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Newsgroups: comp.sys.nsc.32k
Subject: What MINIX extensions are people using on the pc532? (+ other topics)
Message-ID: <9010210401.AA09368@finch.pa.dec.com>
Date: 21 Oct 90 04:01:55 GMT
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I'm curious--I've just started playing with MINIX 1.5 on a IBM PClone, and
from FTPing around the world I've seen quite a few interesting extensions
for MINIX.  So I'm trying to get a feel for what people are doing, and
what remains to be done when I get my pc532 up--what's do people with
pc532's find most useful?

Something like shoelace, or the virtual consoles package?  I've even
seen a symbolic links package for MINIX.  Obviously somebody's ported
a variant of of UUCP, and Bash as a mail user agent.  GCC.  The Clam shell?

Also:  when will the port of MINIX 1.5 be done?  (To whomever may be working
on this: don't interpret this as "nagging", I'm just curious).

Is there any plan to convert "minix-532" for virtual memory?  An alternative
to this is just to get a lot of RAM.  Anyone have a pc532 with a full 32MB
(~ $2000) of DRAM?  :-)

Question: will the current minix (either generic from AST or minix-532)
swap complete processes to disk when it runs out of memory?  (i.e.  max
process size is still limited by size of physical memory, but idle processes
don't take up any ram).  I ask because this seems considerably simpler to 
impliment than a full virtual memory system and yet gives many of the
advantages.  For a single-user system, it's most common (at least the way
_I_ work) to have many processes, but only one or three are active at any time.

Opinions?  Perhaps this should go in comp.os.minix too...

Thanks for the info.

	Mark

Mark Shepard
shepard@decpa.pa.dec.com
shepard@gatekeeper.dec.com