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From: jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.amiga
Subject: Re: UNIX on Amiga 500?
Message-ID: <1991Mar16.195854.13855@santra.uucp>
Date: 16 Mar 91 19:58:54 GMT
References: <1991Mar9.231842.20395@jack.sns.com> <2081@public.BTR.COM>
Sender: news@santra.uucp (Cnews - USENET news system)
Reply-To: jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala)
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Lines: 34
In-Reply-To: thad@public.BTR.COM (Thaddeus P. Floryan)

In article <2081@public.BTR.COM>, thad@public (Thaddeus P. Floryan) writes:
>You may be able to run a Minix port on the A500, but Minix is a far cry from
>the SVR4 which CBM is offering on the A3000UX systems.

I think Minix is quite a nice system for the price and especially
considering you get source.  I'm running Minix and tools like gcc,
g++, groff, GNU emacs, GNU fileutils, GNU binutils, gdb etc. on top of
it.  Well, I'm not running these on an Amiga currently but I'm
planning to get Minix with most of these (only 1 Meg of memory limits)
running on my Amiga 1000.

I recompiled the kernel with 62-char file names, 'cause USG-style
14-char filenames cause trouble.  I also have many other enhancements
to the kernel, like a priority-based scheduler, some added system
calls, many constants bumped up from the normal distribution etc.

The major pain with Minix is the single-tasking filesystem - if
several processes are trying to access the disk at the same time, the
performance degrades terribly.  For example with a big cache when the
machine does a sync the system just aboud grinds to a halt for a while.

Lack of TCP/IP might also be considered a big minus for some, but I
haven't yet needed it that much.  I hear 1.6 will have TCP/IP, but I'm
not sure if it will have Berkeley-style socket library.

By the way, I'm also looking for an OS to my Amiga 1000.
Requirements: source code available, freely distributable, should be
able to port X to it with not that much rewriting of X.  Mach would be
otherwise fine but I don't think it'll be very happy without a MMU.
Amiga's native OS is quite nice, yes, but the source is not available.
Maybe I should just rewrite it from scratch like ast did for Minix
;-).

//Jyrki