Unix / Linux on 680x0

A nerdy Saturday night, digging up more and more information on alternative O/S on the Atari 680x0 range. I already was familiar with a Linux distribution (see The Linux/m68k Home Pages), but this will be reserved for one of my TT's as my Falcon's don't have an FPU (yet). But on my quest for information I stumbled upon NetBSD/atari, a port of NetBSD to the Atari line of personal computers. Currently, NetBSD/atari runs on the TT030, Falcon and Hades. Experimental support is available for the Milan. It seems there's a lot of nice alternatives to explore!

Nice interview with the father of MiNT

During the installation of EasyMint I was looking for some background information about the history of Mint and dug up this nice interview with Mr Eric R. Smith by Konrad M. Kokoszkiewicz: MiNT is Now TOS

Installing Mint from CD not as easy as I thought

After I prepared my Falcon for installation (see former post) I started the Easymint installation from CD. First part succeeded without any issues, but after it tried to restart loading Mint I got a fatal exeption and Easymint wasn't able to continue installing from CD. I tried fixing it manually for some time, setting up CD support in Mint with the correct drivers (I thought), but I ended up with a half finished setup.

Well, I changed strategy, repartitioned my harddrive (4 x 512MB GEM partitions and 4 x F32/LNX partitions equally divided left over diskspace) and copied over the Easymint installation to D:. Installation started, C: became startup partition and J: as a LNX partition became EXT2 for Mint.

During installation I selected XaAES and TeraDesk to be installed as well. All packages were selected for installation as well (basic, standard, develop, libs, net and X11). Right now it is still running the installation, it takes quite some time :-). Until now one error in the develop.tar:
Installing m4-1.4.1-1.m68kmint.rpm!
Error during installation of m4-1.4.1-1.m68kmint.rpm
install-info: No such file or directory for /usr/info/m4.info.gz
excution of m4-1.4.1-1 script failed, exit status 1
I'll try to figure out what is means and how to fix it, but this will not worry me immediately as developing for / under Mint is long term planning for me...

Falcon souped up for (Easy)Mint

Aah, today I had some time to collect some hardware to enhance functionality of one of my Falcons. Magic ran fine on it, but I was unable to get networking up and running under Magic with my Dayna Pocket SCSI/Link. What I've read this week is that is should be easier to get it up and running under Mint.

So, to get Mint on this Falcon I first upgraded my Falcon with a bigger harddisk. The original 60MB doesn't cut the cheese, so I grabbed a 60GB IDE laptop harddisk, formatted and partitioned it (C: = 200MB (type = BGM) and four more partitions equally divided (type = F32)) and all was fine.

Then I hooked up Yamaha SCSI CDWriter, iOmega 250MB zipdrive and the Dayna Pocket SCSI/Link. Configuring all this equipment with HDDriver 8 was a breeze. Finally, to be able to start installing I needed to setup CD drivers as single TOS doesn't support such drives natively. After a bit of a search for MetaDos, Spin! and the correct settings, here I am ready for Mint! Hope to post a succes story soon...

Magic instead...

...of Mint. Today I started to re-install one of my Falcon's (a standard Falcon only upgraded to 14MB of internal memory) instead of one of my TT's as posted before. I was ready to start installing Mint, but after I saw the size of the different packages I decided against it. Because the Falcon is not linked to my local network, does not have a CDRom unit linked to it and my PC's don't have SCSI connectivity to share the ZIP-drive, transfering the Easymint package to the Falcon would be quite a challenge with HD floppies :-\

So I searched for my second hand version of Magic v6.2 and within a couple of minutes it was up and running on the Conner 84MB harddrive (needs to be upgraded I know :-)). Immediately after that Jinnee v2.5 was installed, cause the Magix desktop coming default with the Magic install is of no use for me. Finishing off with NVDI 5.01 and I had a clean nice looking install on the Falcon.

Now I'm going through my large collection of applications to see what software to load onto the machine...

Next week when the university I attend closes for the holidays I will have more time to hook up some additional hardware to the Falcon (CDRom, bigger harddisk, Pamsnet, etc.) making it easier to install Mint as I had planned for today!

Nice free midi / music software

During a quick search on the internet I stumbled upon some nice free midi / music software from Electronic Cow. A short list:

• EC-909 is an analogue drum machine and bass line generator
• Sound Chip Synth is a real-time software-based monophonic analogue-style synthesizer that uses the built-in FM sound chip inside the ST
• Charming Chaos is an algorithmic MIDI sequencer, with a built-in DNA Seed Construction tool that enables you to create your own algorithms

Unfortunately Electronic Cow is no longer in business. Their last lines:
"We'd like to say a huge thank you to all the folk who supported the Cow Project over the past three years. It's been fun... we've never been in it for the money, but because we lost quite a lot of it and because we no longer have any more time to spare (so don't expect upgrades, bug-fixes or new software), putting out all this software for free for everyone to enjoy seemed like a sensible idea."
Maybe you can send a 'thank you' to their email address when downloading and using their software! (E-mail: software@cow-net.co.uk)

Tweaking the blog some more before posting some real findings

Today I'll tweak this blog some more with personal information, links to interesting sites and more. Next week I hope to post some real findings on installing Easymint fresh on a Atari TT. I'm not sure which TT I'm gonna use... the original with 4 MB ST-ram and 64MB of TT-ram or the cased TT with 4MB ST-ram and 4MB TT-ram but with Nova graphics card. Hard choice... if you prefer one of the two machines to let me draw up an installation story (guide), please leave your comment!

First post to open this blog

First post, with one question: why a blog about Atari TOS in 2007?

I am a long time Atari user, started with an 800XL back in the 80's. Today I'm still enjoying my Atari's, especially the ST / TT / Falcon line. It seems however less people know these computers and knowledge might get lost. Sure, there are still a lot of sites and forums with a load of usage and collected knowledge, but I discovered I'm not sharing all my knowledge and experience at these sites. So I thought it would be a good idea to force myself to maintain a blog and write down as much day to day stories about me and my Atari's.

The things I want to cover in this blog are hardware developments for the TOS platform, and software developments like alternative desktops, replacement OS'es and emulators.

So, enough about things to come. Right now I will tweak the layout of the blog some more and hope to post a real valuable post soon. Leave comments if you like, it may encourage me even more to update the blog as often as possible...