughout your platform's lifetime in order to keep it alive. Making a box and expecting your customers to provide the content for it is the best way of wasting your investors' time and money.

What didn't help were the hardware choices that went into it. It had an Athlon 64 X2 processor - a midrange chip that was on the market for two years by the time the EVO was released; coupled with it was an ATI Radeon 3200 - a very low-powered GPU designed for laptops. This made the system massively underpowered, even when compared with its console competitors.

The system could run Amiga games and reportedly, WINE didn't run that bad. Still, when you ask $250 for an unpowered device with no real third-party software support whose only purpose is to play video games from twenty years past, it's no surprise that the EVO died after less than two years on the market.

The people behind the EVO would later attempt to repeat their failure using Android as the base OS (because Android is famously known for the quality of its games). The project failed to gain traction, so the CEO started a new company and attempted to cash in on the Ouya's Kickstarter success by annoucing the OTON, a platform supposedly capable of procedurally generating its own games.

Needless to say, that failed too.

The PC-gaming-on-the-couch concept would later be revisited by Valve Corporation and their Steam Box platform, which also failed due to a lack of market demand.

If anything, the lesson this whole story re-inforces over and over again is the oldest principle in the world: don't solve a problem that doesn't exist.

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The GP2X? It runs Linux.

The GP2X is a South Korean handheld games console made by GamePark Holdings. It came out in 2005 - roughly a year after the Nintendo DS and the PSP, featuring roughly the same hardware capabilities. Two ARM cores - unusually, capable of overclocking - were supplemented by a whopping 64 MB of RAM, the display was roughly the same as the one on the DS, the battery life was decent - what's not to love?

This system was designed to be as open as possible. It featured virtually no first-party games, relying instead on the userbase to develop their own homebrew software. It became quite popular as an import in the mid-2000s, as it was an excellent machine for emulators. It could emulate virtually anything up to the original Playstation, albeit obviously it did some systems better than others.

As for the Linux system underneath it all, it was a fully featured OS hidden behind a custom UI. Hidden beneath was a version of Samba, a HTTP server, FTP and telnet. While the console itself didn't feature Wi-Fi, it could connect to the internet via USB networking.

Also notable is the expansion port. Users could use a multitude of special dongles to get composite television output, or to add USB ports to the console. Using a special breakout box, up to four devices could be plugged into the console at any one time.

And yeah, it also runs Doom.

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The BlackBerry Playbook? It runs [QNX].

QNX is a commercial variant of UNIX, designed for embedded and low-power devices. Its microkernel implementation is particularly interesting - the kernel is made up of servers - basically, services - which communicate with each other. The interesting bit about QNX is that the user can turn off whichever servers they please in order to conserve resources, making the OS ideal for underpowered hardware. The other fun thing is that the kernel does not differentiate between servers hosted locally and those on other QNX machines on the network - making this the only distributed OS kernel I'm aware of. In fact, the developers of QNX hold the patent for it!

This is where the story gets ugly.

The developers, Quantum Software Systems, were acquired by the increasingly irrelevant Blackberry Ltd in 2010. In a stroke of genius, they decided to use QNX as the backbone for their answer to the iPad - the PlayBook.

The PlayBook's modified QNX - Blackberry Tablet OS - supported Flash. It supported all twelve third-party Blackberry applications written in Java. It could run its own, native Adobe Air applications! It was a colossal failure.

For starters, it was massively underpowered. It lacked third-party software support, because by the time it got to market, Adobe Air was already irreleant in the software development market (that is, if anyone paid any attention to it in the first place). It hung around on the market for a brief two years and was abandoned by Blackberry.

Shame, really, but that's what happens when you release a product that nobody asks for. Especially when you cripple any potential it might have with a crap development platform and a dismembered OS under the hood. Such a shame it took the world six years to learn that lesson. (coughBadacoughTizencoughFirefoxOScoughUbuntu Touchcough).

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The SAGE IV? It kind of ran UNIX.

The SAGE IV wasn't as popular as some hardware previously covered on this blog. It was expensive and unsuitable for personal use - indeed, it was most commonly found as an ersatz minicomputer in science laboratories, where it would be connected to several terminals. It had some rudimentary multi-tasking capability, which made it a perfect target for UNIX ports. Other operating systems for the machine included CP/M, PDOS, TRIPOS and the UCSD p-System, which the machine shipped with.

Although UNIX itself was never released for the SAGE IV, Idris, written by P.J. Plauger, was ported relatively quickly, as it already had an M68k port developed. Idris is an Unix-like, multi-user operating system, initially developed for the PDP-11 and ported to a variety of different architectures.

Later on, Idris was pitched to Atari as a replacement system for the Atari ST. While Atari wasn't interested, Idris was released for the ST anyway, but that's a story for another time.

As for the SAGE IV, it left its mark on history - this was the machine on which the Lorraine was developed. The Lorraine, of course, was the MacGyvered prototype of the original Amiga computer. The SAGE IV was used to develop the operating system for the machine.

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The Game Boy Advance? It runs UNIX.

