jkh@bambam.pcs.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) (02/01/91)
My efforts to join the ranks of Amiga Minix users have not been easy, I'm afraid. First, I had absolutely no luck at all with Prentice-Hall's U.K. distribution office (International Book Distributors, Ltd): After an initial delay of some 3 months (partly due to the fact that Amiga Minix was still in the "announced" phase and not in the "shipping" phase), I finally received Minix version 1.5 for the IBM PC. The invoice clearly stated "Minix 1.5 for the Amiga", but that was most definately not what I got. A few phone calls ensued, and at some point IBD conceded that they had made a mistake and if I would be so good as to send it BACK, they'd send me a correct copy. This I did, incurring another DM50 in postage costs from Germany -> U.K., but what the heck, in for a penny in for a pound, as they say.. Three more months passed. Numerous phone calls. Package somehow now stated as missing in shipping and receiving. I'm out L125. More phone calls. Postal records are tracked down. Finally talk to someone who says that the mystery package has been located and I've been granted a "refund". Oh. I wanted MINIX, not the money? Well, we could certainly start the order process over again from the beginning if I wanted.. Ahem. "No thanks, " says I, I've learned my lesson (and still have yet to see any sign of that "refund", not to mention the DM50 I'm out for postage). Color me an unsatisfied customer, eh? So. I finally went out last week and purchased a copy from a local store for DM298, actually a bit cheaper than the british "direct from PH" price (about DM75 cheaper). Fancy that. Pity it took as long as it did to get into the stores or I could have done that in the first place. Get it home, boot it up, GRONK. Hmm. Yup, kernel definately blown. Good think I'd read about that in advance, eh? Sort of a pity that the thing didn't even come with an errata slip (they had over six months to stick one in) though - what if I'd been Joe Blow off the street without USENET access? I'd be more than a bit upset, I daresay. Download new kernel that Steven was so kind as to post to the net and bring it up. Yippe! Boots! Hmmm. Better back up them there disks. Lesse, use transfer -f to format disks (so says the manual), then diskcopy. Zilch. Diskcopy reports errors left right up and down. Check diskettes for media errors (and these are brand-new Sony 2DD diskettes). None. Hmmmmm(!). How am I going to duplicate these damn things?? Try a software nibble copier - no good. Disks "appear" to be copied, but root disk copy loads veeery slowly and then hangs. This doesn't happen with original, so we're hosed there. Then I try a *hardware assisted* copier (the Syncro Express). NO GO! Same results, in fact. Finally, in desperation, I try the nibble copier again. It works! Hmmmmmmm!! Try long and laborious elimination-trial process that I won't go into here (except that it took all night) that finally reveals that (for me, at least), disk can ONLY be copied if the Syncro Express is used first to "format" the disk and then the nibble copier is used to lay down the data. For some reason, neither one alone does the trick. Sigh. Anyway, no matter, the thing works and I have my backups.. Time to TEST it. cd /usr/test... /usr/test? Where is /usr/test? Mentioned in the manual, in the AMIGA section (no, I haven't gone into the Macintosh section by mistake), but it just ain't there. Double sigh. Oh well, let's evaluate this thing anyway.. Response isn't the zippiest, but it sort of works.. Let's do a "ps", that should be interesting.. 2 pages of "processes" roll by, almost all with horribly bogus values. What's going on here? How do I see if a getty is running or not? Yeargh! kermit? Yes! It works! I can log into my other unix machine! 9600 baud max, but hey, I can live with that.. Um.. Can't I? No I can't. The thing is slower than molasses in January! I can type 10 characters, count to 3, and there they are! All at once! Output speed looks to be around 1200 baud, with a tailwind. Catting a page of text causes kermit to reject the last 3rd of the output (2/3 of the page prints, then nothing). What the !