traw@grad1.cis.upenn.edu (09/16/90)
Sorry for asking the novice questions without first reading the Question Sheet; I found it a little ways back in the newsgroup. I have some questions that are not answered by the Sheet though. Prentice Hall was cooperative, but I'd like a second opinion before putting that much money into getting it up and running. 1) The Sheet says something about copying the disks for 3 or so friends. Would it be wrong for me and two or three others to make a group purchase of the disks, and split the costs among us? 2) My PC has a 20 megabyte drive. How much space is required for Minix? 3) Can Minix and MS-DOS share the same drive? I understand that you cannot run ms-dos apps from within minix, but can I partition the drive for half ms-dos and half minix? If so, a) How do I partition the drive b) How do I choose which partition to activate when booting? 4) Which version do I need? The PH people told me that since I was a student, I need 1.3. I thought I would be better with the newer (latest) version, since more of the bugs would be worked out. Not true? Thanks, -drew
overby@plains.NoDak.edu (Glen Overby) (09/16/90)
In article <29614@netnews.upenn.edu> traw@grad1.cis.upenn.edu writes: > Sorry for asking the novice questions without first reading the >Question Sheet; I found it a little ways back in the newsgroup. I You should feel *extremely*guilty* for not reading it, even though your questions are not answered in it. :-) >Prentice Hall was cooperative, OH NO! HE COMPLIMENTED *THEM*! What is this newsgroup coming to? :-) Traitor! Heritic! If you should ever set foot within range of a True Minix Flamer, you shal be held as a "Guest" :-) OK, enough of a guilt trip. Now on to your questions. It is impossible to cover everything in anything less than a book, and even then it's tough. >1) The Sheet says something about copying the disks for 3 or so > friends. Would it be wrong for me and two or three others to make > a group purchase of the disks, and split the costs among us? I believe this statement has been removed and Prentice-Hall now only allows copying by Universities for class and research use. I suspect a lot of people do this with all types of software. >2) My PC has a 20 megabyte drive. How much space is required for > Minix? Depends what you want to load. If you skip the sources, it'll all fit in 5MB with some space to work. If you want to recompile the whole system and keep all the ".s" (assembly output) files around, as well as two copies of the binaries ("commands" compiles to it's own private bin directory, which you can then move to /usr/bin or wherever) 10MB won't be quite enough (I can't think of an exact number right now, but another 5M should do it). >3) Can Minix and MS-DOS share the same drive? I understand that you > cannot run ms-dos apps from within minix, but can I partition the > drive for half ms-dos and half minix? If so, Yes. > a) How do I partition the drive Minix comes with the nicest "fdisk" program I have ever seen. It knows about all types of partitions, and allows you to allocate and remove them at will. > b) How do I choose which partition to activate when booting? Generic Minix reads it's kernel/mm/fs/init image off of a boot floppy, and then looks for a root filesystem image on that same drive. If you leave the boot floppy in there, it will get a superblock error, and try hd3 (drive 0, partition 3). This can be changed with a variety of utilities, including "ShoeLace" and a multi-partition bootstrapper (I use "mfdisk" rather than the one that comes with shoelace). >4) Which version do I need? The PH people told me that since I was a > student, I need 1.3. I thought I would be better with the newer > (latest) version, since more of the bugs would be worked out. Not > true? That's because 1.3 is closer to The Book. I consider 1.5 to be MUCH more useable; it can run in Protected Mode on 286/386/486, using ALL of your memory for programs. 1.3 will only use "AT" memory above 1M as a ram disk. If you're deathly attatched to the code you get being really close to the book (like if you are teaching/taking a class using The Book), then get 1.3. If you want an OS that's as unix-like as possible, get 1.5. -- Glen Overby <overby@plains.nodak.edu> uunet!plains!overby (UUCP) overby@plains (Bitnet)