No, not some weird uClinux + busybox contraption. This is 5th edition UNIX, from June 1974, running on a Game Boy Advance.

Amit Singh achieved this by porting SIMH, a minicomputer system emulator, to the GBA. From there, it's a simple matter of running a PDP-11 system image and re-working the emulator to output nicely onto the GBA screen.

Well, I say "simple", but I still can't get over how cool emulating a 1970s minicomputer on a handheld console is.

Unfortunately, because the Game Boy Advance is seriously lacking in the input department, potential users are required to specify the commands to be sent to the system in a text file and re-compile the ROM with it. Pressing Start sends the next command into the emulator. Because of this, this Unix port is nigh-unusable and only exists as a mild curiosity.

Fortunately, SIMH is available on a variety of other platforms, so you can emulate 5th Edition UNIX (and other systems!) much easier.

EDIT: Soenderg correctly points out that the PDP-11 was a minicomputer and not a mainframe as I have originally stated in this post. Thanks a lot for catching that!

[itrunsdoom]

I was just linked to this, and if you like this blog, retrocomputers and learning stuff, you might like this one too. It’s apparently pretty new, so show ‘em some love!

Thanks @tumblokami!

[itrunsunix]

Thanks to It Runs Doom for linking to us! I would have to lie if I said their blog wasn't a big influence on this project.

[itrunsunix]

The Sega Dreamcast? It runs Linux.

The Dreamcast was Sega's last home console - and what a console it was! It was the first home console to support online multiplayer as standard - the base unit came with a 56k modem installed and an ethernet card was available as an add-on. Its powerful hardware and great line-up of games available at launch (Soul Calibur, anyone?) quickly won over the hearts of the gaming community worldwide.

Then, the PS2 happened and single-handedly forced Sega out of the home console market. Some people are still bitter about that.

Nevertheless, the beautiful gray box still persisted in homebrew circles, thanks to the complete lack of copy protection on the system. You see, in order to fight piracy, Sega decided to buy a proprietary optical disc format from Yamaha: GD-ROM, which held roughly a gigabyte of data on a single disc. This, however, proved completely pointless, as the console was quickly discovered to run homebrew code (and, of course, pirated games) off standard CD-ROMs, with no hardware modification requied.

As for this Debian port, I can't find any information on it online. The link in the video is long dead, and the actual page didn't allow archive.org to preserve it.

The LinuxDC project has also laid dormant since 2002, with documentation slowly succumbing to link rot. It looks like people interested in running Linux on Dreamcasts today need to port it themselves.

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The Apple Lisa? It runs Xenix.

The Apple Lisa was the direct predecessor of the Macintosh line. It was developed after a team of Apple engineers and Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC, who were hard at work developing the first graphical user interfaces on their Alto machine. While the Alto and the concepts it brought to the table were revolutionary, it was never a mass-market computer - only 2,000 units were shipped to customers.

The Lisa was Apple's first attempt to bring the GUI to the masses. Aimed at the professional/business market, it was marketed at $9,995 (in 1983! That's about $24,000 in today's money) and it came bundled with a 5 MB hard drive. Unfortunately, poor hardware design choices and business decisions by Apple (most notably Steve Jobs announcing an upcoming machine which wouldn't be compatible, but would be much cheaper and more powerful) led to the system's discontinuation in 1985. It went through two hardware revisions and price drops and managed to sell 100,000 units.

Xenix was ported to the Lisa by Microsoft and SCO. It allowed terminals to be attached to the Lisa by serial ports and there was a text-based word processor available for it. Xenix did not support the Lisa's graphics or the mouse. The disks are available online and have been confirmed to work with Lisa emulators.

Additionally, a version of UniPlus System V Unix has been reported to have been ported to the Lisa, but not much information on it is available and I have been unable to find any screenshots of it. Some documentation has surfaced, however. Notice how the manual uses "Macintosh XL" instead of "Lisa" - after the release of the Mac, a hardware redesign of the Lisa was sold under the Macintosh XL branding, ostensibly placing it as a "high-end" machine. It didn't sell very well and was discontinued shortly after release.

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The Commodore 900? It ran UNIX.

Well, not quite. The OS for this unreleased Commodore machine was Coherent, a roughly-compatible clone of Unix developed in the 1980s by the Mark Williams Company.

The Commodore 900 was an unreleased computer made by Commodore International as a business workstation or server. Only a couple prototypes were made and development was scrapped after Commodore acquired the Lorraine computer, which you might know under a much more marketable name: the Amiga.

Coherent was a legitimate clean-room implementation of Unix - definitely cloning the original, but completely re-written from scratch, to the point even Dennis Ritchie couldn't find a fault with it.

While it was mostly compatible with System V, it didn't feature compatibility for mice, TCP/IP, SCSI or anything which would have made it useful past the early 1980s. That didn't stop it from being ported to a variety of different architectures and platforms, including IBM compatibles and the PDP-11.

