Linux on Amiga 1200

21 Mar 2015

One of the things I want to do is get Linux to run on my Amiga 1200.

I found a forum post by Adrian Glaubitz that explains the installation of Debian. I followed the instructions but some of the required files were no longer available at the URLs given in the forum post. I contacted Adrian and got an immediate response (thanks again!) pointing me to the new location of the files.

Now I was able to boot into Linux on my Amiga 1200. However, as you can see in the video below, the kernel panicks because it cannot mount the root filesystem. I quickly received useful responses to a mail that I sent to the Debian project’s mailinglist for the M68K port. As it turns out, the Linux kernel that I used does not have support for storage devices attached to the Amiga via PCMCIA.

Installing Linux “for real” on my Amiga 1200 is a project for another weekend as I need to get a USB to RS-232 adapter cable first in order to use my ThinkPad X1 Carbon notebook as a serial console for Linux running on the Amiga.