Commodore's forgotten Amiga Unix gets a modern revival

A vintage Unix window manager and an entire vintage UNIX operating system that uses it have received modern updates. Yes, AI helped, but we're here for it. The Commodore Amiga is one of the best-loved computers of the 1980s: The Register celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2015. Its many fans remember it primarily as a home computer and, in its day, the ultimate games machine. Later in the Amiga's life, however, Commodore hoped to sell its more powerful models as Unix workstations. In 1991, Commodore released Amiga Unix, better known as Amix. It was a full port of AT&T UNIX System V Release 4 for a high-end version of the Amiga 3000 called the Amiga 3000UX. A Commodore brochure [PDF] was titled "Commodore A3000UX: Born to run UNIX SVR4." To give you an idea of just how early this was, Amix shipped on DC6150 quarter-inch cartridge tape, so a clean installation required a Commodore 3070 tape drive. CD-ROM drives weren't mainstream yet. Despite the Amiga's video prowess, the built-in ECS video of this $4,998 machine could only run X11 in black and white. Commodore later offered color support through the optional A2410 graphics card, which cost another $998. Amix was a niche product, and relatively few Amiga enthusiasts remember it today. At the one-day Saku 2026 Amiga conference in Oulu, Finland, last weekend, an intrepid group of hackers announced a new update for Amix. It is available from AmigaUX.org. Commodore's final release was Amix 2.1 in 1992, and it looked like this. The original kernel uses 68030-specific instructions omitted from later Motorola processors, so Amix will not boot on newer machines such as a 68040-equipped Amiga 4000. The update includes a modified kernel for 68040 and 68060 processors, along with changes that allow Commodore's historical bootloader source code to be compiled with GCC on Linux. It adds native support for Zorro III cards and other peripherals unavailable to the original release. There is also an updated unix_boot bootloader, based on Markus Wild's 2002 version, and a refreshed toolchain. A new package manager, apkg, can fetch software over an internet connection. The site details the updated packages, while documentation is collected in the Amix Grimoire. Much of the work comes from three intrepid Finns: Antti Sokero, "isoriano1968", and "Jussi", with what Jussi calls "very heavy use of AI in reverse engineering." If the goal is simply to run a modern Unix relative on original Amiga hardware, NetBSD 11 has a native Amiga port. Indeed, when The Reg FOSS desk first wrote about NetBSD, we noted that version 9.3 could run a graphical desktop on an Amiga. NetBSD is considerably more modern, and Amix was never noted for its speed. NetBSD can outperform it. Amix was historically significant because it appeared as high-end home computers began to overlap with the lower end of the workstation market, as Carl "Datagubbe" Svensson notes when examining the rumored Sun/Commodore deal around Amix. Open Look modernized too Amix came with the Open Look window manager. In 1988, BYTE magazine went Face to Face with Open Look, asking whether it "could make Unix friendly after all these years." Toma tih, whose GEM for Linux we examined earlier this month, has also been adapting Open Look to compile with modern FOSS tools. His GitHub repository remains active. On Reddit, "idevnull" has managed to build and run it on FreeBSD 15.1, and we think the result looks gorgeous. We're looking forward to seeing new releases of either or both projects. (R)