Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: minix on an Apple IIgs
References: <919224344.531007925@news.psnw.com> <drf03.919140263@wumpus> <slrn7cico8.nrq.pino+comp_os_minix@mud.stack.nl>
Organization: Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY
From: aje9383@osfmail.isc.rit.edu (Andrew Erickson)
NNTP-Posting-Host: grace.isc.rit.edu
X-Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: grace.isc.rit.edu
Message-ID: <36cafa57.0@isc-newsserver.isc.rit.edu>
Date: 17 Feb 1999 12:20:23 -0500
X-Trace: 17 Feb 1999 12:20:23 -0500, grace.isc.rit.edu
Lines: 43
XPident: aje9383
X-Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 129.21.3.100
XPident: Unknown
Path: news.adfa.oz.au!clarion.carno.net.au!news0.optus.net.au!news1.optus.net.au!optus!news.ecn.ou.edu!newsfeed.berkeley.edu!news-peer1.sprintlink.net!news-in-east1.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!isc-newsserver.isc.rit.edu!aje9383

In article <slrn7cico8.nrq.pino+comp_os_minix@mud.stack.nl>,
Martijn van Buul <pino+comp_os_minix@dohd.cx> wrote:
>Hmm.. This is the second time within one week that that 65816 pops up ;) .. 
>
>It occurred to me that Daniel Robert Franklin wrote in comp.os.minix:
>> steve winston <xee@psnw.com> writes:
>> 
>> >Somebody gave me an old apple IIgs. Will minix run on it? Do you know of
>> >any other Unix that might run on it?
>> 
>> Minix won't run on it. Somone write a thing called Lunix (yes that's no
>> typo - Little Unix, a take on Linux) which is supposed to run on the 6502,
>> so it might run on the IIgs (65816 CPU?). 

Using 6502-based Lunix would, without rewriting large portions of the
kernel, unnecessarily limit the 65C816.  (Things like the stack are much
more flexible on the '816; I'm sure Lunix must do some stack and zero-page
swapping kludges to be usable at all.  The 6502 was clearly not designed for
ease of handling multiple processes, unlike, say, the 6809.)

>Porting Lunix to the Apple might not be that easy; it was written for
>the Commodore-64, if memory serves me right. Nice machine, that IIgs.
>Too bad it had a slow processor.

My suggestion (not based on experience, unfortuneately--I don't have a IIgs,
just a //e and some other old machines...) would be GNO, a freeware
UNIX-like thing which runs on top of GS/OS and appears to be really, really
nice.  It is not quite UNIX--some rather basic things are a bit
different--but it comes reasonably close and it is already written.

See http://www.gno.org/ for some (lots of) information.

(Yes, the processor is a bit slow.  Apple didn't want the IIgs competing
with the Mac II which was coming out at about the same time, and thus gave
it a slower processor than necessary.  In retrospect, this was probably the
correct decision--the 68000 architecture scales up much more easily than the
6502 or 65816.  Further, the Apple II architecture was starting to get
rather nasty in itself, with all the bank switching of memory and hard-wired
I/O and whatnot.  But some will undoubtedly disagree with me on these
points...and feel it's necessary to flame me to death...)

--Andrew Erickson, aje9383@cs.rit.edu
A pox on all who dare send me unwanted commercial e-mail.
