Does X11 *really* work on minix3?
Charlie
Parallels I could install 3.1.3a, but networking didn't work. In QEMU
3.1.3a installs okay. (I'm not sure about networking there yet.) In
vmware I couldn't get that version to install at all; it just panics
and reboots during the installer's boot process. But 3.1.2a from the
pre-built virtual machine works fine.
In none of those does X11 actually start!
I've tried using chmem up, down, and sideways as some web sites
suggested. I've tried reinstalling X11. I've tried running it as
startx and xdm, X and Xorg. I gave the virtual machines 512M of
memory.
Usually it fails silently. One time it complained about X not being
in my PATH, which of course it really was. But reinstalling caused it
to revert to failing silently. The relevant log files are empty.
Does anyone have the X window system working in MINIX? I mean,
really? Because at this point I don't believe it's possible.
Please prove me wrong! Please tell me what I might have missed. Or
at least how to make X more verbose in its error reporting.
esalmon
I will attest to it working. I'm using 3.1.2a under VMWare on my
laptop. I did have to do the chmem as well, but once I did that (and
I think a reboot, though don't know if that was required) it worked
just fine.
At first, I would get the the login screen, but once I logged in it
would freeze. Once I bumped up the memory in the virtual machine from
128M to 256M it worked fine.
Charlie
> I did have to do the chmem as well, but once I did that (and
> I think a reboot, though don't know if that was required) it worked
> just fine.
How much memory did you tell chmem to use? And was this chmem on /usr/
X11R6/bin/X or /usr/X11R6/bin/Xorg or something else?
I hope in the long term the need for per-program memory limits can go
away. It was fine for my old Mac LC when it had 4M RAM and included
nice graphical tools for managing memory. Squeezed every extra
kilobyte out of the system. But that's not what people expect
anymore.
Hey I wonder how hard it'd be to make a graphical memory manager for
short term use...
Erik van der Kouwe
> really? Because at this point I don't believe it's possible.
>
> Please prove me wrong! Please tell me what I might have missed. Or
> at least how to make X more verbose in its error reporting.
The easiest way to get it to work is to just add lots of memory. On my
512MB laptop it works right after installing - I just tell packman to
install X and then type "xdm". Same for a 1GB VMWare VM running on
another computer, and IIRC it also worked before when I created a 512MB
VM.
I would recommend always using 3.1.2a; 3.1.3 is useful as a basis to
build Minix from SVN, but in my experience it is too unstable for
everyday use.
I would also recommend using VMWare (Player) due to its superb
networking support (at least on Windows). I believe Qemu also has good
network support when run on Linux, but its network functionality is
rather bad in Windows. I don't know about Mac. If you use Qemu, be sure
to use "tun" (rather than "user") networking if you can and don't
forget to set the Qemu compatility flag in the boot monitor.
--
With kind regards,
Erik van der Kouwe
colone...@yahoo.com
> The easiest way to get it to work is to just add lots of memory.
less memory on your video card or even a simple VGA card to make
X less memory hungry? Most (possibly older) cards I've delt with
work if you treat them as simple VGA or 600x800 SVGA.
3ch