From: sreiz@cs.vu.nl (Reiz Steven)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Amiga Minix 1.5 Answers
Keywords: amiga, minix, blabla
Message-ID: <7718@star.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 24 Sep 90 14:53:31 GMT
Sender: news@cs.vu.nl
Lines: 93
Posted: Mon Sep 24 15:53:31 1990


Here are some answers to frequently asked questions about Amiga Minix 1.5:

Q: What are the hardware requirements to run Minix?
A: An amiga with an 68000, 1 MB of ram (or more) and 1 or more
   floppy drives.
   Note that this does include A2000s and expanded A500s and A1000s
   but that it does not include amigas with 680x0s where x>0, sorry.

Q: What kind of multitasking does Minix provide?
A: Pre-emptive multitasking, just like Unix and the normal AmigaOS.
   This means that the programmer doesn't have to do anything special 
   to make his program multitasking.

Q: What floppy format does Minix use?
A: Minix uses (of course) the normal 880 KB diskdrives but uses the same
   format as the atari ST: double sided, 80 cylinders and 9 sectors/track.
   This gives a capacity of 720 KB per disk and full compatibility with
   ST minix, most of the disks in the atari and amiga distribution of 
   minix are identical. The PC minix 3.5" disk format is very much like
   the amiga/atari format but not yet fully compatible. They will be in
   the future.

Q: What about Amiga Minix harddisk support?
A: There isn't any yet. We didn't have a harddisk to test it on, so we
   couldn't develop it. The source of the atari harddisk driver is included
   to make it easier to write your own harddisk driver.

Q: How hard is it to add a harddisk driver?
A: When you have detailed information about your harddisk controller
   it's not very hard. What you need to know is which addresses your
   harddisk controller occupies and what the protocol is to make your
   controller read and write blocks of data. Armed with this information
   you can easily adapt the atari driver.

Q: Is there a program to convert amiga executables to run them under minix?
A: No, not even in the sense that you could compile a minix program together
   with the minix libraries with a normal amiga compiler and then convert it
   to run under minix, but this special kind of conversion would indeed be
   very useful and it is relatively easy to write a program to do it.

Q: Can I run the normal AmigaOS and minix at the same time?
A: No. This version of Amiga Minix takes over the computer completely.
   This allowed us to stay very close to the PC and atari versions which
   do just the same. It would be very neat to have minix and AmigaOS windows
   side by side, seeing minix commands and normal amiga commands being 
   executed side by side, but this would have a very definite drawback:
   A version of amiga minix that would allow this would have very different
   sourcecode from the atari and st versions, large parts of the kernel and
   memory manager would have to be dumped or rewritten, and probably parts
   of the filesystem as well. That way it would be practically impossible
   to use amiga minix for teaching OS courses because lots of interesting
   low level stuff like task scheduling would have to be done by Exec.

Q: Does minix provide a graphical user interface (gui) or other sound and
   graphics capabilities?
A: No, you should view amiga minix as providing you with a totally different
   machine: you can use the amiga in the normal way with its windows,
   graphics and sound OR you can boot minix. Amiga (and atari and PC) minix
   are very similar to using a 80x25 ASCII terminal connected to a mini running
   V7 unix, providing you with the elegance and flexibility of familiar *nix
   utilities like grep and sed or familiar *nix system calls like fork and
   execv, but unfortunately no sound capabilities beyond a beep when you press
   ^G.
   It would be very nice to have a gui but it would have to meet some very
   tough demands:
   - the sourcecode would have to be public domain
   - it should be portable to the amiga, atari and PC
   - it should not be to big to run on a 1 MB machine
   
   If anybody would want to port for example the X windowing system to amiga
   minix he/she of course is very welcome to do so, but I don't think too many
   people will ever be able to run something like that because of the high
   (extreme?) demands this places on the speed of the processor and the size
   of the harddisk and ram.

Q: What software can be run under amiga minix?
A: A load of familiar unix utilities (most with source!) are supplied with
   minix and other unix programs can be ported far more easily to minix than
   to the normal AmigaOS. Amiga-specific programs that use for example the
   intuition library for graphics will probably never run under minix.

Q: How about the serial port?
A: The amiga serial port is supported under minix, you can use kermit and
   zmodem and other terminal programs and even connect a terminal or other
   computer to the amiga to provide you with a true multi-user system!
   (Currently limited to 2-user because amigas have only one serial port,
   support for multiserial boards is probably not very hard to add.)   

Q: How good is amiga minix compared to pc and st minix 1.5?
A: I am not sure about the pc version but it is equivalent to the st version
   minus harddisk support.

                                        Steven Reiz



