dal@midgard.Midgard.MN.ORG (Dale Schumacher) (05/09/89)
Well, after many months of sitting on the self waiting for a proper hard disk to run on, Minix-ST is running at syntel. What this means for the world in general is that work on mail/news software for Minix can proceed. I have a partial port of dcp/uupc for Minix that was gratiously sent to me by Peter Housel. Included in that code is a newer g-protocol implementation which looks like it will be more stable than the uupc version and will support variable window sizes up to the protocol limit of 7 (which will improve throughput immensely). However, the dcp/uupc code only provides essentially the uucico transport level software. Simple mail and news handling back-ends are being developed and I expect to be releasing the whole system as a complete package rather than just posting the uucico part. The news portion will be able to handle batched and compressed newsfeed, so the load on a host system will be less (currently I get my news via mail to my ST under TOS). In preparation for handling compressed news batches, I've ported the 4.3 version of compress to Minix-ST (and also to TOS under Alcyon and Sozobon C with dLibs). This compress is backward compatable with the compress distributed with Minix-ST 1.1, but also will handle compression and decompression with up to 16 bits. Unfortunately, it almost certainly will not port to Minix-PC since 16-bit compress needs around 400K of data space. The code is heavily #ifdef'ed and will work on a PC under MS-DOS, even in small model (if I read the comments correctly) by using multiple 64K segments obtained through a far allocate. Is there interest in my posting this version of compress to comp.os.minix? I'll post more information as the development progresses. I'm sure looking forward to receiving news and mail directly under Minix!
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (05/10/89)
The upcoming release of C News ought to be able to run just fine under Minix. It does not rely on silly features of System V or Berklix. We haven't actually tested it on a 16-bit machine lately, since utzoo made the jump to 32 bits, but it at least *used* to run fine on one. You will need compress if you want to send or receive compressed batches, but 16-bit compression/decompression is not necessary if your neighbors make the (minimal) effort needed to send you only 12-bit stuff (this is the default in C News, in fact). -- Mars in 1980s: USSR, 2 tries, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 2 failures; USA, 0 tries. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu