sreiz@cs.vu.nl (Reiz Steven) (09/24/90)
Here are some answers to frequently asked questions about Amiga Minix 1.5:
Q: What are the hardware requirements to run Minix?
A: An amiga with an 68000, 1 MB of ram (or more) and 1 or more
floppy drives.
Note that this does include A2000s and expanded A500s and A1000s
but that it does not include amigas with 680x0s where x>0, sorry.
Q: What kind of multitasking does Minix provide?
A: Pre-emptive multitasking, just like Unix and the normal AmigaOS.
This means that the programmer doesn't have to do anything special
to make his program multitasking.
Q: What floppy format does Minix use?
A: Minix uses (of course) the normal 880 KB diskdrives but uses the same
format as the atari ST: double sided, 80 cylinders and 9 sectors/track.
This gives a capacity of 720 KB per disk and full compatibility with
ST minix, most of the disks in the atari and amiga distribution of
minix are identical. The PC minix 3.5" disk format is very much like
the amiga/atari format but not yet fully compatible. They will be in
the future.
Q: What about Amiga Minix harddisk support?
A: There isn't any yet. We didn't have a harddisk to test it on, so we
couldn't develop it. The source of the atari harddisk driver is included
to make it easier to write your own harddisk driver.
Q: How hard is it to add a harddisk driver?
A: When you have detailed information about your harddisk controller
it's not very hard. What you need to know is which addresses your
harddisk controller occupies and what the protocol is to make your
controller read and write blocks of data. Armed with this information
you can easily adapt the atari driver.
Q: Is there a program to convert amiga executables to run them under minix?
A: No, not even in the sense that you could compile a minix program together
with the minix libraries with a normal amiga compiler and then convert it
to run under minix, but this special kind of conversion would indeed be
very useful and it is relatively easy to write a program to do it.
Q: Can I run the normal AmigaOS and minix at the same time?
A: No. This version of Amiga Minix takes over the computer completely.
This allowed us to stay very close to the PC and atari versions which
do just the same. It would be very neat to have minix and AmigaOS windows
side by side, seeing minix commands and normal amiga commands being
executed side by side, but this would have a very definite drawback:
A version of amiga minix that would allow this would have very different
sourcecode from the atari and st versions, large parts of the kernel and
memory manager would have to be dumped or rewritten, and probably parts
of the filesystem as well. That way it would be practically impossible
to use amiga minix for teaching OS courses because lots of interesting
low level stuff like task scheduling would have to be done by Exec.
Q: Does minix provide a graphical user interface (gui) or other sound and
graphics capabilities?
A: No, you should view amiga minix as providing you with a totally different
machine: you can use the amiga in the normal way with its windows,
graphics and sound OR you can boot minix. Amiga (and atari and PC) minix
are very similar to using a 80x25 ASCII terminal connected to a mini running
V7 unix, providing you with the elegance and flexibility of familiar *nix
utilities like grep and sed or familiar *nix system calls like fork and
execv, but unfortunately no sound capabilities beyond a beep when you press
^G.
It would be very nice to have a gui but it would have to meet some very
tough demands:
- the sourcecode would have to be public domain
- it should be portable to the amiga, atari and PC
- it should not be to big to run on a 1 MB machine
If anybody would want to port for example the X windowing system to amiga
minix he/she of course is very welcome to do so, but I don't think too many
people will ever be able to run something like that because of the high
(extreme?) demands this places on the speed of the processor and the size
of the harddisk and ram.
Q: What software can be run under amiga minix?
A: A load of familiar unix utilities (most with source!) are supplied with
minix and other unix programs can be ported far more easily to minix than
to the normal AmigaOS. Amiga-specific programs that use for example the
intuition library for graphics will probably never run under minix.
Q: How about the serial port?
A: The amiga serial port is supported under minix, you can use kermit and
zmodem and other terminal programs and even connect a terminal or other
computer to the amiga to provide you with a true multi-user system!
(Currently limited to 2-user because amigas have only one serial port,
support for multiserial boards is probably not very hard to add.)
Q: How good is amiga minix compared to pc and st minix 1.5?
A: I am not sure about the pc version but it is equivalent to the st version
minus harddisk support.
Steven Reizgert@targon.UUCP (Gert Kanis) (09/25/90)
>Q: What floppy format does Minix use? >A: Minix uses (of course) the normal [Amiga] diskdrives but uses the same > format as the atari ST: double sided, 80 cylinders and 9 sectors/track. > This gives a capacity of 720 KB per disk and full compatibility with > ST minix, most of the disks in the atari and amiga distribution of > minix are identical. Hello you all, sorry to start this over again but something came back to my memory. The distribution disks of Minix ST 1.1 were only 360 KB (single sided). ^^^^^^ Probably because Atari (like *BM) in the early Eighties thought that 360 K drives were good enough to start with. Somewhat later they introduced the 720 K (double sided) drives. I believe at this moment hardly any Atari ST user has a 360 K drive as his/her only floppy station. I might be wrong though :-) Anyway I am wondering what format the Minix 1.5 distribution (68K) is in. 360 K or 720 K disks?. Does it cost $169 because an (almost) obsolete disk format doubles the number of disks? (Not a flame) > The PC minix 3.5" disk format is very much like > the amiga/atari format but not yet fully compatible. They will be in > the future. > Steven Reiz One good reason to look forward to Minix 2.0 (199x) Happy hacking, -- Gert Kanis gert@targon.UUCP ..!mcsun!hp4nl!targon!gert
meulenbr@cst.philips.nl (Frans Meulenbroeks) (09/26/90)
gert@targon.UUCP (Gert Kanis) writes: >Anyway I am wondering what format the Minix 1.5 distribution (68K) is in. >360 K or 720 K disks?. If I remember correctly the ST disks are 720k except for the boot disk and the root disk which are 360k disks. The latter aren't full anyway so using 720k disks would not be a win. The total number of disks is 10. If 360k disks were used 17 disks would have been required (adding even more $$$ to the price) -- Frans Meulenbroeks (meulenbr@cst.philips.nl) Centre for Software Technology ( or try: ...!mcsun!phigate!prle!cst!meulenbr)
raymond@cs.vu.nl (Raymond Michiels) (09/26/90)
gert@targon.UUCP (Gert Kanis) writes: >Anyway I am wondering what format the Minix 1.5 distribution (68K) is in. >360 K or 720 K disks?. The Amiga and Atari versions both consist of 9 double sided 3.5" floppies. For ST-MINIX this means 9 x 720Kb and for AmigaMINIX 8 x 720Kb + 880Kb -Raymond.