Amiga 3000UX first impressions

[John B. Sobernheim]

   I have seen the light and it is called /usr/amiga/bin/fractal

	We received a 3000UX the other day.  As far as I know this is
a saleable unit (I am a dealer), one of the first.  The following are my
impressions of the machine so far.  

	The Amiga 3000UX that we received is configured with 9 MB's of
RAM, 1MB of Chip and 8MB's of Fast (using 1mbitx4 zips).  It has a
200MB Hard Drive.  The Ethernet Board was also included and installed.
(From the brochure my dad got at Comdex, I had thought the Ethernet
board would be an optional pheripheral).  It comes with three manuals;
Installing Amiga UNIX, Learning Amiga UNIX, and, Using Amiga UNIX.
Unix.  There is a short command reference manual included.  There is a
single page saying that this is a BETA release of the software and 
manuals and that the user is eligible for a free upgrade to version 1.0
of the software and manuals (For a $50.00 media replacement/shipping and
handling charge :-).  The version of Unix in this A3000UX was 
BETA 3j.  An errata page listing known bugs and problems was also 
included.  Finally, there were two 3.5" floppy disks (3000UX Boot & Root
File System) and an install tape cartridge as well as the standard Amiga
software and manuals.  The system was preloaded with Unix.  I set up the 
system with a 1950 Color Monitor and the A2232 multiple serial port card.  

	By holding down both mouse buttons on boot, I was able to boot 
into AmigaDos 1.3 and 2.0.  The Work: partition was set up as a circa 
21MB partition. 

	By rebooting the machine without holding down the mouse buttons, it
booted into Unix.  (On the first boot, it went through a configuration 
script asking about network setup, passwords, etc.  I was absent through
this procedure).  When it got to the login prompt, I logged in as root,
and used the SYSADM (Similar to FACE on 3.2x Unix) interface to add a
new user and home directory called tcr.  It created a /home/tcr directory
and set up ksh as the default shell.  

	First thing I did, as tcr, was lock up the console :-).  I tried,
and succeeded, to run Xwindows, but I forgot that I needed some sort 
of interface to it, ie. Xterm, Open Look, etc.  After TURNING OFF THE
POWER and going through a palm sweating fsck on reboot, I read the manual
a little and found that we have virtual terminals in Amiga Unix.  If you
hit left-alternate-F1_through_F8, you can have eight (or ten, depending
on how you configure it) virtual terminals into Amiga Unix.  When I locked
up the one virtual terminal by trying to run X, all I should of done was
log in under another virtual terminal (left-alt-F2) and kill the task.
Live and learn.

	Shortly after this, I found (by reading the manual) a script called
oladduser which added all the stuff to my home directory and set up paths
to allow me to run Open Look.  I got Open Look up and spent the rest of
the day, trying to get it up in more than one bit-plane.  I was not
successful.  (If anyone knows what I need to do please mail me!)  A couple 
of decent tech/unix guys came in and we all played with the machine some 
more.  I asked them about my problems with X and they said, "right" :-).  

	We found a neat thing in SysVR.4 where when doing a 'ls -al' it now
shows links in the format of file -> file.  (file [is linked to] file).
There are a large number of man pages included in the installation, a
variety of games including nethack and adventure in /usr/games, amiga
specific files in /usr/amiga, troff, gcc and cc.  The default $PATH
doesn't seem to include the users current directory, which is interesting.
(I think it has to do with /etc/profile and /usr/bin/ksh.  ie. In /etc/
profile it says something like if shell is rsh or csh, do this, it doesn't
do it if shell is ksh.  Anyway I haven't gotten around to checking that
out).  I compiled hello.c with gcc and cc.  A customer came in and we
stuck a #pragma in to see if gcc would try and invoke nethack or something,
it didn't appear to.  Another customer found a man page for nawk (new Awk) 
but couldn't find the program itself.  There is a spreadsheet included in
the distribution.  News software is included in the distribution, I didn't 
check to see what other communications software was included... kermit, 
umodem, etc.

	We played around with tty monitors and servers and got a login prompt
out to a 2500 running vt100.  My UnixPC, that's on the net, is all the way
on the other side of the store and I haven't gotten up on it yet.  /etc/
inittab has entries for the built in serial port and the A2232 multiple
serial port card.  The built in serial port is referred to as /dev/term/ser.
/etc/inittab also has entries for all of the virtual screens calling a
program called /usr/amiga/bin/getscr as the "getty".

	All this time I hadn't seen a single color other than the standard
console screen of 640x200xblackxgold, the F2 - F8 Screens of varying 
resolutions and colors (ie. F5 is 640x400xblackxwhite) and the Open Look
screen of 640x400xblackxwhite.  A half hour after the store closed last
night I ran it... /usr/amiga/bin/fractal.  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! It is
an Amiga. :-)

	There is a device called /dev/amiga that let's the developer access
the Amiga's Hardware, I think.. the manual warns about it's usage however.

	Anyway, I hope this serves to whet ya'lls collective appetites.  Any
questions/problems I can help with, please mail me.  If anyone would like,
I can post files like /etc/inittab, directories, etc.
-- 
John Sobernheim   ...boulder!tcr!news || news at tcr.UUCP
The Computer Room ...CIS 76625,1210 
Denver, Colorado  ...But moma, that's where the fun is! (Manfred Man)