Tintin, the Linux-Running Amiga 1200

Until recently, my primary computer for use at home was the Commodore Amiga 1200 that I bought jointly with my brother in about 1992. It’s physically located in Dunedin, New Zealand, and tends to be known as Tintin to its local DNS, SMB and AppleTalk colleagues.

Hardware

Tintin has the following hardware, as if you’re interested:

CPU: 50 MHz Motorola MC68060, on phase5 Blizzard accelerator card
Memory: 2 MB Chip, 24 MB 32-bit Fast
Storage:
- 1 GB Maxtor 71084 A internal IDE hard disk
- 2.1 GB Quantum Fireball ST SCSI hard disk (mounted externally)
- iomega zip 100 external SCSI removable media drive
SCSI: phase5 SCSI-Kit IV fast wide SCSI-II host adapter
Ethernet: CNet CN40BC (10base2/10baseT, PCMCIA)
Modem: not any more (see here)
Monitor: A rather ancient NEC MultiSync II monitor, shared with at least one other computer

Operating System

These days it normally runs Linux (or more specifically Debian GNU/Linux), being used as a file and WWW server by my new PC and a couple of older Apple Macintosh computers that also live here, and of course as a general computing toolkit. It used to be used as an Internet gateway, but that task has now been taken over by Nestor. Tintin really only gets booted into AmigaDOS when I need to run Mac software (courtesy of Shapeshifter), and it also runs NetBSD on occasion. Actually, installing and running NetBSD on Tintin in the mid-1990s was my first “FreeNix” experience.

Still, there are features of AmigaDOS that I really miss, even on UNIX/Windows/Macintosh, and I’ve yet to see the mail client that can top YAM. What I really need is enough decent computers to run every OS at once…(donations are welcome).

Questions, comments, compliments, or complaints? Send Internet e-mail to “cme at ihug dot co dot nz”.