Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!botter!star!...@cs.vu.nl
From: a...@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: MINIX announcement, version 1.2; comments to me
Message-ID: <660@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 23 Feb 88 15:28:13 GMT
Sender: a...@cs.vu.nl
Reply-To: a...@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 333
MINIX INFORMATION SHEET
1. WHAT IS MINIX?
MINIX is an operating system that is a subset of UNIX Version 7. It contains
nearly all the V7 system calls, and these calls are identical to the
corresponding V7 calls. It also includes a Bourne-compatible shell, and close
to 100 utility programs, including cc, grep, ls, make, etc. To the average
user, it is effectively V7 UNIX. If you dig deep enough, you will, however,
find some differences.
The MINIX kernel has been written from scratch by Andy Tanenbaum (a...@cs.vu.nl).
It does not contain ANY AT&T code at all. The utility programs have been
written by Andy Tanenbaum, his students, and a number of other people,
including people on USENET. None of the utilities contain any AT&T code
either. The shell, the Pascal and C compilers, make, etc. have all been
completely redone. As a result, this code is not covered by the ATT UNIX
license, and it can be made available.
2. WHAT CPUS DOES MINIX RUN ON?
MINIX was originally written for the IBM PC, XT, and AT. It has since been
ported to the NS 16032 and the 68000 (Atari ST). It will also work on many
386-based machines. A list of clones on which MINIX has been tested is
included below.
3. HOW CAN I GET MINIX?
MINIX is being sold by:
Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632 (1-800-223-1360), and
Prentice-Hall Int'l, Hemel, Hempstead, England (+44 442 231555)
When ordering it, please specify the 640K PC version, 512K AT version or
256K PC version (which will be dropped starting with Version 1.3). The Atari
version will run on any Atari ST, from a 512K machine with 1 floppy to a Mega
ST with 4M and 16 hard disks. It works better on the latter. The Atari version
will be available from Prentice-Hall in the late Spring.
The U.S. price for the IBM version is $80. The price outside the U.S. is
somewhat higher due to the way Prentice-Hall's divisions are financed.
The price for the Atari version will be roughly similarly to the IBM version.
All distributions contain executable binaries and the complete source code.
4. HOW CAN I FIND OUT MORE ABOUT MINIX?
MINIX is described in detail in the following book:
Title: Operating Systems: Design and Implementation
Author: Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Publisher: Prentice-Hall
ISBN: 0-13-637406-9
There is also a paperback available outside the U.S. only. A German
translation was begun in Feb. 1988. The software package does not contain a
manual; this is contained in the appendices to the book, which also contain a
complete source code listing (in C) of the MINIX kernel.
5. IS MINIX PUBLIC DOMAIN?
No. MINIX has been copyrighted by Prentice-Hall. Prentice-Hall has decided to
permit a limited amount of copying of the sources and binaries for educational
use. Professors may make copies for students in their operating systems
classes. Academic researchers may use it for their new experimental machines,
and things like that. A small amount of private copying of diskettes for the
use of personal friends is ok, but please do not make more than 3 copies from
each original. Prentice-Hall is trying to be more reasonable than most
software publishers. Please do not abuse this. Online repositories of the
full source code distribution are not permitted. All commercial uses of MINIX
require written permission from Prentice-Hall; for the most part, they are
willing to grant such permission in return for a royalty on sales.
6. WHAT PROGRAMS COME WITH MINIX
The list below gives the programs that are either distributed with Version 1.2
or have been posted to USENET since then:
ar ascii basename bawk cal cat cc chmem chmod chown clr cmp
comm cp cpdir date dd df diff dosread du echo ed elle expr
factor fdisk find fix getlf grep gres head kill libpack libupack ln
login lpr ls make mined mkdir mkfs mknod more mount mv od
passwd pr prep printenv pwd readfs rev rm rmdir roff run sed
sh shar size sleep sort spell split stty su sum sync tail
tar tee test time touch tr treecmp umount uniq update uudecode uuencode wc
Various other programs have also been posted, but the ones above are considered
part of the "official" distribution and will appear in Version 1.3 (summer '88).
