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From: apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Problems with MiNT
Message-ID: <2849@atari.UUCP>
Date: 8 Mar 91 20:16:01 GMT
References: <13036@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <1991Mar6.000929.8743@uwovax.uwo.ca> <13152@darkstar.ucsc.edu>
Organization: Atari Corp., Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 36

rome@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (60380000) writes:
>I have been recently told that the reason I couldn't halt programs when
>using Gulam was because it redefined the keymap for it's own purposes
>so MiNT doesn't see the CTRL-Z.  I have tried the shells MiNTBash and
>Ksh but neither of them are as good as Gulam is.

Gulam is not a good shell to use under MiNT because you can't use it more
than once.  Gulam installs vectors in global places, and, as you've seen,
remaps the keyboard, so it's not friendly in a multi-tasking environment.

For the keyboard problem, try shift-help, which is bound to "keys-reset."
This seems to help.

That "ls" is an external command in some shells isn't such a sin, but if
you hate it you hate it.  It shouldn't be so bad if it comes from a
RAMdisk, and the fast-load bit is set, and the shell hashes the PATH.
"Init" which comes with MiNT doesn't hash the path, which is a real shame.

("Hash the path" means that when you set the path, it reads those
directories once, and then when you type "ls" it looks in memory to decide
what program to run, rather than scanning all the directories in your path
every time you enter a command name.)

Another thing that helps the speed of program execution is having a large
disk cache in GEMDOS (or MiNT, as the case may be).  Run CACHEnnn.PRG with
nnn around 080 to see directory scans and the like speed up a lot.  At
least then the directories being scanned will be in memory, and won't be
read off disk.

Meanwhile, Eric Smith is working on a new release of MiNT, and I'm working
on a new release of some utils, including the shell.  The new features will
include arguments to batch files and (I hope) path hashing.

============================================
Opinions expressed above do not necessarily	-- Allan Pratt, Atari Corp.
reflect those of Atari Corp. or anyone else.	  ...ames!atari!apratt