culberts@hplwbc.hpl.hp.com (Bruce Culbertson) (07/16/90)
Some of you may be wondering what the current status of PC532 Minix is and, especially, what ever happened to the disks you sent me. In early June I sent the first "beta" version to several friends who I could reach conveniently via the internet. These early pioneers were really on their own because I had typed only about one screen's worth of installation notes. Furthermore, the SCSI driver was polled and I was even having occasional trouble with my own disk. The SCSI driver needed considerable further work. In the first few days of July, I sent out two sets of "distribution" version disks to Sverre Froyen and John Connen. At that point, the SCSI driver was interrupt driven and worked reliably with my Seagate ST-277N disk and my OMTI SCSI-to-ST506 controller. Sverre immediately got Minix to boot from the RAM disk but John could not get this configuration to work. We discovered that the last monitor I posted still did not use direct exception mode. I sent John a new monitor which fixed his problems with the diskless version. A current monitor is now part of the distribution. Unfortunately, both Sverre and John had disk problems. I discovered that there is a surprisingly broad range of disk behavior among the various SCSI drives on the market. Eventually, however, we convinced Minix to speak to Sverre's Micropolis 1578-15, and John's CDC Wren III and Maxtor 8380S. During this period, several more requests for disks arrived in the mail but I decided not to distribute any more copies until we had Minix working with a few more disks. Unfortunately, we have not tested the latest Minix with the Miniscribe disk which so many of you have. I hope we have no problems with it. If we do, however, we will fix them. Tomorrow I will be mailing disks to everyone whose requests I have received. The recipients of the disks will benefit considerably from John's and Sverre's suggestions and debugging efforts. I will be mailing disks to: Jesper Brondum Ron Irvine Neil Johnson Robbin Johnson Don Merritt Bert Vincent I have not heard of any bugs in PC-532 Minix aside from SCSI problems and problems which were already in PC-Minix version 1.3. Of course, this is not the same as saying there are no bugs! By the way, of the six people listed above, I can only find an e-mail address for Robbin Johnson. (I lost some. Sorry.) Would the rest please e-mail me your addresses? Also, would anyone else requesting disks in the future please include an e-mail address with your request? Thanks. Bruce