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From: Cynthia Rates <cynthiar@sgi.net>
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Subject: Re: Minix on a floppy
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Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 16:46:27 -0500
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Maybe someone could try in the future seeing as they have those 2.88 floppies
I've heard about that can be formatted to upwards of 3 megs. Too bad Iomega
wouldn't release the specs to those college kids a while back. That would
have been a very useful implementation, boot anywhere Minix.

Osdude,
http://members.xoom.com/osdude/
osdude@xoommail.com

Al Woodhull wrote:

>
> Through Minix version 1.5 there were instructions on recompiling on a
> system with no hard disk, with two floppy drives. It sounded like
> quite a juggling act, what with source files and object files and
> compiler passes distributed across multiple floppies. I never tried
> to follow these instructions, but I am assured it could be done.
>
> You can find the contents of Chapter 8 of the Minix 1.5.10 Reference
> Manual at ftp://turing.oit.umass.edu/pub/refman.1.5/Recompile.nrf.
> This is an nroff source file, you'll need to run it through nroff or a
> similar program to properly format it. You'll also want to get the
> file ftp://turing.oit.umass.edu/pub/refman.1.5/macros to support the
> reformatting. Be aware that the version of nroff distributed with
> Minix is not adequate to fully format this file, but groff on Linux
> should do it.
>
> Minix 1.5 and earlier versions were intended to be usable on systems
> without hard drives. If you installed on a hard drive you still needed
> an add-on to be able to boot from the hard drive. But later versions
> have gotten bigger, and as far as I know nobody has attempted to
> recompile later versions on floppy-only systems, and there is no claim
> that you can use Minix in any useful way without a hard disk.
>
> Al

<snip>

