ianf@nada.kth.se (Ian Feldman) (03/16/90)
In article <1990Mar16.022933.11010@iwarp.intel.com> pcm@iwarp.intel.com (Phil Miller) writes: > > Yes, I've successfully booted & run MINIX on a Zenith laptop computer. > I didn't do anything special to make it work, just made a boot disk (on > another machine), a root file system disk, and booted it up just fine. > > I sort of made a point of doing this; for some reason, I got a perverse > kick out of running (something like) Unix on a computer while riding > in a car between Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington; maybe this > is a first? Yea, we all know that, it's a perversity of the highest order to have to ride a car between Portland, OR and Seattle, WA... ;-)) but how about attempting another first -- that of burning a suitable subset of Minix into a ROM, and putting that, instead of the MSDOS, into, say, a Toshiba T1000SE? In fact: can it be done at all, as far as the Toshiba/ Minix is concerned? Could Andy T. perhaps indicate what subset of commands, apart from the kernel, is it that one ought to select for such a minimum setup? --Ian Feldman / ianf@nada.kth.se || uunet!nada.kth.se!ianf / The "I had the bug narrowed down to a subrutine and then I lost all interest" hacker
ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) (03/18/90)
In article <3149@draken.nada.kth.se> ianf@nada.kth.se (Ian Feldman) writes: > Could Andy T. perhaps indicate what subset of commands, apart from > the kernel, is it that one ought to select for such a minimum setup? I never took a course on Toshiba ROMs so I don't know what goes into them. Sorry. Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)
atk@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Alan T. Krantz) (03/19/90)
Utility programs in a ROM? Good grief. I suppose it has something to do with not having a hard disk. Probably you would want sync, mount, ls, sh, cat, cp, login, mv, mkdir, rm, rmdir and su I guess. Andy Tanenbaum
ianf@nada.kth.se (Ian Feldman) (03/20/90)
In article <18573@boulder.Colorado.EDU> Andy Tanenbaum <ast@cs.vu.nl> writes: > Utility programs in a ROM? Good grief. I suppose it has something to do > with not having a hard disk. Probably you would want sync, mount, ls, > sh, cat, cp, login, mv, mkdir, rm, rmdir and su I guess. > > Andy Tanenbaum Actually it has more to do with not having to listen to an ever-spinning, noisy, harddisk.... or as little as possible, anyway. There are but 2 laptops on the market that are equipped with a self-spinning-down harddrives: the Compaq SLT and the Apple Portable -- unfortunately they're both very expensive and the second one is rather of a "transportable" school. The rationale for putting as much as possible of the utilities, along with Minix kernel, in a ROM is also that they rarely ever change.... so why bother with a harddisk, if one could boot and run a number of programs from a no-delay ROM? --Ian Feldman / ianf@nada.kth.se || uunet!nada.kth.se!ianf / The "I had the bug narrowed down to a subrutine and then I lost all interest" hacker