Amiga Unix — 68040 · 68060

Year of the Amiga Unix Desktop 2026

Amiga UNIX, again

Amigaux.org is a compilation of hobby projects trying to make Commodore's original Amiga UNIX more easily accessible, and to get it running on newer Amiga hardware.

Amiga Unix was Commodore's System V Release 4 for the Amiga. It was notoriously picky on hardware and was basically only installable on the original hardware it was shipped on: the A2500UX and A3000UX.

By asokero, isoriano1968 and jusii.

Why?

The short answer: we couldn't think of a more useless project.

The longer answer: Amiga UNIX is a mostly forgotten corner of Amiga history. It was only around for a couple of years between 1990 and 1992. Unlike AmigaOS it pretty much vanished the moment Commodore stopped working on it. In the 30+ years since, a handful of people have tried installing it and poking at it, but for understandable reasons nobody really built anything new on top of it. Originally the system was expensive and rare and owned by very few. Therefore it was natural that it never picked up the nostalgia that AmigaOS did.

We still think Amiga UNIX is an interesting piece of the story. This project is basically about getting familiar with an old, forgotten system and getting it running on better hardware. The point is to make Amiga UNIX run on newer Amiga machines and keep a bit of its heritage alive while we're at it.

But wouldn't it be better to spend time on Linux or *BSD?

This project is specifically about Amiga UNIX and preserving it as a piece of Amiga and computing history. It isn't meant to be serious, or even particularly sensible, but then neither is using an Amiga in 2026. If you need a computer for actual work, please use a more modern one.

What works today

In progress: RTG graphics for the Z3660, ethernet throughput in the accelerator firmware, X11R6.3 and Mesa as packages, a read-only CD filesystem, and install-media polish. After that, a native modern gcc on the box, RTG on the real accelerator and the packaged X11/Mesa stack — and then the full launch here: packages, source, instructions and manuals.

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
Installing on a real 68060. Keymap, disk, partition sizes, package set — then it shows you what it is about to do. Real time, with the long waits taken out.
First boot. It names itself, sets the clock, writes its hosts file — including the package repository — and comes up at a login prompt.

Can I get Amiga UNIX running on hardware X?

Probably. For the CPU, the main question is whether it has working MMU support. Emulating an MMU is tricky and slow, so at the moment a real CPU is likely always the fastest option.

Is this just AI slop?

Many components of this project lean on AI a lot, and there's no point pretending otherwise. It isn't a requirement, though, and some of the drivers were written the old-fashioned way. Without it, most of what's here simply wouldn't be realistic, or motivating, in the time we have available — which is probably why development on Amiga UNIX died in the first place. And even with the help of AI, most of the projects here have taken months of work and a lot of testing on real hardware. AI does change the way one can work on totally crazy projects such as these.

How can I help?

Come say hi on the #AMIX channel of the Amiga.dev Discord, or in the Amiga Unix section of the EAB forums.

The kernel

Drivers and hardware

Graphics and X11

Built on

Tools and docs