thomas@trane.UUCP (Thomas Driemeyer) (01/13/90)
Hi,
I have a home-built 68020/68000 box at home and have decided that Minix is
the best thing that can happen to it. Problem is, the architecture is wildly
incompatible with everything else, so I can't just walk into the next store
and buy Minix. So the idea is to use a Unix system and a Sozobon compiler
to port everything, and then run it at home.
Is that practical? I have written multiuser OS's before, but I don't want
to spend years on this.
In <360@fwi.uva.nl>, croes@fwi.uva.nl (Felix A. Croes) writes
> My ld will be part of Frans Meulebroeks' semi-official Minix ST 1.5.0 update.
Glad to hear that there will be a 1.5.0 for the Atari. If it is available,
- I buy Minix ST 1.1,
- apply Frans's patches (I hope they are posted, I can't ftp),
- port and compile everything on Unix using zcc,
- run it at home.
Right? It would save _a lot_ of trouble if there is a streamer or 1/2"
tape version of the Minix ST 1.1, the info sheet is a bit ambiguous here.
If so, what format does it use, and what is the ISBN?
Has anyone done this (the Mac folks, for example)? Are there reasons why
this is utterly impossible without using an Atari? Or do I just have to
rewrite the booter, the exception code and the drivers, and off I go?
Complications I could do without are, for example, assumptions that an
integer is always 16 bits, address 0 must be writable, addresses must be
< 2**24, F-line opcodes are reserved, caches can't be used etc. I like
Sozobon because the source is available.
My box was designed with a 68030 in mind. Can Minix be extended to use
virtual, copy-on-write memory schemes?
Please email.
Thanks a lot!
Thomas Driemeyer
pyramid!trane!thomas
Disclaimer: My company has nothing to do with this.BALTUCH%BRANDEIS.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu (Jacob Baltuch) (01/16/90)
Time for a New China Lobby
By Lynn Chung
[ the Wall Street Journal ]
[ Monday, January 15, 1990 ]
The director of a service program for Chinese students in America at a
major Chinese-American cultural orgranization gets phone calls about stranded
Chinese; a woman with a six-month-old baby who is going blind from an illness
for which she is unable to afford medication because her husband has died and
her fellowship has run out; a young Chinese tenor, a recipient of major
international prizes, now living on potatoes in Queens. To find help, the
director does not call some Chinese-American charity fund established nationwide
on June 5. Nor does she call the Organization of Chinese-Americans, or the
Chinese American Planning Council, or the China Institute. Instead, she calls
the American Jewish Committee.
Within weeks after Tiananmen, the AJC had set up an "Adopt a Chinese"
program for emergency grants. Today, more than six months later, Chinese-
Americans have yet to mount any significant humanitarian, intellectual or
political effort in support of the exiled pro-democracy movement.
This silence carries a message of Chinese-American apathy and impotence.
And the message has evidently not been lost on President Bush: the
administration has been left freee to play geo-politics, unconstrained by human
rights considerations, because it doesn't have to worry about domestic
realpolitik.
Chinese-Americans should take a lesson from Jewish-Americans, who have
campaigned tirelessly against human rights abuses in the Soviet Union for
decades and achieved great things. Only large, vocal constituencies have the
power to make Chinese human rights into an issue that Washington cannot afford
to ignore. But after an initial flurry of rallies, in the wake of the Tiananmen
massacre, Chinese-Americans have utterly and shamefully failed to speak out for
freedom in China.
A few prominent Chinese-Americans do get together every now and then, to
tsk-tsk at the president's latest appalling gesture of appeasement, or to
exchange the newest horror story of repression in China. But no Chinese-American
lobbyist yet combs the halls of Congress, or plagues State Department aides with
phone calls, or waves lists of imprisoned Chinese dissidents under the noses of
Brent Snowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger. No significant Chinese-American group
has emerged to think through the complex issues of U.S. China policy, or to
provide fellowships for the exiled Chinese intelligentsia adrift in America, or
to assemble emergency funds for stranded Chinese.
It is ironic the there should be such a startling difference between
the political maturity and social responsibility of Jewish-Americans and
Chinese-Americans. Chinese-Americans have pretty much stayed out of politics
in American, with one unfortunate exception: The "old China lobby", whose
charismatic spokeswoman, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, charmed the U.S. media and
U.S. politicians from the '30s through the McCarthy era with her silken
cheongsams and open-toed butterfly shoes.
But her dulcet promises of democracy soon turned into an unpalatably
authoritarian anti-communism, and the Chiangs themselves into parasites on
American largesse. Many Chinese-Americans never recovered from the embarrass-
ment of Nationalist affiliation. Now they are shy of politics, still fearful of
any criticism of the People's Republic that might be unpleasantly reminiscent of
the Chiangs.
One might have thought that the events in Tiananmen would have wakened
Chinese-Americans out of their long hibernation. Taiwan has largely redeemed
itself with a greatly improved human rights record: In recent elections, the
opposition party made impressive gains against the Nationalists. Today, Chinese-
Americans should have the courage to reject the outdated politics that handled
the People's Republic with kid gloves and treated Taiwan as a sinister pariah,
just as Mr.Bush needs to reject to outdated "China card" politics that were such
a trump against the Sovient Union in 1972. It's time for Chinese-Americans to
find their own, new, American politics.