jchvr@ihlpg.ATT.COM (Hartong) (07/07/87)
Be warned: I have only read the BOOK, so have not worked with Minix yet: I am waiting for the port to ATARI (something I can afford). However I have worked with MSDOS and had the following idea for providing one key popups in Minix: currently when hitting F1-F10 Minix goes into a debugging mode and F1 shows process table and F2 shows memory map. The actual code is commented saying it should disappear when Minix is debugged. I propose to use the F1-F10 keys for starting virtual terminals: this means that after hitting for example F2 ALL characters typed after that will appear to Minix as coming from terminal 2. After hitting F3 all seem to appear to come from terminal 3 etc. We need a few hacks in tty.c to recognize this fact and to store/restore the screen image from the screen to a file on disk. Also we need to change init to start up more then one login process. After this each virtual terminal is tied to another process and one such terminal can run an agenda utility, another a calculator etc. What we get in this way is that the user can have at the flick of a function key another process with its own virtual terminal, its own screen image and its own process. Anyone interested in providing this hack to the world? H.F. van Rietschote