LAP - E-UAE (Text Test)

Let's now try e-uae.  Why the hell would we do that without any kind of graphical user interface having been installed I hear you ask?  Well, the e-uae program has a really interesting, and completely fucking useless, feature.  It can be run without a graphical interface.  It uses the ncurses software to display the amiga video output using the text only terminal.  Oh, yes, you are going to want to see this.  Is it any use?  Fuck no, but it is amusing nonetheless.

umount -v /media/amiga
sudo mkdir /media/lfs
sudo mount -v -t ext3 /dev/disk/by-label/amiga /media/lfs
cd /media/lfs/sources

Make a directory for the amiga software ...

mkdir amiga
chmod -v a+wt amiga

... and move into it and download the amiga emulator.  I should point out at this stage that there is actually a more up to date version of the emulator available. It is in beta though, and I have not tested it yet. I will set out how to download and configure it in an appendix post at the end of the build.

cd amiga
wget http://www.rcdrummond.net/uae/e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4/e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4.tar.bz2

Then reboot into the Amiga Key.  Run the following commands to unpack the Amiga emulator:

cd /sources/amiga
tar -xjvf e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4.tar.bz2
cd e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4

Again, you can autocomplete with [tab] to speed this up.  Now configure the install:

./configure --enable-autoconfig --with-curses | tee config_report.txt 

The [autoconfig] option may not strictly be necessary for this simple test, but I want to keep things as auto as possible, so lets stick it in.  The [curses] tells the configuration that we want to use the text graphics display.  The command then [|] pipes the output to [tee] which sticks it in the [config_report.txt] file.  That way we can peruse that file at our leisure to check for any error messages in the configure report.

Then build with:

make $CORES_TO_USE

I wouldn't actually install the software yet, because we are going to go through a few more configurations before we get one I will be happy with.  The executable file can be found in the [src] directory and it is called [uae].  Test it with:

./src/uae

It will fail.  If you read the failure properly it will tell you that it cannot find a .rom file.  This is the only thing which is stopping it working, but you wouldn't know that from the less than helpful text report.  So I jumped back into the LiveCD Key and copied a 1.3 kickstart rom file, and a 1.3 workbench disk to /root on the Amiga Key.  I renamed them to something very very simple.  I then rebooted to the Amiga Key, moved back to the e-uae sources folder and ran the command again as follows:

cd /sources/amiga/e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4/src
./uae -r ~/1.3.rom

That runs the emulator in default mode with the [r]om file [~/1.3.rom].  And, bugger me.  That looks surprisingly like an Amiga boot screen rendered in text symbols!

Lets try a workbench disk.  First we need to close the emulator.  The only way I would work out how to do that was to find the id number of the [uae] application in a new terminal:

ps aux | grep uae

and then [kill] that application number

kill 1234

Where 1234 is whatever the last command told us was the number.

For some reason that terminal window was rendered useless, so I switched to number 3.  However, thanks to the Ubuntu UK Podcast, I now know I can run the command [reset] when the terminal window is fubarred, and right enough it came back to life! I moved back to the [src] directory and ran [uae] again:

./uae -r ~/1.3.rom -0 ~/1.3.adf

This runs the previous command, with the disk image [~/1.3.adf] loaded in drive df[0]:
A, hahahahahaha, that's Workbench in text!  Completely indecipherable but entertaining nonetheless.  Mouse is non-functional.

Ok, clearly this is entertaining, and the emulator, roms and disks are working, but what we need is a proper graphical interface.  It is time for the X windows system to be installed.  Just tidy up the mess here first:

cd /sources/amiga/
rm -rvf e-uae-0.8.29-WIP4