7. HOW DO I KEEP UP TO DATE ABOUT MINIX.
If you are on USENET, subscribe to newsgroup comp.os.minix. There are about
10,000 people in this group, and new software, bug fixes, and general discussion
about MINIX take place here. If you are on BITNET or ARPANET, you can get this
newsgroup via a mailing list by contacting:
ARPANET: info-minix-requ...@udel.edu
BITNET: sending a message (either interactive or mail) to listserv@ndsuvm1
saying:
signup minix-l Your_Full_Name
8. ARE THE MESSAGES POSTED TO COMP.OS.MINIX SAVED ANYWHERE?
Yes. There are several archives, one run by Vincent Broman on bugs.nosc.mil,
another run by James Galvin on louie.udel.edu, one on the Bitnet
"LISTSERV" at NDSUVM1, and an archive area on Simtel20.arpa
The following text was posted by Vincent Broman and describes how his archive
works.
>> Bugs.Nosc.Mil archives comp.os.minix news articles of lasting interest
>> and other Minix material, such as a list of machines reported to be
>> able to run Minix. Material of widespread interest includes diffs for
>> updating v1.1 to v1.2 and preliminary fixes headed for v1.3, code developing
>> toward a serial port driver, diffs for cross compilation under MS-C and
>> Turbo-C, the new asld with split I&D, and recently the editor, Elle v4.1 .
>>
>> This material is available by anonymous FTP (during non-business hours)
>> on bugs.nosc.mil in directory pub/Minix . The file SUBJECTS contains a list
>> of Subject lines serving as a kind of index. The file names are mostly just
>> the Message-Id of a news article.
>>
>> Several ways to get these kinds of goodies, in order:
>>
>> 1. Look, or ask someone you know to look, for articles still available
>> on the machine where you read news, or on a neighbor.
>> 2. Ask the person who posted the material to mail it to you.
>> 3. Get access to a machine on the ArpaNet (or talk to an acquaintance who
>> has access) and FTP to louie.udel.edu or bugs.nosc.mil .
>> 4. To get smaller selections from the bugs.nosc.mil archive by Email,
>> see the instructions following.
>> 5. To get very large amounts of material from archives, talk to someone
>> in charge of it, e.g. me, about mailing a tape. Surface-mailing of tapes
>> is cheap. Voluminous Email is expensive, though not as expensive as
>> posting news.
>>
>> Everything available to anonymous FTP in directory pub/Minix can be obtained by
>> sending a mailed request to minix-ser...@bugs.nosc.mil or nosc!minix-server .
>> Include in the message, either among the header fields or the body, a line like:
>>
>> Reply-To:
>>
>> and after that a line or lines naming desired files e.g.:
>>
>> send compatibility
>> send SUBJECTS
>> send 1...@botter.cs.vu.nl
>>
>> to get an automatic mailed reply. Notice file names are case sensitive.
>> should look something like one of these examples:
>>
>> y...@stolaf.uucp
>> sdcsvax!ihnp4!mtgzz!guru
>> cs.vu.nl!gi...@uunet.uu.net
>> person%utoronto.bit...@cunyvm.cuny.edu
>> user%ulowell.cs...@relay.cs.net
>> honcho%durham.mail...@mit-multics.arpa .
>>
>> Email is not free. Abuse of the system will cause bad karma.
>> Contents may have settled during shipment.
>>
>>
>> Vincent Broman, code 632, Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego, CA 92152, USA
>> Phone: +1 619 553 1641 Internet: bro...@nosc.mil Uucp: sdcsvax!nosc!broman
Information about the other archives can be found below.
>> NDSUVM1's listserv has two archives of Minix information. The first is
>> an automated weekly log of all messages sent to the MINIX-L list. The
>> other is an manually organized manual of sources sent to the list. Both
>> are accessed by sending either interactive messages (bitnet only) or
>> mail (all other networks) to LISTSERV@NDSUVM1. Some possible addresses
>> from other networks are:
>>
>> Bitnet: listserv@ndsuvm1
>> Internet: listserv%ndsuvm1.bit...@cunyvm.cuny.edu
>> UUCP: psuvax1!ndsuvm1.bitnet!listserv
>>
>> **NOTE*** the UUCP gateway at PSUVAX1 appears to violate some rule of
>> RFC822 which listserv does not like being violated (duplicate 'From:'
>> lines). If possible, use a different gateway; otherwise expect a nasty
>> letter from NDSUVM1's postmaster, if anything. I am interested in hearing
>> from anybody on on UUCP or a Bitnet Unix machine who does successfully
>> receive anything from listserv.
