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From: tonyg@batserver.cs.uq.oz.au (Tony Gedge)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Initial impressions of Macintosh Minix
Keywords: Macintosh Minix
Message-ID: <7199@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au>
Date: 6 Feb 91 22:26:19 GMT
References: <1991Feb6.032849.8832@uniwa.uwa.oz>
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In <1991Feb6.032849.8832@uniwa.uwa.oz> comrade@uniwa.uwa.oz (Peter Cooper (GUILD)) writes:
[ Stuff about P-H muckups deleted ]
>Since I have a Mac of my own, I decided to purchase it anyway (it
>saves on freight charges...).  Some things I noticed about MacMinix
>1.5 were:

>1.	The installation guide had numerous (critical) typographical
>	errors.  In addition many aspects of the installation
>	procedure are neglected.  Pity someone who has never installed
>	a Unix system before...

Actually, I noticed all those errors (after reading the shell scripts like
setup_root et al.)  After working out what they were trying to do, I had no
trouble.  Minix is now happily chewing all my disk space :)

>2.	The installation guide said that 1.5 would run under System
>	6.0 or better.  I -was- running 6.07.  No go.  I found an
[ Multifinder woes deleted ]

I found that there were a few problems with MacMinix running under Multifinder
(I'm running system 6.0.5).  Sometimes switching Minix to the background would
cause the machine to hang... but heck... I just run it under Finder and there
are no problems.  Oh... and turning off all my INITs helped a great deal.
I also noticed that Minix takes 10 times longer to boot if MasterJugger(tm) is
installed.

>3.	Simple things like making the /usr/include directories
>	readable to users -other- than bin weren't done.  Why was this

This would be a problem for a person not familiar with unix.  But, if you
have a small background with Unix beforehand, it's trivial.

>4.	NO ON-LINE MANUALS.  For whatever the reasons, this is simply

I'm thinking of working on nroff/troff source for the manual entries and
improving them a bit... probably this will never happen :)

>5.	The tty seems a bit slow.  There have been suggestions here on

The TTY (console windows) I/O isn't too bad (well, it's not spectacular either)
but what annoyed me the most was the unreliability of the rs232 I/O.  I found
that I had to at least double the size of the serial buffers to avoid dropping
characters at 2400 baud.

>Even with these criticisms, I quite like MacMinix and intend to use it
>quite intensively.

I think it is great.  I've learnt more about operating systems while trying to
fix the rs232 and ps problems (trust me... I didn't find the second set of
ps fixes until after I'd fixed it myself :) that I could have in any formal
course.  Minix has served the purpose for which I bought it.

Tony Gedge.

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