Mail Archives: opendos/1997/02/25/19:40:11
On 25 Feb 1997 17:20:20 -0500 Richard Hoskins <rmh AT interlaced DOT net>
writes:
>mharris AT blackwidow DOT saultc DOT on DOT ca writes:
>
>> Minix is a UNIX operating system that would run on 286's and
>> possibly even 8088's if I'm not mistaken. It had its own filesystem
>> as well. Linux was originally designed (in Linus's own words) to "be
>> a better Minix than Minix".
>
>The free Minix (2.0) requires IDE drives and an AT bus, given that,
>an 8088 will run it.
>
This is what the FAQ seems to imply. It
apparently isn't true.
>If you have an XT, you need an earlier version (1.5), which is still
>hoarded by Prentice-Hall.
>
I have gotten 2.0 up and running on two
XT architecture machines, the biggest
problems I ran into were the 360K floppy
drives (I had to use the special "tiny"
disk images). Minix seems to interact
with hard drives at the BIOS level, so
any hard drive support that is BIOS-
intrinsic appears to be detected just
dandy. My preliminary surmise is that
Minix 2.0 doesn't really need an IDE
drive (MFM, RLL, ESDI, and even some
SCSI controllers "look" the same when
accessed via BIOS) or an AT bus.
For the record, the two XTish systems
I used were an Ampro Little Board PC
with built-in SCSI and an ancient
full-height 80 MB CDC SCSI drive and a
Leading Edge Model D with a Perstor
ARLL controller and a Seagate ST-138
MFM drive. Both systems had the
aforementioned single 360K floppy
drive, PC-convention serial and
parallel ports, and Hercules video.
- Raw text -