Minix 3.3.0 on Thinkpad T400 and Neofetch

[Sam Tornado]

Hello!

I am having fun playing with Minix, but I am not a computer engineer.

My goal was to install it on my old T400 Thinkpad, and install neofetch to impress my friend. We have been changeling each other with  harder and harder Linux Distros, Arch Gentoo, LFS, so thought I would try Minix out to surprise my friend.  

But I had some trouble, first I could not clone the github source because of lack of SSL support, so I used SSH to transfer the files from another PC. But then the version of Bash was too old, so I transferred the source for Bash ~4.0, but then I realized there was no gcc.

I noticed some conversions about a later version then 3.3, where could I find that? and does anyone a better way to update a newer version of bash?

Anyways having fun and learning a lot! Thanks!

[steven....@gmail.com]

If you just wanted to install it, did you see that you can download a pre-built ISO image? That includes a build of the most recent development snapshot, v3.4.0 RC6.  If you followed the "download" links at www.minix3.org this might have been unclear, but on the Download page below the Official Releases section you'll see a heading, "Development snapshots" that will take you to this page: http://download.minix3.org/iso/snapshot/   You should see an ISO for 3.4.0rc6 in the list.

If all you want is to install the latest version, go with the 3.4.0 RC6 ISO from the link above. If you really want to crosscompile the system from scratch there is a fairly easy guide on the wiki, but you should pay attention to the build platform. I wound up using CentOS 7.9, the versions of various packages happened to work well with the build system. You should spend some time reading the wiki and look for the related threads in this group if you want to go down this road.

Good luck,
--S.

[Josh Noe]

The latest version of Minix is the 3.4RC, which is in the git repo. The recommended way to install it is cross compiling from linux (iirc it may not be possible to build it from Minix 3.3). There is a wiki article on how to do so here: https://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=developersguide:crosscompiling

Depending on what distribution/compiler version you are using you may end up having a couple build errors due to stale code. If so, post them here and I will try to help.

Once you get it going you will want to install pkgin (the Minix package manager). The prebuilt images include it, but you have to install it manually if you build from the repo. You can install it with the command PKG_PATH=http://minix3.org/pkgsrc/packages/3.4.0/i386/All/ pkg_add pkgin (thanks Jean-Baptiste Boric!) After pkgin is installed you can use it to install bash 4.4 and many other packages.

Finally, there is no gcc because minix uses llvm/clang as its compiler.

Hope that helps!