$@%#@!! is going on here?? I can get 19200 baud SUSTAINED INPUT into the amiga with AZCOMM (and that's under AmigaDOS with several other things running), so I know the machine's got the woof to do it, even with multi-tasking going on. What is Minix doing on the serial port between reads? Calculating PI?!? I'm running only ONE THING!! [Editors note: We beg the reader's forebearance while the author of this article, suffering the effects of over 6 months of accumulated minix-related stress, has a minor nervous breakdown. We sincerely regret the inconvenience.] ARGHH!! SCREEAM! WAIL! GNASH! EYAAAAAAAAAAEEYAEEYYAAAA!!!! CLAW REND RIP SLASH! STOMP! YEEEEEYAAAAAAAAAEERGRGGGHHH!!!!! GGGGGGGGHHHHHHHNNNNN.....!! WHIMPER... SOB... moan... [ We're back. Thanks again. - Ed ] Ah.. Wheew! I feel a lot better now. How much do I owe ya, doc? Now that I've gotten that out of my system, let me be the _first_ to correct myself and say "I know this isn't BSD 4.4 BSD here and what do I expect for DM300, VMS compatability??" I also don't want to cast aspersions on the developers, some of whom I've entered into friendly correspondence with over the last few months and would hate to offend. I do feel, however, that this release leaves a few things to be desired. In hopes of rectifing this situation as much as possible, I have the following questions: 1. What's with the horrible serial performance? I was actually sort of hoping to do SLIP'y style stuff over it, given the lack of direct hard disk support and the fact that my other Unix machines have disk space aplenty (as well as various useful forms of ancillary backup media attached). I have no Ethernet for the Amiga, so serial looks like _it_. 2. What's with things like ps, and this legendary "test" directory? 3. Why Elvis and not Stevie? Stevie seems to be much more vi-like, from what I've seen. And it's free. 4. What's this ELLE, um, editor? It's just close enough to Emacs to make you think you know what you're doing until you actually try to do something with it. Why not simply link elle to /bin/rm and save the user the trouble of wiping out his files more painfully? Ok, ok, I'm sorry, that was a cheap shot. But seriously, I think "mg" (or uEmacs) and "stevie" would make a much better pair than these other two rather less standard utilities (and Minix does go on a bit about "standards", so I know *someone* thinks they're important). For me, at least, ELLE now occupies the great bit-bucket in the sky. A shame, since it could have been compatible (^S for "fork a shell?", ^W to write the file? C'mon!) 5. Given that the serial driver can be given the appropriate laxatives to speed it up, has anyone done a simple "file server" client that ports easily to Unix? I can easily see a very simplistic (but useful) NFS implementation build around a few simple message types between a device driver (/dev/snfs?) and this client. The AMOEBA stuff looks also interesting, but I don't know how much "amoeba-ness" has to be present at the other end to get it to work. I'd naturally like to interfere with my running (production) Unix boxes as little as possible. Simple user mode clients hanging off a serial channel I can easily live with - kernel tweaks or really complicated Amoeba file server clients I can do without at the moment. 6. Does a format utility exist under Minix? I can't find one.. I would hate to have to shutdown minix and reboot with the AmigaDOS boot disk just to run BOOT:c/transfer -f everytime I decide I need to make a temporary filesystem. 7. I have 2.5MB of memory in my Amiga. I'd like more of it to be used for the root file system so I could have a larger /tmp. Ideally, I'd like it to grow dynamically, competing with processes for memory, but I realize that this might be a bit much to ask for. Simply being able to resize it to another fixed size would be nice. 8. There is no question number 8. 7 is enough for one posting. Many thanks, vielen danke, etc etc. Jordan -- PCS Computer Systeme GmbH, Munich, West Germany UUCP: pyramid!pcsbst!jkh jkh@meepmeep.pcs.com EUNET: unido!pcsbst!jkh ARPA: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu or hubbard@decwrl.dec.com
guineau@wjg.enet.dec.com (W. John Guineau) (02/03/91)
