bdale@winfree.UUCP (Bdale Garbee) (04/20/87)
I've spent the last 11 hours or so beating on Minix. I'm pleased with the
results. The effort of building kernels on my Toshiba, shuffling to 5.25
floppies, then thrashing with my clone hardware was immense, but worth it.
Now that the hard disk is up, development cycle time is getting bearable.
Many thanks to Larry Hubble for the replacement scrolling routines. They
have apparently completely cured the problems on my Toshiba T1100+ with
screen blanking. I'll hand the new code off to my EGA-toting friends in
a day or so...
An equivalent number of thanks to Don Dugger for the new com_out() routine
he developed for his Z150. It has completely cured the write error problems
on my Adaptec 2002/Rodime combination. It also seems to work fine on my
WD1002/Tulin combination. In fact, I have successfully done mkfs's on the
first two partitions of each drive. BTW:, the WD/Tulin combo is on an 8Mhz
clone, the Adaptec/Rodime combo is on a 4.77Mhz clone. Both drives have a
PC-Dos 3.2 bootable partition as the last partition on the drive.
What's left to do:
- How does Minix handle bad blocks on a hard disk or floppy, or does it?
A utility to "scrub" a disk by trying to read all the blocks on it, and
mapping out all the unreadable blocks would probably be a VERY good idea.
- I want to blow away the RAM disk on the system that has the hard
disk. Has anyone done this, and if so, how? Goal is to have the
boot disk end by mounting /dev/hd1 as /, instead of creating and
loading a RAM root filesystem.
- Has anyone written a serial port driver yet? If someone has a driver.
I'll bring up a minimal Kermit... and start work on the TCP/IP port.
--
Bdale Garbee, N3EUA phone: 303/593-9828 h, 303/590-2868 w
uucp: {bellcore,crash,hp-lsd,hpcsma,ncc,pitt,usafa,vixie}!winfree!bdale
fido: sysop of 128/19 packet: n3eua @ k0hoa, Colorado Springs