37-Year-Old Amiga Platform Gets Linux Kernel Updates, AmigaOS SDK

The last commercial Amiga computer available for sale was the AmigaOne X5000, a PowerPC-based revival machine released in 2017. The Amiga platform itself is 37 years old, but you’d better believe that Amiga fans have the latest Linux kernel, 6.0, running on newer Amiga machines. The first real PC for creativity has a dedicated squad.

On the Hyperion Entertainment forums, developer of the Amiga OS, user Christian, aka xeno74, announced the availability of the final 6.0 kernel for the AmigaOne X5000 and X1000 machines. The announcement featured required images of 3D games such as Cro-Mag Rally and Otto Mattic, as well as system profile images to check for core up-to-dateness. Work on kernel 6.1 alpha builds has already begun further down the branch.

By itself, “Linux is available on fancy hardware”may not be all that surprising, but there are other encouraging developments in the Amiga space worth noting.

Hyperion has announced the release of a “very substantial and comprehensive update”of the AmigaOS 4.1 54.16 SDK for those who prefer to keep the basic Amiga look and feel on their system. The update includes new gcc compilation options, Simplegit and Subversion management tools, and general updates to many tools.

It’s also worth noting that the “biggest Amiga event”happened again over the weekend for the first time since the pandemic. The Amiga37 conference, held in Mönchengladbach, Germany, brought together about 50 exhibitors, talks, awards, and a performance by The Fastloaders. The conference website stated that the venue was “next to ALDI SÜD”.

The Amiga is unlikely to see a mainstream audience again, but the energy of its fans is inspiring and perhaps a lesson for today’s niche systems. As Jeremy Reimer wrote at the beginning of his 12-part Amiga story, people who give their time and energy to a system whose parent company went bankrupt in the late 1990s do so for a reason:

The Amiga computer was a dream come true: an inexpensive, fast, flexible multimedia computer that could do just about anything. It handled graphics, sound, and video as easily as other computers of the day handled plain text. He was easily ten years ahead of his time. It was everything that its creators imagined, except for one important problem: the world, in fact, did not know about its existence… .

To many people (modern development) efforts seem futile, even stupid. But for those who understand who was there and survived the Amiga in its prime, they do not seem foolish at all.

Thanks to Slashdot for noting this convergence of modern Amiga-dom.