Minix 3.1.8 Release

[Arun Thomas]

Hi all,

We are pleased to present the MINIX 3.1.8 stable release. The major
features of this release are:

* New package management infrastructure: pkgsrc and pkgin
* Unix Domain Socket support
* Multiboot support
* Ext2 filesystem support
* ACPI driver
* Full APIC mode including IO APICs
* Experimental AHCI support

To find out more about this release, please see
http://wiki.minix3.org/en/MinixReleases. You can grab the ISO image
from the download page: http://www.minix3.org/download.

We would like to thank our Google Summer of Code students for their hard
work this summer. Thanks also to Google for generously supporting our
students while they hacked on MINIX. We are also grateful to the MINIX
community for all your contributions and feedback. We hope you enjoy the
new release.

Arun

[pikpik]

Hi,

On Oct 4, 10:21 am, Arun Thomas <arun.tho...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We are pleased to present the MINIX 3.1.8 stable release.
>

I've installed the image in VirtualBox (with workarounds), and I think
it works well!

The stable release seems to work very well, but I had some problems
with tracking current:

- The "bin" user failed to complete "make world" due to not having
permission to change something in (I think) a timezone file/folder. (I
retried as "root," and it completed successfully.)

- After restarting MINIX and booting the "custom" boot image, I found
ProcFS to have problems (PS reported errors about it).

>
> The major features of this release are:
>
> * New package management infrastructure: pkgsrc and pkgin

Personally, I find the steps to set up pkgsrc are a little...
involved? Is it possible to have the steps written down somewhere,
such as in the log-in message? Also, my largest annoyance with the
initial setting-up process is that often dependency-related packages
take many retries to simply download. Is there any way to improve
that? (Is simply writing a "retry" script sufficient for unsupervised
download/installation processes?)

> * Unix Domain Socket support

Isn't this very important for many popular programs and packages? :D

> * Experimental AHCI support

Are there any SATA drives that are known to work with MINIX at the
moment?

> We would like to thank our Google Summer of Code students for their hard
> work this summer. Thanks also to Google for generously supporting our
> students while they hacked on MINIX. We are also grateful to the MINIX
> community for all your contributions and feedback. We hope you enjoy the
> new release.
>
> Arun

Thank you very much! I think the students, as well as the rest of the
MINIX Team, have done a great job!

pikpik

[Larson, Timothy E.]

> Personally, I find the steps to set up pkgsrc are a little...
> involved? Is it possible to have the steps written down somewhere,
> such as in the log-in message? Also, my largest annoyance with the
> initial setting-up process is that often dependency-related packages
> take many retries to simply download. Is there any way to improve
> that? (Is simply writing a "retry" script sufficient for
> unsupervised
> download/installation processes?)

Have you discovered "make fetch-list | sh" yet?

I've done the initial setup and bootstrap of pkgsrc enough times now that it doesn't feel too excruciating to me any more. :) Maybe I'm numb to the pain??? :D But if something could be done to simplify it, of course that would be great.

Having a pkgsrc man page would be a better idea, I think, than putting that info in a login message.

I've yet to try 3.1.8, so I can't comment much on specifics...

Tim
--
Tim Larson
App Admin, Intercall Production Services

[pikpik]

Hi,

On Oct 5, 5:20 pm, "Larson, Timothy E." <TELar...@west.com> wrote:
>
> Have you discovered "make fetch-list | sh" yet?

Unfortunately, I was unable to find that in the latest image. But I
may have found a bug instead (a find | grep /dev issue). :)

> I've done the initial setup and bootstrap of pkgsrc enough times now that it doesn't feel too excruciating to me any more.  :)  Maybe I'm numb to the pain???  :D  But if something could be done to simplify it, of course that would be great.
>
> Having a pkgsrc man page would be a better idea, I think, than putting that info in a login message.

I agree with that idea! Except I think a small starting message would
be good, like the Packman message in earlier versions.

Thanks,
pikpik

[Larson, Timothy E.]

> > Have you discovered "make fetch-list | sh" yet?
>
> Unfortunately, I was unable to find that in the latest image. But I
> may have found a bug instead (a find | grep /dev issue). :)

This is mentioned in the Pkgsrc Guide.

> > Having a pkgsrc man page would be a better idea, I think, than
> putting that info in a login message.
>
> I agree with that idea! Except I think a small starting message
> would
> be good, like the Packman message in earlier versions.

Okay, I see. I was thinking you wanted a relatively expansive introduction as login text. If you were suggesting something like "Check out our new packaging framework, pkgsrc. See its man page for details." as a login message, then I completely agree that's a good idea, with Minix evolving so fast.

[Arun Thomas]

On 10/07/2010 02:04 AM, pikpik wrote:

>
> I agree with that idea! Except I think a small starting message would
> be good, like the Packman message in earlier versions.

The motd mentions how to use pkgin. You should see it when you log in.

Best,
Arun

[pikpik]

Hi,

Thanks Arun! I know that pkgin is displayed (in the MOTD) to users as
the package installation method, but should pkgsrc (set-up steps
included?) be shown prominently as well?

Thanks!
pikpik

[Arun Thomas]

Well, we don't think normal users should have to use pkgsrc. We view
pkgsrc as a tool for those who want to develop packages. If interested
users want to help create packages (which would be great), they can
refer to the wiki for documentation.

Best,
Arun

[pikpik]

Hi,

Okay, that makes sense.

On Oct 7, 9:52 am, "Larson, Timothy E." <TELar...@west.com> wrote:
>
> > > Have you discovered "make fetch-list | sh" yet?
>
> > Unfortunately, I was unable to find that in the latest image. But I
> > may have found a bug instead (a find | grep /dev issue). :)
>

> This is mentioned in the Pkgsrc Guide.
>

Thank you! I looked and found it in NetBSD's official guide. I guess I
had been assuming it was in something of MINIX's (installation image
or documentation).

Thank you,
pikpik