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From: ab2r@midway.uchicago.edu (Marshall Abrams)
Subject: Minix on Sharp PC-3100?
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Date: Wed, 22 Jan 1997 04:33:11 GMT
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OK, I know you folks must see questions like this all the time--I
just saw a similar one myself--but my searches for FAQs and such
turned up nothing that answered my question.

I want try to run a stripped-down Minix on my old Sharp PC3100.
This is a sort of large palmtop, a 10mhz 8088 with about 2MB of
RAM--640 for normal use, the rest RAM disk.  It boots MSDOS off
of a C: drive in ROM.  Maybe'll it'd boot off a PCMCIA card in
the A: slot if I got one--I'm not sure.  Has some sort of
built-in EMM.  The BIOS is clearly non-standard.

I know that there's not much I could fit on this little machine,
and if I didn't boot off of a PC-card, I'd have to do some sort
of somersault to load the kernel on top of DOS--kind of like
Linux's BOOTLIN or LOADLIN, which basically copy a kernel into
memory and then jump to it, leaving DOS behind.  In principle
this seems like it ought to be possible.  I'm not much of an
assembler programmer, but probably could hack BOOTLIN to do it
once I learned something about how Minix boots.  Except maybe I'd
be trying to load the kernel off of a DOS-based RAM disk!

Has anyone done anything similar?  Am I insane?  How insane am I
to think about this?

Thanks!

Marshall Abrams (Minix (pre-)newbie)


-- 
Marshall Abrams                                     marshall@chas.uchicago.edu
"WWW" means "Wait...   Wait...   Wait... " (upside down: "More, Modem, More!")
