{"id":530693,"date":"2026-07-08T05:16:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T05:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/530693\/"},"modified":"2026-07-08T05:16:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T05:16:15","slug":"the-atari-jaguar-runs-linux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/530693\/","title":{"rendered":"The Atari Jaguar Runs Linux"},"content":{"rendered":"

Among the many forgotten might-have-beens of the games console world, the Atari Jaguar occupies a special place. It was the final gasp of Atari Corporation, the Jack Tramiel-era incarnation of the famous pioneering game console brand that brought us the ST line of computers, and like Marlon Brando\u2019s Terry Malloy character from On the Waterfront, it coulda been a contender. But the early \u201990s games business wasn\u2019t kind to the console from Sunnyvale, and it was squeezed from behind by the SNES and Genesis\/MegaDrive, and in front from the PlayStation. Thirty years later then, can it run Linux<\/a>? [Cakehonolulu] is here to show us how.<\/p>\n

With only 2 megabytes of RAM and space for 8 megabytes of ROM, this is hardly a powerhouse. But its 16-bit 68000 processor is a supported Linux architecture, albeit with the -nommu flag on compilation. The \u201cJerry\u201d DSP chip has the required serial port and timer to boot a first Linux kernel, and after a bit of hackery to make it jump to the ROM location, something boots. There\u2019s no init process until the flat executable file for a -nommu kernel is navigated, but with that past a BusyBox userspace and a graphics driver for the \u201cTom\u201d graphics chip gives it a chunky on-screen console. The code can be found in a GitHub repository<\/a>, for the curious.<\/p>\n

It seems to be the moment for 68k consoles to receive the Linux treatment, as it\u2019s only a few weeks since we saw it on a MegaDrive<\/a>. Other \u201990s consoles aren\u2019t far behind though, with the Nintendo 64 falling to the penguin<\/a> a few years ago. Meanwhile, the Dreamcast had Linux running decades ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Jaguar image: Evan-Amos, Public domain<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Among the many forgotten might-have-beens of the games console world, the Atari Jaguar occupies a special place. It…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":530694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[85,46,125],"class_list":["post-530693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/530694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}