comrade@uniwa.uwa.oz (Peter Cooper (GUILD)) (02/06/91)
My club, the University Computer Club at U.W.A. decided to order Minix 1.5 for the PC on 3.5" disks late last year. (This -does- actually have something to do with MacMinix, believe it or not!) We ordered it from our local PH office here in Perth. A couple of days later, when it was decided that the AT (the only PC we have with 3.5"s) had better things to do, we tried to change our order to PC 5.25". Unfortunately the local office is closed for a few months around Christmas, so we had to deal with the Sydney office. They said that would be okay, and that we'd be getting the 5.25" version soon. What arrived, of course, was a PC 3.5" version from Sydney. We talked to an extremely helpful salesperson who assured us that a new copy would be freighted immediately. Well. What we got was a 3.5" version again! But for the _Macintosh_! The invoice actually said 'IBM PC 5.25" version'. Since I have a Mac of my own, I decided to purchase it anyway (it saves on freight charges...). Some things I noticed about MacMinix 1.5 were: 1. The installation guide had numerous (critical) typographical errors. In addition many aspects of the installation procedure are neglected. Pity someone who has never installed a Unix system before... 2. The installation guide said that 1.5 would run under System 6.0 or better. I -was- running 6.07. No go. I found an install disk for 6.01. It doesn't seem to run under -any- Multifinder I have tried (contrary to advertised features) and certainly not 1beta9 (upgrade to it...great improvement). 3. Simple things like making the /usr/include directories readable to users -other- than bin weren't done. Why was this the case? It is a matter of 2 minutes work for the person(s) creating the distribution filesystems, and means that users new to Minix won't tend to run screaming from the room. 4. NO ON-LINE MANUALS. For whatever the reasons, this is simply not appropriate. I will be ftping them shortly, but what about those Minix users who don't have Internet access? 5. The tty seems a bit slow. There have been suggestions here on how to speed it up, but the critical sections of code may lie in the 'MacBoot' application. I haven't seen source for it. Where can I find such things? Even with these criticisms, I quite like MacMinix and intend to use it quite intensively. Oh, and something for alt.conspiracy: Could Prentice-Hall be sending the wrong packages on purpose? They've already made twice the number of sales that they would have otherwise. :-) ----- snail: email: Peter Cooper comrade@uniwa.uwa.oz.au Box 22 Guild of Undergraduates University of Western Australia
tonyg@batserver.cs.uq.oz.au (Tony Gedge) (02/07/91)
In <1991Feb6.032849.8832@uniwa.uwa.oz> comrade@uniwa.uwa.oz (Peter Cooper (GUILD)) writes: [ Stuff about P-H muckups deleted ] >Since I have a Mac of my own, I decided to purchase it anyway (it >saves on freight charges...). Some things I noticed about MacMinix >1.5 were: >1. The installation guide had numerous (critical) typographical > errors. In addition many aspects of the installation > procedure are neglected. Pity someone who has never installed > a Unix system before... Actually, I noticed all those errors (after reading the shell scripts like setup_root et al.) After working out what they were trying to do, I had no trouble. Minix is now happily chewing all my disk space :) >2. The installation guide said that 1.5 would run under System > 6.0 or better. I -was- running 6.07. No go. I found an [ Multifinder woes deleted ] I found that there were a few problems with MacMinix running under Multifinder (I'm running system 6.0.5). Sometimes switching Minix to the background would cause the machine to hang... but heck... I just run it under Finder and there are no problems. Oh... and turning off all my INITs helped a great deal. I also noticed that Minix takes 10 times longer to boot if MasterJugger(tm) is installed. >3. Simple things like making the /usr/include directories > readable to users -other- than bin weren't done. Why was this This would be a problem for a person not familiar with unix. But, if you have a small background with Unix beforehand, it's trivial. >4. NO ON-LINE MANUALS. For whatever the reasons, this is simply I'm thinking of working on nroff/troff source for the manual entries and improving them a bit... probably this will never happen :) >5. The tty seems a bit slow. There have been suggestions here on The TTY (console windows) I/O isn't too bad (well, it's not spectacular either) but what annoyed me the most was the unreliability of the rs232 I/O. I found that I had to at least double the size of the serial buffers to avoid dropping characters at 2400 baud. >Even with these criticisms, I quite like MacMinix and intend to use it >quite intensively. I think it is great. I've learnt more about operating systems while trying to fix the rs232 and ps problems (trust me... I didn't find the second set of ps fixes until after I'd fixed it myself :) that I could have in any formal course. Minix has served the purpose for which I bought it. Tony Gedge. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Computer Science Department, | tonyg@batserver.cs.uq.oz.au | | University of Queensland, Australia.| "cc stands for Cryptic Crossword" | -------------------------------------------------------------------------