Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!strath-cs!cs.glasgow.ac.uk!bru-cc!eesrajm From: eesrajm@cc.brunel.ac.uk (Andrew J Michael) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: AmigaMINIX Keywords: Amiga MINIX floppy Message-ID: <1855@Terra.cc.brunel.ac.uk> Date: 12 Oct 90 16:18:34 GMT Organization: Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK Lines: 62 The MINIX Centre has being playing with AmigaMINIX over the last couple of days, and in view of the various comments on the net I thought that their findings might be useful. The MINIX Centre has a brand-new A500 with an A590 hard disk. The first problem was finding out how to copy the AmigaMINIX boot disk under AmigaDOS - the MINIX instructions aren't too helpful for Amiga novices. The fact that copying the disk changes its name from BOOT to Copy_of_BOOT so that the machine won't recognise it doesn't help either. You also have to relabel the copy so that it is called BOOT. Installing MINIX on the original disk is not recommended since it has to write to the disk. We had to discard two original disks before finding one that could be copied by the Amiga - having ten packets of AmigaMINIX on the shelf behind you can be very useful at this stage. Once copied and MINIX installed, the A500 booted quite happily off the minix.img file, without having to use the backup file minix.img.bu. However, the two files do appear to be different - does any one know whether they are supposed to be ? Unfortunately, once booted there is virtually no memory to run anything. It is not even possible to run ls ! We would therefore disagree that AmigaMINIX can be run on an A500; it can't without extra memory, anyway. After putting 2Mb on the hard disk card, we tried again. First impressions are that the machine is a pretty slow MINIX engine. There is a noticeable and extremely annoying delay between hitting a key and seeing the character on the screen. Disk accesses also seem slow. However, despite comments to the contrary, it DOES work. We tried fsck'ing all the P-H MINIX floppies. All passed without an error on both the Amiga and an ST. We tried making MINIX floppies on an ST and fsck'ing them on the Amiga - no problem. We tried the other way round - still no problem. The only problem we have encountered so far in two days of testing is that you might encounter an "unrecoverable write error" message when inserting the /usr floppy during booting. This is because the distribution /usr has a writable /usr/adm/wtmp on it, and init will attempt to write to it during the reboot. If the floppy is write-protected, as it might well be, you will get "unrecoverable write error" messages. Apart from that, and the duff boot disk problem, all seems well. Four of our customers whom we have contacted also say the same. All we want now is a hard disk driver (guess why we bought the hard disk .....) AmigaMINIX on a 68030 still remains a problem. With John Guineau's help we have progressed a little, but it is not yet solved. Andy Michael -- Andy Michael (eesrajm@cc.brunel.ac.uk) " Emulation is the sincerest 85 Hawthorne Crescent form of pottery." West Drayton Middlesex - William Frend De Morgan UB7 9PA