Being cheap, relatively powerful, light-weight and - most importantly - working on Z8000 CPUs - Commodore chose it as the OS for its new business computer. Development got far enough for a couple of complete, functional prototypes to be manufactured. Amiga's acquisition forced Commodore to scrap the computer. Commodore would later have a line of professional Amiga computers, but at that point they were aimed at the graphics and video market.

More about the Commodore 900:

The CBM 900, The Secret Weapons of Commodore

The Commodore C900, This is Z

Photographs taken from The Secret Weapons of Commodore.

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The IBM PC/XT? It runs Unix.

The IBM PC/XT was an upgraded version of the original IBM PC, adding a 10 MB hard drive - which, for 1983, was a pretty good amount of storage. Originally, it shipped with PC-DOS, but soon after release a couple of Unix variants became available.

The first variant was PC/IX, which came on 19 floppy disks and was accompanied by an 1,800-page manual. Due to hardware constraints, various features are missing from this system - there's no FORTRAN compiler or TAR, no BSD tools such as vi (the INed editor takes its place) or the C Shell. Despite achieving reasonably good performance, it was not a commercial success.

Released in 1983 by SCO, Xenix was Microsoft's own variant of System 7 Unix. It ran on a variety of 16-bit micro- and minicomputers and it featured Microsoft's own improvements to the base OS. Microsoft licensed the OS package to various corporations, who were then expected to port it to their own architectures themselves. SCO developed the IBM PC port, adding in various improvements from BSD 4.2. Unlike PC/IX, Xenix featured vi, as well as termcap and curses, and it also supported rudimentary networking through serial ports. It was also the first multi-user, multitasking OS on the platform.

Minix was developed from the ground-up as a fully-compatible Unix variant by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, who used it to teach concepts on operating system design. Coming in at 12,000 lines of code, it was fully compatible with Seventh Edition Unix system calls. The concepts behind Minix were explained in the accompanying textbook, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. Minix is also historically significant as the OS Linus Torvalds was using when he started work on his own Unix-like kernel, Linux.

PC/IX was quietly discontinued and replaced with 386/ix, or Interactive Unix in 1985. Xenix survived until 1989, when it was replaced by SCO Unix (now SCO OpenServer). Minix is still being actively developed, and it went open-source in 2000.

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The Nintendo GameCube? It runs Linux.

Released in 2001, the Nintendo GameCube was an odd duck. Instead of using conventional DVD discs, it opted for a smaller, proprietary optical disc format, ostensibly to combat piracy. That didn't stop hackers from finding out several methods of running homebrew code on the console.

Internally, the charming little box contains a 485 MHz PowerPC CPU and a custom ATI GPU. The hardware was specifically designed to make programming for the system as easy as possible.

Linux was ported to the GameCube in early 2004. The console is powerful enough to support the X Window System and some SDL application - including, of course, Doom.

The GameCube was also the first home console to support stereoscopic 3D. Because 3D television sets were not widespread at the time, the feature wasn't allowed to be used outside of development, but one released game reportedly still supports the feature: Luigi's Mansion.

In 2006, Nintendo released their new console, the Wii. Internally, the Wii was essentially a straight hardware upgrade from the GameCube, which, of course, led to GCLinux being ported to the new system.

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The Xbox 360? Yeah, it runs Unix.

The Free60 project aims to put Linux, BSD or Darwin on the Microsoft Xbox 360. In March 2007 an execution method involving a bit of jiggery-pokery on the motherboard and a copy of Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Game was discovered, and shortly after install scripts for Gentoo, Debian and Ubuntu came out.

Unfortunately, stock Xboxes lost the ability to run unsigned software through that method in 2009. Any consoles which were tampered with to accept Free60 before the patch got promptly bricked. The above tutorial concerns consoles with a JTAG or RGH modchip.

In 2011, a new method was discovered, dubbed the Reset Glitch Hack.

The Xbox 360 itself has a 3.2 GHz Tri-Core PPC CPU and a custom ATI Xenos GPU - and yes, there are Linux drivers available.

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The Nintendo DS? It runs Linux.

The DSLinux project has ported the Linux operating system to the Nintendo DS and Nintendo DS Lite. Newer models such as DSi and 3DS might work in DS-compatibility mode. Apart from real hardware, DSLinux also runs on some NDS emulators, like desmume.

DSLinux is functional, has excellent documentation, and brings a wealth of useful Linux programs to the DS.

The Nintendo DS was an unusual beast - not only did it have two screens, it also had two different processors! An ARM9 and ARM7, to be exact. The ARM9 did the heavy lifting, while the ARM7 was there to handle Wi-Fi, sound and Game Boy Advance compatibility.

This port of Linux features a couple of basic utilities taken from Blackbox, as well as Irssi and Bitchx, for when you really want to be fancy with your IRC. Additional softtware can be installed by cross-compiling the source files along with the rest of the operating system into a new .nds file that flash carts can boot.

DSLinux is one of the very few pieces of software that supports the Opera Memory Expansion Pak. In fact, it's preferable to run this off a Game Boy Advance flash cart with a Slot-1 passthrough, since the Game Boy Advance flash cartridges usually features about 32 MB of memory.