Minix 1.1 / 1.2

[Ruud Baltissen]

Hallo allemaal,,

I have several old IBM PC-XTs and Commodore compatibles. One member of the Commodore community came with the idea to run Minix on these old machines. I was able to find some floppy images of 1.1 and 1.2. I tried these on Microsoft Virtual PC and the first floppies of both sets booted fine. But then things stucked.

It is possible that this only runs on a real PC, but I doubt. So my question: what is needed to install Minix on these PCs?

To be honest, I haven't read the famous book yet. Worse, I can't even find the first edition. I found the PDFs of the second and third edition but I haven't any idea if they can be used as well. So any suggestions to make Minix run on these old PCs are welcome!

Met vriendelijke groet / kind regards, Ruud Baltissen
www.baltissen.org
 

[Roc Vallès]

If you've got enough RAM, I'd try:

http://www.minix-vmd.org/pub/minix/2.0.3/

Else, go with 1.5, not 1.0.

http://minix1.woodhull.com/index1.html

[Antoine LECA]

On 2015-10-20 18:26Z, Ruud Baltissen wrote:
> I have several old IBM PC-XTs and Commodore compatibles. One member of the
> Commodore community came with the idea to run Minix on these old machines.
> I was able to find some floppy images of 1.1 and 1.2. I tried these on
> Microsoft Virtual PC and the first floppies of both sets booted fine. But
> then things stucked.

Pretty much to be expected: virtual machines emulate 90-mm floppy
drives, while these ancient versions of Minix only know about XT floppy
drives, which are 5¼" 360K (not even HD as used on AT.)
Minix 1.3 was the first version which more or less worked on AT-class
machines, albeit still with 5½" drives (and lots of problems with them);
there were patches floating around to support 90-mm floppy drives but
they were biased to PS2 machines.

As Roc said, you will have _much_ more success with 1.5.10.

> It is possible that this only runs on a real PC, but I doubt.

Don't.

> So my question: what is needed to install Minix on these PCs?

Sorry, you lost me: what is "these"? The real hardware, or Virtual PC?
In the first case, assuming your "old XT" are real IBM PC-XTs (not XT286
nor anything enhanced with a 90-mm drive), Minix 1.1 or (better) 1.2
should work, even if 1.3 or 1.5 are vastly better (less bugs.)
About the compatibles, I guess 1.5 is a better base to start.

Regarding Virtual PC, do yourself a favour and jump to 2.0.2: you won't
have stupid issues with things like volumes limited to 32MB, kind of
trap you might very easily dig into inadvertently...

> To be honest, I haven't read the famous book yet. Worse, I can't even find
> the first edition. I found the PDFs of the second and third edition but I
> haven't any idea if they can be used as well. So any suggestions to make
> Minix run on these old PCs are welcome!

While I learned Minix with the 1st edition, I believe the 2nd is a
better choice, at the very least because it collected the experience of
many bug hunts. 3rd edition (and Minix 3.1) is quite a bit different,
and won't apply so smoothly to old machines; on the other hand, it is
less antiquated.


Antoine

[Ruud Baltissen]

Hallo Roc,

> http://www.minix-vmd.org/pub/minix/2.0.3/

First line on that page says: Version 2.0.3 will not run on a system with only 640K!
And these old XT (compatible)s only have 640 KB.

> Else, go with 1.5, not 1.0.

I didn't find any floppies with 1.5, just 1.1 and 1.2.

[Ruud Baltissen]

Hallo Antoine,

Pretty much to be expected: virtual machines emulate 90-mm floppy
drives, while these ancient versions of Minix only know about XT floppy
drives, which are 5¼" 360K (not even HD as used on AT.)

Ah, I understand: Minix expects a 360 KD FD and the virtual machine gives it a 720 KB or, most likely, a 1.44 MB one that has too different parameters.
So I'll create real floppies and will try these.

[Roc Vallès]

Create some floppies from this:

http://www.minix-vmd.org/pub/minix/old/

[Antoine LECA]

On 21/10/2015 18:26, Ruud Baltissen wrote:
>> Pretty much to be expected: virtual machines emulate 90-mm floppy
>> drives, while these ancient versions of Minix only know about XT floppy
>> drives, which are 5¼" 360K (not even HD as used on AT.)
>
> Ah, I understand: Minix expects a 360 KD FD and the virtual machine gives
> it a 720 KB or, most likely, a 1.44 MB one that has too different
> parameters.

