vancleef@iastate.edu (Van Cleef Henry H) (03/23/91)
Bought a copy of the Minix 1.5 PH release last week from a student who bought it to learn Unix, found himself in over his head with Minix. Subscribed to this news group to find a scramble of 1300-odd "current" postings, with random dates---trolled through them, but my questions may fall in the FAQ dept. I have Minix installed on an Epson Equity LT laptop, 640K RAM, 2 720K floppies. Astounded that I can do useful work with such a small configuration. I have also looked through what I could find at plains.nodak.edu, have been through the RTFM exercise, etc. It is a switch from dealing with Ultrix 4.?-bis (kernel, commands, X11)--what I get paid for. 1. Configuration. The PH release boot disk says "1.5." and "Copyright 1991". Is this "1.5.10?" What have I got vs. what is in plains.nodak archives and what should I get? 2. 386 version---what does it take to make this a 386 setup? Or will the PH kernel as-is utilize the full width of a 386 address? I take it that the boot disk labelled "AT" boots into protected mode. 3. Readclock doesn't "see" the RT clock (Equity LT is an XT clone with a clock.) Anybody know where clock is located on this machine (the addresses to read)? Otherwise, port to the LT is "clean," though the plain vanilla LT is obsolete. 4. I am looking to buy a barebone 386. Does Minix work OK with the DTK and/or AMI motherboards? I have a lifetime supply of MFM hard disks, so will put Minix on one, "install" it by a program called "HDSWAP", which involves operator intervention (slide out old disk, unplug plugs, install new disk, plug in plugs, boot up machine.) 5. What about ESDI, SCSI? Or do I end up writing my own drivers? 6. I copied the demo program from plains.nodak and put it on a 720K floppy. Disk boots to the menu, but continuing with an "=" causes a panic trap with "cannot find partition table." I assume that the demo program expects to be reading a 360k floppy and is looking for a physical location on the disk. Is this correct? 7. Compilers---how can I go to a load module format? I see comments in the manual about using other compilers and "converting" the output. What format, etc.? I don't see any instructions for setting up gcc for Minix anywhere---or did I miss something? For those who protest that Minix is a "toy," I remember doing serious work on V7 on a PDP-11 (35, as I recall). But then I did not think that a PDP 4/7/9 were "little" back in the 60's. Just glad we don't have to use ASR 33/35 teletypes or Friden Flexowriters as console devices any more. --
mahesh@uts.amdahl.com (Mahesh Veerina) (03/28/91)
In article <1991Mar22.211901.19845@news.iastate.edu> vancleef@iastate.edu (Van Cleef Henry H) writes: > >4. I am looking to buy a barebone 386. Does Minix work >OK with the DTK and/or AMI motherboards? I have been using Minix 1.5.10 on an AMI 386/20MHz for a while now. No problems at all. -- mahesh mahesh@uts.amdahl.com {ames,sun,decwrl,apple}!amdahl!mahesh
ghelmer@dsuvax.uucp (Guy Helmer) (03/29/91)
In article <1991Mar22.211901.19845@news.iastate.edu> vancleef@iastate.edu (Van Cleef Henry H) writes: >4. I am looking to buy a barebone 386. Does Minix work >OK with the DTK and/or AMI motherboards? MINIX 1.5 and 386-MINIX runs fine on my DTK 386sx motherboard. -- Guy Helmer | helmer@sdnet.bitnet Dakota State University | dsuvax!ghelmer@wunoc.wustl.edu (605) 256-5264, (605) 256-2788 | uunet!dsuvax!ghelmer Ahh, if weddings were as easy to design as software...