>>
>> The message logs are kept in the "MINIX-L" section, with names in the form:
>>
>> MINIX-L LOGyymmw
>>
>> where "yy" is the year, "mm" is the numeric month and "w" is an alphabetic
>> character from A to E indicating what week of the month. Several months of
>> log files are kept on-line, the number depending on disk space availability.
>>
>>
>> The other archives are kept in the "MINIX" section.
>> To obtain a list of the files in the Minix archives, issue the command:
>>
>> INDEX MINIX
>> or
>> INDEX MINIX-L
>>
>> (if you use mail, the command must be in the body of your message)
>>
>> Files are retrieved with the 'GET' command:
>>
>> GET MORE INFO MINIX
>>
>> to get the file "MORE INFO" from the group "MINIX".
>>
>> For a complete list of information on the listserv:
>>
>> INFO ?
>>
>> Due to the 80-character per line (punched card) limit on Bitnet mail, many of
>> the files will be shipped using an encoding scheme that allows logical lines
>> to be split up into many physical lines. The default for going to other
>> networks is "Listserv Punch". It can be obtained from the file 'MISC LPUN'.
>> This file should traverse networks unscathed.
>>
>> Please direct all comments and questions about this archive to Glen Overby at
>> nu070...@ndsuvm1.bitnet
>> A limited archive of MINIX related material is available from simtel20.arpa
>> in the directory PD:. These same files are available on Bitnet
>> from LISTSERV@RPICICGE in the same directory.
>>
>> To get these files from LISTSERV@RPICICGE, use the /pddir and /pdget commands
>> for a directory listing and file retrieval, respectively.
9. WHAT CLONES HAS MINIX BEEN TESTED ON?
MINIX runs on the IBM PC, XT, and AT. It also runs on those clones that are
IBM compatible. You would be amazed at how many are not. The following list
was compiled by Vincent Broman from postings to comp.os.minix:
Computer info source MINIX runs? HD runs?
--------- ----------- ----------- --------
AMT-ATjr dar...@ethos.uucp yes
ARC Turbo XT clone m692...@sdsu.uucp yes
AT&T 6300 dkl...@marque.uucp yes no
AT&T 6300 j...@chinet.uucp yes yes with fix of go
ATronics AT clone hub...@cae780.uucp yes
ATronics XT clone d...@bek-mc.caltech.edu yes yes w/ fix
Aerocomp Clone rmt...@uokmax.uucp yes no
Amstrad s...@warwick.uucp yes no
BIOS silent partner a...@cs.vu.nl yes yes
Commodore PC-10 II a...@cs.vu.nl yes yes
Compaq 386 a...@cs.vu.nl no
Compaq DeskPro wal...@xanth.uucp yes
Compaq DeskPro 286 wal...@xanth.uucp yes
Compaq Portable caven...@drivax.uucp yes yes w/fix
Compaq Portable II fos...@beno.css.gov yes
Computer Classfd ST/286 m...@lanl.gov yes
Corona PC-400 dtin...@utoronto.bitnet yes
Corona PC-400 j...@unrvax.uucp no (see below)
Epson Equity 3 a...@cs.vu.nl yes yes
Faraday motherboard jal...@netxcom.uucp yes
Ferranti PC860/XT l...@uk.ac.newcastle.cheviot yes yes w/ fix
GRID GridCase 3 ste...@cwi.nl yes
Honeywell AP a...@cs.vu.nl yes yes
HP Vectra e...@unmvax.unm.edu no
IBM PC gan...@utah-cs.uucp yes
IBM PC-AT @6MHz a...@cs.vu.nl yes yes
IBM PC-AT @8MHz a...@cs.vu.nl yes no
IBM PC-XT a...@cs.vu.nl yes yes 10Mb
IBM PC-XT-286 a...@cs.vu.nl yes no
IBM PC Convertible b...@winfree.uucp no
IBS system 2000 sbann...@sol.uvic.cdn yes yes w/ fix
IMC XT, 8MHz V20, beu...@klipper.cs.vu.nl yes
ITT XTRA a...@cs.vu.nl yes
Kaypro 286i (AT) com...@tjalk.cs.vu.nl yes
Kaypro PC k...@driwash.uucp yes
Leading Edge clone gan...@utah-cs.uucp yes
Leading Edge models M&D wegr...@cdx39.uucp yes
Leading Edge MP-1673 w...@eddie.mit.edu yes no
NCR PC8 a...@cs.vu.nl yes no
Samsung clone gan...@utah-cs.uucp yes
SEFCO AT Clone d...@bek-mc.caltech.edu yes yes?