Yep, indeed the 1,440-KiB (1.47-MB) drive, as just about any computer
since 1993...

> So I'll create real floppies and will try these.

Beware if you try on VirtualPC with a real (1440-KiB) floppy drive and
properly formatted copies of the real floppies: it will solve some
issues such as Minix code naively expecting that sector 0.0.9 to be
followed with 0.1.0, while your previous emulated floppy had it at
0.0.10 instead; but you should also allow for the Minix "floppy" driver
and the booting code ("bootblok") to use the timings for the 360-KiB
*drive*... which often drives XXIth-century computers (and emulators)
crazy! If you search the web, this issue is documented.

Of course, if you are using the real XT hardware instead, no issue.

Antoine

[Antoine LECA]

On 21/10/2015 18:21, Ruud Baltissen wrote:
>> Else, go with 1.5, not 1.0.
>
> I didn't find any floppies with 1.5, just 1.1 and 1.2.

http://download.minix3.org/previous-versions/Intel-1.5/

Reachable from main page, downloads, previous versions; there is a lot
of material there. Also check http://www.minix-vmd.org

Antoine

[Ruud Baltissen]

Hallo allemaal,


I managed to startup version 1.1 on an old IBM PC-XT with a 20 MB harddisk. On of the possibilities after booting the floppy is checking the HD. That doesn't work out (yet). I wouldn't be surprised if I do something wrong.

Anyway, another option is to boot further and that goes well. At one moment the computer asks me to login. I presume I should login with 'root', so I did. The nect thing asked is the password. I tried 'nothing', the word 'root' and more obvious possibilities but nothing worked. I tried to find it in the two books I have but the 2nd version doesn't mention anything about booting at all and the 3rd version only says to login as root, no password mentioned. So I'm stuck.

Who knows the password, please?

[Thomas Cort]

The page lists the password for 1.5. Maybe it's the same?

http://gunkies.org/wiki/Minix

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[Ruud Baltissen]

Hallo Thomas,

> The page lists the password for 1.5. Maybe it's the same?

It is, thank you very much!


With kind regards met vriendelijke groet, Ruud Baltissen

[Antoine LECA]

On 25/10/2015 14:53Z, Ruud Baltissen wrote:
> I managed to startup version 1.1 on an old IBM PC-XT with a 20 MB harddisk.
> On of the possibilities after booting the floppy is checking the HD. That
> doesn't work out (yet). I wouldn't be surprised if I do something wrong.

Probably not.
I would have been surprised the HD stuff worked at all out of the box,
since Minix originally targeted floppy-only PCs and XTs: by Minix 1.1,
the HD stuff was pretty rough, and what you saw reflects that; even 1.2
was not fully stabilized, this came by 1.3. Please read attentively the
READ_ME and follow it quite to the words to make the HD stuff working.

For example, I remember there were quite a bit of uncertainty with the
partition ids, known as "sysind": for 1.1, according to diskfix.asm (a
MASM program you need to build and run), it was 0h40; 1.2 introduced
fdisk which used 0 for any "non-DOS" created partition, a potentially
misleading value, which caused griefs from several DOS variants of
FDISK. It was not until to-be-1.4b version released 1989-10-26 (happy
birthday!) that the scheme was changed to use a dedicated number for
MINIX, forced by the then-new 'm' command; that number was then 0x08,
which was changed at an unknown-to-me moment to 0x80; the last piece
came in for 1.5.0 (Christmas '89), when indicator 0x81 was introduced to
indicate "already rounded [to 1-KiB boundary] partitions."


Antoine

[Jacob Adams]

In case that page ever goes down the passwords are 

ast Wachtwoord

root Geheim

Jacob 

[Bengo]

http://www.hampa.ch/pce/pics-ibmpc-os.html

There you have it a real XT emulator that runs 1.1 version.

VPc, VBox, Bochs, VMware will not work