[ IOBlix driver | Paula audio driver | System installer ]
What is NetBSD?
NetBSD is an open-source UNIX-like OS that runs on several architectures. As its name suggests, it is based on the BSD UNIX flavour. Of course NetBSD runs also on 68k Amigas (see NetBSD-amiga).
I've started using NetBSD since version 0.9. The current formal release at the time of this writing is 1.5. I'm tracking the "current" source tree and I've done a little kernel hacking so far. I wouldn't call myself an experienced UNIX hacker, but I'm doing my best to learn more on the NetBSD kernel.
Contributions to NetBSD
I've revised the original aucc.c to support some more input formats and to play with 14bit precision on the 8bit DACs of the Amiga custom chips, using a well known technique. This work has been inspired by AHI.
Here you can get the source code of the new driver: aucc.c [29KB]
This improved aucc driver has been incorporated in the official kernel sources as of release 1.4.
The IOBlix is a nice multi I/O board for the Amiga Zorro bus. It's based on the ST16654 UART and provides 4 high speed serial ports and 2 parallel ports.
Here's a patch you can apply to the NetBSD-current source tree to add IOBlix support into the kernel: NetBSD-IOBlix.diff
Sysinst is a menu driven curses installer for NetBSD. Several architectures use it to simplify the installation process. As of 1.4, the Amiga port was still using a shell script because specific support for the Amiga was lacking in sysinst. Here you can download an experimental version of sysinst for the Amiga. To test it, you need to copy the binary in your miniroot filesystem.