zs04+@andrew.cmu.edu (Zachary T. Smith) (02/15/89)
I'm considering porting Minix to one of two machines, only one of which exists as of yet; the first is a Sharp laptop XT, and if I liked the port enough, I'd put in an EPROM-disk, which that mahcine supports. The other machine I'm considering is a port to a vanilla 68000 homebrew whose design I am still playing with, most likely to reside in EPROM. My questions are: First, has anyone ported Minix to the Sharp-4501 or 4502, and if so, how large was the final executable program, total? Indeed, how large is ANY port of Minix to an 8088/x86 PC? Second, how much code could I expect for a port to a 68000-class machine? Any help appreciated.... zts
ianf@nada.kth.se (Ian Feldman) (11/20/89)
What with recent proliferation of "notebook" and smaller-than-laptop computers has anybody given a though to implementing Minix, or most of it, in a drive-less environment? I'm thinking mainly of products like NEC UltraLight, the Atari Portfolio and the Poquet, each with MS-DOS embedded in ROM. In addition both NEC and Poquet claim ability to run suitably configured software directly from ROM-cards, without having to read the code into the RAM. So, a Poquet running Minix and a mail-shell and we're set for life... or at least until the telepax technology matures. -- ---- ------ ianf@nada.kth.se/ @sekth.bitnet/ uunet!nada.kth.se!ianf ---- --
pcm@iwarpr0.intel.com (Phil Miller) (11/27/89)
In article <2339@draken.nada.kth.se> ianf@nada.kth.se (Ian Feldman) writes: > What with recent proliferation of "notebook" and smaller-than-laptop > computers has anybody given a though to implementing Minix, or most > of it, in a drive-less environment? I'm thinking mainly of products > like NEC UltraLight, the Atari Portfolio and the Poquet, each with > MS-DOS embedded in ROM. In addition both NEC and Poquet claim ability > to run suitably configured software directly from ROM-cards, without > having to read the code into the RAM. > So, a Poquet running Minix and a mail-shell and we're set for life... > or at least until the telepax technology matures. >------ ianf@nada.kth.se/ @sekth.bitnet/ uunet!nada.kth.se!ianf Kind of hard to imagine MINIX being frozen in silicon at this point... Phil Miller pcm@iwarp.intel.com . . . . . . .
rbthomas@frogpond.rutgers.edu (Rick Thomas) (11/30/89)
> > So, a Poquet running Minix and a mail-shell and we're set for life... > > or at least until the telepax technology matures. > Kind of hard to imagine MINIX being frozen in silicon at this point... However, the latest InfoWorld, (Nov 27, pg 27) has a big spread on "Flash" Eprom chips from Intel and the non-volatile RAM-disk cards that have been announced that use them. A 4MB Flash-disk card for an AT (big enough for Minix root, /usr, and some space for users' home directories) would cost about $2600 at the prices quoted in the article. Chip prices are currently kinda high, but they will almost certainly come down as the manufacturers ramp up production. Assuming that the same 4MB would retail for under $1000 by this time next year, a lap-top Minix machine with a built-in modem becomes a very real possibility. For another example, there is a 4.3 pound MS-DOS compatible machine from Psion that uses Flash RAM as a substitute for floppy disk. It runs for up to 30 hours on a set of 12 AA batteries (no moving parts to soak up power, dontcha know...). Interesting... Rick