Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!tuvie!vmars!hp
From: hp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at (Peter Holzer)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: New version of minix -- anybody taken it for a spin yet ?
Message-ID: <1932@tuvie>
Date: 30 Oct 90 15:25:51 GMT
References: <303@cti1.UUCP> <193@rc6.urc.tue.nl> <4643@dogie.macc.wisc.edu>
Sender: news@tuvie
Distribution: comp
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anderson@udder.macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson) writes:

>Alas, I am one of the other half.  I sent in my 1.3 boot disk
>label and a check for $109 on September 14.  I'm still waiting,
>and I'm beginning to be pissed.  If you asked later and already
>have yours, I'd like to hear about it (AT version).

The day of joy might be near :-). I ordered mine on September 12th
and it arrived last Thursday (Oct 25th). Curiously enough, about
a week before that I received a note from PH telling me that
this product is not yet available. 

While playing around with it I found a few bugs, however:

Ps doesn't work at first, because /etc/pstable is missing. To
create it, /usr/src/kernel/kernel, /usr/src/mm/mm and
/usr/src/fs/fs must be made first. It also works only for root
as normal users cannot read /dev/kmem. Setting the suid bit
solves this problem.

The times(2) call always returns zero. The POSIX standard says
about times:

RETURN VALUE:
	On success times returns the elapsed time sinc an
	arbitrary point in the past (e.g. system startup time)
	in CLK_TCKs of a second.
	This point does not change between two invocations.

and all impementations I've seen (PC/IX, Ultrix, ix/386) do it
that way. I will fix this and post the diffs to fs (What the
heck does times have to do with the file system ? IMHO this
belongs into mm).

Not a necessarily a bug, but a portability problem:
S_IREAD and S_IWRITE (defined under Minix 1.3, most (all?)
Unices, MS_DOS, ..., not in POSIX, however) are no longer
defined in sys/stat.h.
They should be defined as S_IWUSR and S_IRUSR resp. inside
a #ifndef _POSIX_SOURCE.

Elvis dies every now and then with the message `Alarm clock' and
leaves the terminal in raw mode. The sequence `stty
default^Jvirecover' is already hardwired into my fingers after
one weekend :-(.

The keyboard driver has an ugly `feature': It uses codes 0200 ..
0205 for the shift type keys. Unfortunately one German umlaut
lies in this range so I cannot easily make myself a German
keyboard. When (if) I have time I will change the driver so that
it won't use shift codes inside the IBM-ASCII range 0 .. 0377.

Otherwise I am quite pleased with Minix.

Regards,
	Peter.
--
|    _  | Peter J. Holzer                       | Think of it   |
| |_|_) | Technical University Vienna           | as evolution  |
| | |   | Dept. for Real-Time Systems           | in action!    |
| __/   | hp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at                 |     Tony Rand |