Minix F.A.Q 1.5


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MINIX 1.5 FEATURES

(IBM, Macintosh, Atari, Amiga and SparcStation versions)

ADDITIONAL FEATURES

In addition to the above features, there are other features present in some (but not all) versions of MINIX 1.5. Some of these are listed below.

ADDITIONAL MINIX 1.5 FEATURES (MACINTOSH VERSION):

ADDITIONAL MINIX 1.5 FEATURES (ATARI ST VERSION)

ADDITIONAL MINIX 1.5 FEATURES (SUN SPARCSTATION VERSION)

HARDWARE REQUIRED

Macintosh
Apple Macintosh Plus, SE, SE/30, II, IIcx, or IIx with at least 1M of RAM. An additional 1M of RAM and a hard disk is strongly recommended. MINIX has been tested primarily with version 6.0 and latter of the Apple system software. Problems may conceivably arise with earlier versions. Any hard disk or display that is supported by the normal Macintosh OS is also supported by MINIX.
Atari
Atari ST or Mega ST with at least 1M of RAM. Although the system will boot with only 512K, you will be very restricted in what you can do. A 720K diskette drive is required to install the software. The older 360K diskette drives are supported, but are not capable of reading the (720K) distribution disks. A hard disk is supported, but is optional. Some of the Supra hard disks are not Atari compatible, which can cause problems. A fix is available from the MINIX Centre.
Amiga
Commodore Amiga 500 or 2000 with at least 1M of RAM. One 720K diskette drive is sufficient. A hard disk is not required (or even supported). To use a hard disk with the Amiga, someone familiar with how this disk works will have to write a driver for it. If this driver is then posted to the net, it will be possible to use a hard disk with MINIX on the Amiga. Minix will NOT run on 68020 and larger Amiga systems.
Sparc:
Sun SparcStation 1, 1+ or IPC. Does NOT run on a SparcStation 2 and has not yet been tested on a SLC, IPX or ELC. A floppy disk drive is required, a SCSI hard disk is not required but strongly recommended to take full advantage of the system. 4MB RAM is sufficient to run Minix, up to 64MB is supported. The monochrome framebuffer (bw2) as well as a color framebuffer (cg3 or cg6) are supported. SCSI hard disks can be used and even booted from. Ethernet, mouse and audio are not supported. Printers can only be connected via a serial port.

PARTIAL LIST OF UTILITIES INCLUDED IN MINIX 1.5

animals ar ascii at atrun backup badblocks banner basename bawk btoa cal cat cdiff cgrep chgrp chip chmem chmod chown clr cmp comm compress cp cpdir crc cron ctags cut date dd de df dhrystone diff diskcheck dosdir dosread doswrite du echo ed elle ex expand expr factor fgrep file find fold fortune fsck gather getlf getty grep gres head ic id ifdef indent inodes kill last leave ln login look lpr ls m4 machine mail make man mined mkdir mkfs mknod modem more mount mref mv nm nroff od passwd paste patch pr prep pretty printenv printroot ps pwd readall readfs recover ref rev rm rmdir roff rz sed shar size sleep sort spell split strings strip stty su sum sync sz tail tar tee term termcap test time touch tr traverse treecmp true tset tsort ttt umount unexpand uniq unshar update users uud uue vi vol wc whatsnew whereis which who whoami width write

PARTIAL LIST OF LIBRARY FUNCTIONS INCLUDED IN MINIX 1.5

abort abs access alarm atoi atol bcmp bcopy chmod chown chroot ctermid ctime ctype curses cuserid doprintf dup dup2 fgetc fgets fopen fork fpathconf fprintf fputc fputs fread freopen fseek fstat ftell fwrite getcwd getdents getegid getenv geteuid getgid getutil gtty index ioctl isatty kill link lock lrand lsearch lseek malloc memccpy memchr memcmp memcpy memmove memset message mkdir mkfifo mknod mktemp nlist open opendir pathconf pause peekpoke perror rand read readdir regexp regsub rename setbuf setgid setjmp setuid signal sleep sprintf stat strerror strlen strncat strncmp strncpy strpbrk strrchr strspn system telldir termcap time times tmpnam ttyname umask umount

CONTENTS OF MINIX 1.5 REFERENCE MANUAL

  Chap.  1 INTRODUCTION
  Chap.  2 INSTALLING MINIX ON THE IBM PC, XT, AT, 386, AND PS/2
  Chap.  3 INSTALLING MINIX ON THE ATARI S
  Chap.  4 INSTALLING MINIX ON THE COMMODORE AMIGA
  Chap.  5 INSTALLING MINIX ON THE APPLE MACINTOSH
  Chap.  6 USING MINIX
  Chap.  7 RECOMPILING MINIX
  Chap.  8 MANUAL PAGES
  Chap.  9 EXTENDED MAN PAGES
  Chap. 10 SYSTEM CALLS
  Chap. 11 NETWORKING
  App.   A MINIX SOURCE CODE LISTING
  App.   B CROSS REFERENCE MAP

MINIX BOOK

The author of MINIX, Andrew S. Tanenbaum, has written a book describing how operating systems in general and MINIX in particular work internally. The book describes an earlier version (and includes a source listing), but it is still useful for understanding how MINIX works inside, even if some details are now different. The bibliographic information is:
     Title:      Operating Systems: Design and Implementation
     Author:     Andrew S. Tanenbaum
     Publisher:  Prentice-Hall
     ISBN:       0-13-637406-9
Paperback versions are also available in English (outside North America only), French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Japanese. The books can be ordered from any bookstore.

SunOS Minix

SunOS Minix is a version of Minix that runs as a user process on Sun 3s and 4s running SunOS 4.X. In SunOS Minix, the processor time used is the time allocated to the SunOS process running SunOS Minix, each file system is a SunOS file, and the console is /dev/tty of the SunOS process. Also, it is possible for multiple users to log into a single instance of SunOS Minix.

SunOS Minix runs as a user process, so does not require a dedicated machine. Also, multiple instance of SunOS Minix can run on a single machine simultaneously without interfering with each other.

SunOS Minix is produced by applying a set of patches to Mac Minix 1.5 (both 1.5.10.0 and 1.5.10.1 can be used) or PC Minix 1.5. Also, Atari Minix has been used as the base version by at least one person. The SunOS Minix patches are available via anonymous ftp from csc.canterbury.ac.nz in the file SMX_2_00.TAR_Z in the UNIX directory.

Also in version 2 of SunOS Minix is our first efforts at providing support for Solaris 2.0.

Any enquiries should be sent to paul@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz. There is a SunOS Minix mailing list. Postings and admin requests for the mailing list should be sent to the same address.


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