exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

stephen_usher wrote: 24 Dec 2025 18:27 It's still working!

stephen_usher wrote: 28 Dec 2025 10:10 And, after a few days away, and being paranoid, I thought I'd test the 800XL again... All still working. Phew!

I declare it fixed. :-)

stephen_usher wrote: 29 Dec 2025 15:49 While I'm waiting on the 8 bit Atari things to arrive I thought I'd have a go at installing NetBSD on the TT, mostly so as to compare it with Debian Linux but also it seems that X will run under it on the TT.

Well, that was a bit of a journey. Firstly the install documentation is so out of date to be absolutely wrong about getting started. In the end I worked out that there was a boot floppy image, but it was 1.44MB and not 720K. Finding how the loadbsd program worked was also fun, not helped by the ISO image from the NetBSD repository having long names for everything which TOS couldn't show.

The next fun thing was that the installer, although partly aware of non-BSD partition tables failed very quickly whilst trying to set up the partitions for the system and then tried to install a boot block, which failed of course. In the end I manually created the root partition filesystem. Once this was done I could start on the "reinstall", as this is the only option which would work. Oh, and then we come back to the CD ISO file... All the filenames were uppercased but the installer required lowercase, except for the kernel packages which required specific mixed case. Well, after about 6 CD burns I was able to get the system installed.

After some manual reconfiguring and killing fccache and postfix start-ups I was able to log into the running system.... which is incredibly slow. Debian Linux is probably three times the speed. Yes, it's that slow. However, amazingly the NetUSBee-Lite networking works with my filter card in place.


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Talking about slow, I had to kill the font cache start-up as after an hour it still hadn't finished, with hardly any drive activity. According to ktruss it was spending most of the time doing lightweight thread system calls. Similarly makemandb spends hours doing very little I/O but churning away.

I managed to get the X server from another site and install that without much hassle.

X, although painfully slow, does work both in TT-Medium and TT-High and the the latter looks really nice. Now, if I can get the performance issues fixed this would be a nice UNIX machine. :-)


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Steve wrote: 29 Dec 2025 16:32 Did you try the official Atari UNIX on your TT?