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From: gordon@jc3b21.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Future Patches To Make Minix Usable in the Real World
Message-ID: <114@jc3b21.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 7-Jun-87 23:39:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: jc3b21.114
Posted: Sun Jun  7 23:39:21 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 11-Jun-87 02:19:09 EDT
Organization: Century Computer Systems, Tierra Verde, FL
Lines: 46

I am not trying to insult Mr. Tanenbaum and MINIX. I think MINIX is the
greatest educational "UNIX TOY" around and can compliment the effort and
the method of distribution with the highest praise, however, I have
been here before with "VIRGINS" and have very little hair left to pull out.
I was there with "OS9" and "UNIFLEX" and a couple other efforts on micros
a few years back trying to get them to run in a semi-commercial atmosphere
and this whole MINIX process is like "DEJA-VU" to me. There are some glaring
problems with using MINIX as even a toy development system that have stopped
me dead in my tracks. I will list some of them and I am sure someone has
posted previous comments about that I have missed.
(1) the C compiler and MINIX upchucks floating point numbers at run time.
    the documentation coyly warns of this. God, how do you write any kind
    of applications even for fun only without real numbers?? HELP!!
(2) The boot operation leaves me wondering why a hard disk was not used
    right off the top. Who would ever try to run UNIX on floppies??
(3) There is no multi-user capabilities provided as I read it. I only
    need one for testing purposes. I know the processor is brain dead and
    that is the basic problem. Has anyone written a /dev/tty02 or higher
     that works??
(4) The / directory is a flying joke. This must be because of the need to
    use 2 floppy drives instead of a hard disk. If you accidentally copy
    a large directory into slash / you are up for some entertainment.
(5) The ram disk uses up too much memory that could be used by other tasks.
    Can this be killed and sent to disk where it belongs??
(6) NO SWAPPING IMPLEMENTED IS A HORROR!! What can I say?
(7) MINIX does not appear to work with more than 640k of ram. Can this be
    expanded??
(8) This is a rephrase of #2 above: can you boot directly to hard disk
    without any floppys? I can get /dev/hd0 to work as /dev/hd0 but I
    can not boot directly to /dev/hd0.
(9) FSCK should be renamed "Fragment,Crash,Collate,Kill". If you use an 
    entire hard disk partition for MINIX which works fine by the way, FSCK
    will screw it up because FSCK is expecting partitions 1-4 and not
    partition 0.. If I ignore running FSCK I have no problems.

     Hopefully some of my 
complaints have been considered for solutions pending by the author or
users. I would love to see MINIX reported to a 68000 or higher where it
could really be let go!!  THANKS FOR YOUR HELP IN ADVANCE,

R. Gordon Price
Century Computer Systems Inc.
P.O. Box 58133
Tierra Verde Florida 33715
(813) 864-2678
FAX (813) 867-0822