Hi guy's.

I just thought I might draw your attention to a fantastic project that could do with a bit of new life breathed into it.

It's called LUnix. http://lng.sourceforge.net/

It's an open source project that brings the Linux operating system to the good old Commodore 64, 128 and some of the other good old 8 Bit'ers!

If you have time, please help support this project. Even if you only visit their forums and post a few words of encouragement. It all helps!

.-.-.

I once (about 10 years ago) had big plans to code PPP for Lunix but fortunately Daniel forestalled me. Lunix was the first successful attempts on creating a "full blown" OS on the C64 (that actually worked!) afaik and preceded Contiki and Wings by years. Lunix is also far more a complete OS than the much more popular Contiki, implementing an advanced shell, virtual terminals and true multitasking. Lunix is perhaps one of the most underrated development projects on the C64 in "modern time" and it's a pity it didn't receive proper support.

Maybe it's time to give it a kick start again?

There seems to me a big re-emerging interest in the C64.

The uIEC for example is a fantastic little project that gives the C64 and other 8 bit CBM machines mass storage with SD, SDHC, IDE storage support.

This would be perfect to run Lunix in.

.-.-.

Lunix also runs very well on an IDE64. So the disk access is very fast.

If there would be a way to add C (cc65) based programs / services to that system, I'd rather use Lunix than ContikiOS (me being a UNIX geek anyway). And it is missing support for the TFE / RRnet adapters. Lunix really has some features: 32 tasks at 7 possible priorities etc. Such a pity this is no longer being developed. It would be a nice alternative to ContikiOS.

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LOAD ":*",8,1
READY.
RUN

Lunix was really cool. It is a pity it is no longer developed.

I think I read somewhere about LUnix support for cc65 (maybe on the cc65 mailing list?).

It would be tremendously cool to see further development of LUnix and I'd love to see it work with the 16MB REU function of the 1541 Ultimate.

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Call me Golan; my parents did.

This is indeed possible. IIRC all the sources are available.

Very much agreed. I think it would be great to see what could be done with it further.



Ethernet cart support would be nice too.

Speaking of the LUnix email list, I believe I still have an email address signed up with that... sadly it would seem that the last email post to that list was on October 7, 2006.



Yes, some it seems, the LUnix site states, "Support for o65 object format (it means that apps can be written using cc65 asm and (soon) C suite)".

I don't remember seeing too much (if at all?) on the CC65 email list about that. I'd have to dig through the CC65 list archives when I get the chance.

Posting a link to the format and description for André Fachat's relocatable o65 binary that LUnix uses. It can be found here.

Doing so to keep some LUnix information together in one place.

The latest source is v0.21 which was released less than 5 years ago (good news!). They can be found on Sourceforge, but for some reason they dont seem to be available any more, or perhaps just a temporary error. Maybe you guys have better luck? See http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... e_id=10515


Edit: There are some really old sources (1:st ?) on ftp://ftp.zimmers.net/pub/cbm/c64/os/lunix/ but there are some good info on the code/format there as well to get started....

Indeed!



I tried and was able to download them. Thankfully it must have been a glitch.

Also, I remembered someone was doing a GUI for LUnix and after going through some old bookmarks found the link.

White Flame was working on a GUI with some nice features for LUnix called "Sox". There isn't any download but a screenshot of the GUI he did in BASIC as development code. A direct link to White Flame's Sox page is here. It also doesn't appear that his site has been updated for a while.

Even though there isn't a download I'm still posting about this for LUnix historical reasons (and again to keep all LUnix stuff together in one place).

White Flame, if you happen to see this post, is there anything to add that's not on the page? Status? Etc.

I saw the info at WF's homepage. Unfortunately its been a long time since he updated it.

I took a quick look at the LUnix 0.21 sources and can verify that LUnix has been sporting TCP/IP since 1999. Programming seems pretty straight forward. I'm sure writing a NIC driver would be easy. I'll try to take another look at it this week.

imho there is one big problem with lunix - the development tools used (and needed) to build the sources. they are all very old, have really odd bugs, and noone except daniel understands them completely (the inner workings that is). the first step needed to kickstart lunix development again would be converting all the sources to build with an activly maintained set of tools (the cc65 suite comes to mind here, as it already supports the o65 format etc).

other than that, i think adding a driver for the rr-net should be kinda easy. i added the driver for silversurfer back then, and it was almost trivial

oh, as for lunix using REU or similar - that will be much much harder (except you only use it for "ramdisk" - that should be fairly easy) because lunix doesnt have support for using memory extensions (banked external memory that is).

oh, and the source is a huge pile of undocumented stinking dung (dont even look at the existing documentation, it is way outdated and most of it doesnt apply anymore) - you have been warned =)

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http://hitmen.c02.at/html/tools_rr.html

All in all, it sounds like lots of fun!