mlewis@unocss.UUCP (Marcus S. Lewis) (02/08/89)
I am a newcomer to this group, and I have been plowing through 47 pages of news articles, to no avail. I have a friend who has no access to USENET who just bought Minix 1.2 and he can't boot it on a Tandy 1000 EX. I booted it on a Compaq 286 with no problems (that's a slick OS!) but when he tries on his machine, he gets a repeating message to the effect that the Winchester is getting a message from -1, the screen gets trashed and the drive light never goes out. It announces the Ram disk has been loaded, please insert the next disk, and that's the end of that. No further dialog withthe machine is possible until it is rebooted with MS-DOS. Say, pray tell, what is happening here? I have the text book, he has the manual, and we are going to be going through the sources, but there's a lot of code there, and we are not sure where to start. The EX runs EVERYTHING, except probably Minix, I suppose. He's a bit upset, for which I can't blame him. Any help would be vastly appreciated. Marc Lewis
japplega@csm9a.UUCP (Joe Applegate) (02/10/89)
In article <659@unocss.UUCP>, mlewis@unocss.UUCP (Marcus S. Lewis) writes: > > The EX runs EVERYTHING, except probably Minix, I suppose. He's a bit upset, > for which I can't blame him. Any help would be vastly appreciated. Don't blame Minix... Tandy computers ARE NOT IBM compatible... I have several programs that will not run at all on a Tandy and many others that will run but are quite unusable with Tandy's lousy substandard keyboard. It's probably 90% software compatible... and that's the good news... the bad news is it's only about 10% hardware compatible! In fact I have yet to add any hardware to the Tandy without modifying it... and I've modified Midi Cards, Hard Disk controllers and an Eprom burner! The real good news is that I've posted diffs on 3 different occassions to patch the kernel to run on the Tandy 1000! Unfortunately, no one else seems to care... AST has not added those diffs to the supported version of Minix, none of the archives carry them, and the compatibility list still claims that the Tandy is incompatible. If there really is any interest I can dig them up again and repost BUT my current diffs are for 1.3d and will NOT apply properly to 1.2. In a nutshell the WINI intterupt has to be changed to 2... and the second intterupt mask has to be eliminated... Both of these changes have should be #ifdef'd so that you can compile with TANDY defined to get them. Joe Applegate - Another person suckered into buying a Tandy non-compatible!
chasm@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Charles Marslett) (02/10/89)
In article <659@unocss.UUCP>, mlewis@unocss.UUCP (Marcus S. Lewis) writes: > I am a newcomer to this group, and I have been plowing through 47 pages of > news articles, to no avail. I have a friend who has no access to USENET > who just bought Minix 1.2 and he can't boot it on a Tandy 1000 EX. > I booted it on a Compaq 286 with no problems (that's a slick OS!) but when > he tries on his machine, he gets a repeating message to the effect that > the Winchester is getting a message from -1, the screen gets trashed and the > drive light never goes out. It announces the Ram disk has been loaded, > please insert the next disk, and that's the end of that. No further dialog > withthe machine is possible until it is rebooted with MS-DOS. In a possibly unrelated issue, has anyone run Minix on a machine with one of the "first party DMA" disk controllers that Tandy and several others are now selling? These controllers are very fast and usually used with larger drives. Since they (optionally) can do their own DMA transfers they may require some special care to avoid their new features -- the features have to be optional, since the ROMs on IBM ATs can boot up with the drive. I believe WD makes one and Adaptec makes another. More interesting, perhaps, is anyone trying to get the DMA working with Minix? This may apply to the Tandy EX question, too, if the disk controller it is using is one of these (sorry, I don't have one, and don't know the names). - > Marc Lewis -- Charles =========================================================================== Charles Marslett STB Systems, Inc. <== Apply all standard disclaimers Wordmark Systems <== No disclaimers required -- that's just me chasm@killer.dallas.tx.us
tif@cpe.UUCP (02/11/89)
Written 6:45 am Feb 10, 1989 by killer.UUCP!chasm in cpe:comp.os.minix >In a possibly unrelated issue, has anyone run Minix on a machine with one >of the "first party DMA" disk controllers that Tandy and several others >are now selling? These controllers are very fast and usually used with >larger drives. Since they (optionally) can do their own DMA transfers >they may require some special care to avoid their new features -- the >features have to be optional, since the ROMs on IBM ATs can boot up with >the drive. I believe WD makes one and Adaptec makes another. I can speak for the SCSI controller that Tandy sells (Adaptec). It is a "first party DMA" board but is in no way compatible with typical HD boards (at the register level). The board can boot because it contains a ROM which replaces the BIOS HD function with its own driver. It is a VERY nice board but I fear it would take SUBSTANTIAL effort to make minix work with it. It is set up ideally for Un*x but it is just radically different from any ST-506-like adapter. (Actually bios_wini.c might work with it!). Paul Chamberlain Computer Product Engineering, Tandy Corp. {killer | texbell}!cpe!tif