> My efforts to join the ranks of Amiga Minix users have not been > easy, I'm afraid. I can greatly sympothize (sp?) with you about the perils of Amiga Minix. However I do have great faith in Steve Reiz and co. that they are hard at work making AMinix work reliably. Steve has already posted a hard disk driver for the commodore controllers. Pentice Hall is another story... I'm still hoping someone will get the time to do 680x0 support. I've tried but the floppy reliability problems in the original and first patched versions of Minix make it immpossible for me to do *anything*. I couldn't even get the test suite to compile without read/write errors trashing my floppies. Maybe the recent stuff Steve posted will work better... The only comfort I can give you is around diskette formatting. Minix File systems require IBM format on the media. You need to format the floppys on a PC in 720K format first (or use MSH on the Amiga - works great). The transfer utility is for moving files between AmigaDOS and Minix. You must use the Amiga side to format floppies (transfer -f). Moving only one file is not so bad if you use tar to pack a few together. -- W. John Guineau grep meaning life | more Digital Equipment Corporation guineau@wjg.enet.dec.com or wjg@wpi.wpi.edu
sreiz@cs.vu.nl (Steven Reiz) (02/05/91)
jkh@bambam.pcs.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) writes: [problems with purchasing minix deleted...] > Download new kernel that Steven was so kind as to post to the net and >bring it up. Yippe! Boots! Hmmm. Better back up them there disks. ^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Good! Even better :-) Please note that a more recent version of the kernel can be ftp-ed from ftp.cs.vu.nl, directory /pub/sreiz/minix, file latest_aminix.lzh. It fixes some problems with floppy drives, which might prevent the problems you had in copying the disks. >Lesse, use transfer -f to format disks (so says the manual), then >diskcopy. Zilch. Diskcopy reports errors left right up and down. [Jordan was finally able to copy the disks using commercial copiers] The BOOT disk is an amiga disk, you can copy it with any amiga copy program, even with the DiskCopy program that comes with your Amiga... The other disks are basically MSDOS format disks (with a different filesystem). >backups.. Time to TEST it. cd /usr/test... /usr/test? Where is /usr/test? Sorry, we accidently left the test binaries out. The test sources are included though, you might consider compiling them to be the first test :-) >Let's do a "ps", that should be interesting.. >2 pages of "processes" roll by, almost all with horribly bogus values. >What's going on here? How do I see if a getty is running or not? I'm not sure what the problem with ps is, but I am under the impression that ST minix also has this problem. There is, of course, always good old ctrl-alt-F1, which should dump the process table. >kermit? Yes! It works! I can log into my other unix machine! 9600 >baud max, but hey, I can live with that.. Um.. Can't I? No I can't. The thing >is slower than molasses in January! I can type 10 characters, count >What is Minix doing on the serial port between reads? Calculating PI?!? >I'm running only ONE THING!! I think that this problem is inherent in the current implementation of minix, which is a bit slow in some areas. Every character that goes through the serial line causes an interrupt. The handling of these interrupts is done very well by the Amiga OS, and not so well by minix. I am pretty sure that this performance can be boosted by using buffering of characters on a lower level (in the routine which catches the serial interrupt). In the current implementation the serial task will be scheduled for every character coming in or going out. >3. Why Elvis and not Stevie? Stevie seems to be much more vi-like, from > what I've seen. And it's free. Elvis is free as well, and better than stevie (from what I've heard), there may be a more recent version of Elvis than the one distributed, though. >4. What's this ELLE, um, editor? It's just close enough to Emacs to make > you think you know what you're doing until you actually try to >.. > Ok, ok, I'm sorry, that was a cheap shot. But seriously, I think > "mg" (or uEmacs) and "stevie" would make a much better pair than >.. Elle might give you the ability to rebind keys, i'm not sure about it, though. Microemacs 3.8 can be compiled very easily under minix, I know because I did it. I'm not going to post it, though, because I used non-standard keybindings, and I'm not sure if I can endure