[smcl]

That's peculiar that a pre-baked linux distro for Amiga would require an FPU to boot. Off the top of my head I can't think why that would be :S

[kjs3]

The kernel is required to support FP instructions, either through emulation (processor would trap them) or an FPU. Early on, no one had ported the emu code to Linux 68k, but even later emulation (done by Roman Zippel) could be hit-or-miss, so it was pretty common to not be able to boot without a real FPU.