Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!fernwood!apple!decwrl!wuarchive!udel!mmdf
From: MDOELL%DOSUNI1.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Magnus Doell)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: SCSI disk drives under MINIX
Message-ID: <34957@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Date: 30 Oct 90 13:13:56 GMT
Sender: mmdf@ee.udel.edu
Lines: 32

On Mon, 29 Oct 90 16:37:10 GMT Erach Irani said:
>Is there any limitation as to the SCSI disk drives MINIX can talk to.
>Most PC UNIX's cannot use the STO2 adaptor which costs only $ 35 or so
>and works fine with DOS.  (The other SCSI adaptors cost  around $200).

In official MINIX there isn't a special driver for SCSI. So you have to
use bios_wini.c or write a special SCSI driver yourself or ask me for my
SCSI driver. If you want to use bios_wini.c you will loose the protected
mode and than you couldn't port GNUemacs etc. to MINIX (see below).
Also you might get problems with bios_wini.c as Seagates BIOS uses the
BIOS timer variable for timeouts and MINIX doesn't update this location
(this may be true in other BIOS drivers also).

>How much disk space is good to use MINIX.  Is 80 Meg OK for MINIX,
>GNUEmacs, DOS, latex (6 Meg in DOS), and Microsoft Windows.

This might be enough for the binaries but it wouldn't be enough during
porting the GNU software to MINIX (I use 60 Meg for MINIX and have to be
a disk-jockey for moving sources in and out as I need them until I got a
second disk (300 Meg :-)

You need the following things for porting GNUemacs etc.:
1. Bruce' 386 extension for MINIX-PC and Bruce' BCC
2. Porting GNU gcc (Bruce has done this, I am still working on)
3. At least 4M RAM (better 8) as MINIX doesn't swap and GNUemacs
   needs a lot of memory for itself and for all the files you are
   working on with this beast.
4. Porting GNUemacs etc.
5. A lot of help from other people (I couldn't believe that porting
   all this stuff will be easy and could be done quick by one person :-)

Ma.D.