another one of these flames of yours :-) I'm currently trying to compile mg3abeta on our suns here, if that succeeds i plan on trying a minix version as well. You might want to check out microemacs 3.10, though. >5. Given that the serial driver can be given the appropriate laxatives > to speed it up, has anyone done a simple "file server" client > that ports easily to Unix? I can easily see a very simplistic (but useful) The most probable candidate for this is UUCP. >6. Does a format utility exist under Minix? I can't find one.. I would Sorry, no. Well, it does exist, but it doesn't work because the current floppy driver doesn't support it. >7. I have 2.5MB of memory in my Amiga. I'd like more of it to be used > for the root file system so I could have a larger /tmp. Ideally, I'd > like it to grow dynamically, competing with processes for memory, but > I realize that this might be a bit much to ask for. Simply being able > to resize it to another fixed size would be nice. Dynamic resizing, though very attractive, would be very un-minix, i'm afraid. You can create a root disk of a different size, though, even larger than the physical size (720 kb), and boot from it, to get the effect that I think you're looking for? I believe that the exact procedure to be followed is explained in the manual under the heading 'increasing the size of the ram disk'. Regards, Steven Reiz
guineau@wjg.enet.dec.com (W. John Guineau) (02/06/91)
In article <8960@star.cs.vu.nl>, sreiz@cs.vu.nl (Steven Reiz) writes: |> From: sreiz@cs.vu.nl (Steven Reiz) |> Newsgroups: comp.os.minix |> Subject: Re: Some initial impressions of Amiga MINIX |> |> jkh@bambam.pcs.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) writes: |> |> [problems with purchasing minix deleted...] |> |> > Download new kernel that Steven was so kind as to post to the net and |> >bring it up. Yippe! Boots! Hmmm. Better back up them there disks. |> ^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |> Good! Even better :-) |> |> Please note that a more recent version of the kernel can be ftp-ed from |> ftp.cs.vu.nl, directory /pub/sreiz/minix, file latest_aminix.lzh. |> It fixes some problems with floppy drives, which might prevent the |> problems you had in copying the disks. |> This is great that you put the fixes up for ftp! Could you put some kind of version in the file name so we can tell what the 'latest' really is? Also, I tried to ftp to ftp.cs.vu.nl but it kicke me out saying: /usr2/wjg% ftp ftp.cs.vu.nl Connected to star.cs.vu.nl. 220 star.cs.vu.nl FTP server (SunOS 4.1) ready. Name (ftp.cs.vu.nl:wjg): ftp 530 User ftp unknown. Login failed. |> Regards, |> |> Steven Reiz |> -- W. John Guineau grep meaning life | more Digital Equipment Corporation guineau@wjg.enet.dec.com or wjg@wpi.wpi.edu
tsarna@polar.bowdoin.edu (Tyler Sarna) (02/07/91)
Speaking of ftp.cs.vu.nl... it doesn't work. It claims user ftp
is unknown. I know this *used* to work, as I did it before.
And I *REALLY* *REALLY* want an AmigaMINIX with working floppy
access too!
------///------------------------------------------------------------
/// Tyler "Ty" Sarna E-Mail: tsarna@polar.bowdoin.edu
\\\/// "...from France, Iraq, and other Arab nations..." - CNN
--\XX/---------------------------------------------------------------sater@cs.vu.nl (Hans van Staveren) (02/07/91)
In article <43941@nigel.ee.udel.edu> tsarna@polar.bowdoin.edu (Tyler Sarna) writes: >Speaking of ftp.cs.vu.nl... it doesn't work. It claims user ftp >is unknown. I know this *used* to work, as I did it before. An operating system upgrade here led to a minor snafu. It is corected and anonymous ftp to ftp.cs.vu.nl should once again work. As they say: we apologize for the inconvenience
harris@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au (Rik Harris) (02/10/91)
tsarna@polar.bowdoin.edu (Tyler Sarna) writes: >Speaking of ftp.cs.vu.nl... it doesn't work. It claims user ftp >is unknown. I know this *used* to work, as I did it before. try user 'anonymous' this is what I always use, and it works on ftp.cs.vu.nl. rik. -- Rik Harris - rik@sola.fcit.monash.edu.au or harris@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au who died of administration on the 20th of December 1990 Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, Monash University, Caulfield Campus, Australia