Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
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From: aswNS@hamp.hampshire.edu (Albert S Woodhull)
Subject: Re: Minux?
Message-ID: <b1a7cb$a3324.2f@news.hampshire.edu>
Date: Sun, 26 Nov 1995 15:51:35 GMT
References: <Pine.SOL.3.91.951125140458.8866A-100000@web>
Organization: Hampshire College, Amherst MA
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On Sat, 25 Nov 1995 14:06:55 -0700 Goldarg (goldarg@azstarnet.com)
wrote in comp.os.minix:

: I think I heard somewhere that Minix will run on a Ibm xt with an 8088 
: and 640k Is this true? I was hopeing I could put it on one of the 20 meg 
: mfm drives I have, The computer is a old ibm 5160 with a 360k floppy and 
: 2 20 meg mfm drives and cga or herc video (Can have either I havent 
: chosen if i want the herc or the cga on the 5150 i have .)

Yes it is true. With a little bit of squeezing you can even have a
networked Minix 1.7 running on such a machine. You have to change the
etc/rc to not run all the net daemons (you don't need them all) and
you have to forego using the big beautiful ash shell in favor of the
much more compact sh. It is possible the 1.7.2 release may contain 
some optimizations that will make working with smaller memory a little
easier, but the urrent version works reasonably well in 640K.

I don't know for sure if the hercules graphics adapter will
work. Standard Minix doesn't know about graphical screen modes anyway,
and probably the herc looks like an mda in text mode. But any add-ons 
you get for graphics probably will know only about cga.  

A single 20M drive is a little small -- You can probably fit
everything, but space may be a bit tight when you start compiling. The
recommended minimum is 24M. If you are willing to use both drives,
putting the src/ directory on the second drive would be a good way to
split things. I would recommend keeping a small MS-DOS partition, in
case you want to use MS-DOS for trouble shooting the system -- when
testing things like network or communications hardware it is nice to
be able to get a second opinion from software that you are absolutely
confidnet about -- not that Minix isn't a great system, but it still
hasn't been tested on every possible hardware variant :-).

The main problem you will have on your system will be getting
everything onto it in the first place with only 360K drives. There are
TINYROOT and TINYUSR 360K disk images in the distribution to get you
started, but everything else assumes you have a drive that can read
720K disk images. I did my installation on a system like yours by
compiling a networking kernel on another system, transferring it by
floppy disk, and then transferring the main USR and SRC distributions
by ethernet. If there is demand I could repackage the the USR and SRC
trees as 360K images.

--
Albert S. Woodhull, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA
awoodhull@hamp.hampshire.edu
woodhull@shaysnet.com
413-549-2962

