New to minix
Russell Shaw
I've been using linux for 10 years and am annoyed at the
amount of time it takes to compile the kernel, and the
difficulty in using debuggers on it when making a device
driver.
Is minix3 ok to run my desktop on? If not, what needs fixing?
Jon Shadow
If you wanna use it on desktop, you'll probably want to write drivers
for video and sound. You also need KDE or Gnome, right now its only
fluxbox and jwm.
--
Sergeyli
Russell Shaw
Ok. I read somewhere that there's no virtual-memory manager or swap
file or something. Is that all sorted?
Ulrich Schmidt
> ....
that was on older versions of Minix.
Minix 3.1.4 and newer has virtual memory support.
I don't recommend MINIX currently for your desktop PC, because missing
drivers and there are currently not very much desktop applications, like
office, multimedia, browsers, etc..
If you want to install it on a real machine, i recommend you an old PC
like a Pentium 3 machine.
I has installed Minix 3.1.8 on an ten years old computer and there was
it really fast. boot of this computer with Minix tooks online 15
Seconds, while Windows 98SE tooks 2 minutes on this machine
There are currently 10 ethernet drivers and 1 WLAN driver (Orinoco)
Supported ethernet chips are currently
1. Intel Pro/100
2. 3Com 501 or 3Com 509 based card
3. Realtek 8139 based card (also emulated by KVM)
4. Realtek 8169 based card
5. Realtek 8029 based card (also emulated by Qemu)
6. NE2000, 3com 503 or WD based card (also emulated by Bochs)
7. AMD LANCE (also emulated by VMWare and VirtualBox)
8. Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit
9. Attansic/Atheros L2 FastEthernet
10. DEC Tulip 21140A in VirtualPC
There was an working port of Open Sound System, but it was broken and
now one has repaired it.
Minix has currently no USB Stack, maybe is anyone working on it?
Common UNIX software like ftp, ssh, X11, tar, gzip, Python, GCC is avaible.
Antoine LECA
> Ok. I read somewhere that there's no virtual-memory manager or swap
> file or something. Is that all sorted?
There is a basic virtual memory manager (since about 2 years).
It allows virtual allocation for stack and shared memory (IPC), which is
very nice to use X11 or other memory hungry programs like GCC or BSD
make; OTOH there is no demand-load, no file-mapping, hence no dynamic
loading or shared libraries, and no swap.
Antoine
Russell Shaw
Ok. I'm familiar with linux kernel operation to some degree. I'll have
a look and think about what i can fix when i get time.