Shitel a...@cs.vu.nl no
Tandy 1000 kim...@wdl1.uucp no
Tandy 1000SX,1000EX j...@moncol.uucp no
Tandy 1000 j...@mia.uucp yes w/fix yes w/fix
Tandy 1200 modified b...@winfree.uucp yes
Televideo Telenix 286 a...@cs.vu.nl yes
Toshiba T1100+ b...@winfree.uucp yes
Toshiba T1100+ stu...@bms-at.uucp yes
Unisys micro IT a...@cs.vu.nl yes yes
Unnamed Asian Clone art...@ubu.uucp yes
Xerox 6085 PC emulator lind...@cheviot.newcastle.ac.uk yes yes
XT-2000 clone subel...@ttidca.tti.com yes
Zenith 150 n...@wldrdg.uucp yes no
Zenith Z-151 z...@felix.uucp yes yes w/ fix
Zenith 181 b...@winfree.uucp yes
Zenith Z-248 (AT) a...@cs.vu.nl yes yes (20 Mb)
Disks Info source Comment
----------- ----------- -------
Adaptec 2002/Rodime b...@winfree.uucp works with fix of n0ano@wldrdg
Data Technology Corp a...@cs.vu.nl AT controller; works
DTC-5150BX HDC l...@uk.ac.newcastle.cheviot runs with fix
Everex AT compat HD m...@lanl.gov HD troubles
Maynard Corp Hard Card gan...@utah-cs.uucp not compat
Seagate 4026, IBM Ctrlr s...@gitpyr.gatech.edu runs with fix of hubble@cae780
Seagate ST4906 80Mb HD hub...@cae780.uucp yes with posted fix
WD 1002S-WX2 HDC, ST225, g...@orstcs.uucp runs with posted fix
WD 1002A-WX1 HDC, Rodine 204, b...@winfree.uucp runs with fix of n0ano@wldrdg
WD 1002/ST225 HD alb...@ncoast.uucp won't run yet
WD 1003-WA3 FDC com...@tjalk.cs.vu.nl runs with posted fix
Xebec HDC 20Mb disk art...@warwick.uucp works, but hd <3Mb only
Xebec HDC, 10Mb HD m692...@sdsu.uucp runs if minix on 1st partition
Z150 Hard Disk n...@wldrdg.uucp works with posted fix
Bernoulli disk acharya@sbcs has problems doing mkfs thereon
Toshiba T1100+ 720K stu...@bms-at.uucp supported by posted fixes
AT&T 6300 Floppies a...@cs.vu.nl supported by posted mod
Video cards Info source Comment
----------- ----------- -------
Corona PC-400 own display j...@unrvax.uucp cursor stuck, scrolls wrong.
CT-6040S mono-graphics g...@orstcs.uucp support by posted fix
EGA video a...@cs.vu.nl not working, fixes suggested
(EGA) NEC GB-1 vizard@dartvax scroll fix unsuccessful also
PGC s...@gitpyr.gatech.edu fine
Sigma Designs Color 400 b...@njitsc1.uucp incompat, causes NMIs
Tecmar Graphics Master sbann...@sol.uvic.cdn CGA emul probs like EGA
Toshiba T1100+ display stu...@bms-at.uucp scroll problem, mod posted
Printers Info source Comment
--------- ----------- -------
Epson FX-80 prtr art...@warwick.uucp unreliable prtr driver
printer MSDOS ok, Minix not, d...@sdsu.uucp supported by posted fix.
Other boards Info source Comment
--------- ----------- -------
AST Six Pack Clock t...@killer.uucp support by posted code
AST Six Pack Premium g...@orstcs.uucp clock code posted
... MegaPlus diam...@hpfclp.hp.com simpler clock code posted
MCT multi-IO card m...@lanl.gov code for clock setting posted
Multi-IO card/AMT-ATjr dar...@ethos.uucp none of above clock code worked
CompuAdd MFC caven...@drivax.uucp myxm's clock code worked
Alpha Micro Videotrax z...@felix.uucp board is inimical
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