Quote:
Originally Posted by jayminer
I love projects like this! I'm curious though, I have (basically) no experience of Minix, how much can it do nowadays? Does it have proper networking, is much of the GNU-userland portable to it/usable under it?
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Thanks for your interest! My interest in MINIX is mostly academic; I have always been interested in OS development, and MINIX follows the philosophy of early UNIX of being simple enough and small enough to be fully understood by a single person. It's simple yet quite sophisticated since the kernel works by message passing.
MINIX supported networking as early as version 1.5 on PC, and on ST from 1.6.25, I think. The Amiga version was "left behind" at 1.5.10.2 with no networking.
I am not aware of attempts to port a GNU-userland to it; there is however at least one attempt to produce a PC cross-compiler that targets ST MINIX 1.6.25, however recompiling the OS meant quite a lot of changes to the K&R code had to be applied:
http://www.beastielabs.net/minix/
I provided a small "hack" so that the full cross-development environment could work on cygwin.
Someone has also managed to port MINIX 2.0.2 to Atari ST, but no source code was released.
I didn't go that route because I don't have the time to change all of the code in the Amiga version. Ideally, I'd like to produce at least an Amiga 1.6.25 port, but that may be in the (far) future, mostly depending on the free time I have. For now, I'd be happy to get a full HD installation on my A1200
