Mission of this Wiki

I purchased my TT030 in 2008. After I started to investigate getting it up and running with NetBSD, I was surprised to find:
 * The last meaningful discussion thread on the port-atari mailing list was in 2003.
 * The last installable release of NetBSD for the Atari, at least for my TT030, was NetBSD 1.6.1 released in April of 2003.
 * Despite all this, NetBSD continued to release "supported" versions of the Atari port. The 4.0 kernel wouldn't even boot!

I was able to get up and running with NetBSD 1.6.1, learning a lot along the way but also encountering some challenges. I'd like to share what I've learned with the community and create a place where others can do the same, in the hopes that we can move the state of NetBSD on the Atari forward. Already, thanks to hard work from a number of folks on the port-atari mailing list, as of the NetBSD 5.0 release, NetBSD/atari is now fully functional again!

This wiki started off seeded with the lessons I learned in my (ongoing) NetBSD / Atari TT030 adventure. It's very helpful for me to keep all my notes compiled in one place so it's easy for me to do a re-install, etc. By posting it online, hopefully it will be of use to others as well. The wiki is in fact open to contributions from anyone. Please chip in! It would be wonderful to see new folks start experimenting and contributing new helpful information.

One thing I'll note is that this wiki is intending to be more or less specific to the TT030. NetBSD for the Atari was originally developed to run on a number of different Atari platforms. As described above, interest in running NetBSD on any of these platforms seems to have withered since 2003. So to build up interest again (and since I own a TT030...), I think it makes sense to focus specifically on the TT030 for now. IMO, if you're going to get involved with NetBSD on the Atari starting from scratch, making the choice to use the TT030 as your base hardware configuration is ideal. If you happen to use a different Atari platform though, I encourage you to take full advantage of this wiki -- leverage the information here, converse with others, and contribute!

David Ross 07:47, October 24, 2010 (UTC)