Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!killer!texbell!bigtex!milano!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!apple!vsi1!altnet!uunet!mcvax!nikhefh!n62
From: n62@nikhefh.hep.nl (Klamer Schutte)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: ST Minix
Message-ID: <547@nikhefh.hep.nl>
Date: 11 Oct 88 12:50:34 GMT
References: <126@cwjcc.CWRU.Edu> <241@lzaz.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: n62@nikhefh.hep.nl (Klamer Schutte)
Organization: Nikhef-H, Amsterdam (the Netherlands).
Lines: 40

In article <241@lzaz.ATT.COM> bds@lzaz.ATT.COM (B.SZABLAK) writes:
>In article <126@cwjcc.CWRU.Edu>, bammi@dsrgsun.ces.CWRU.edu (Jwahar R. Bammi) writes:
>> FYI: For all who have been waiting (with baited breath) for ST Minix,
>> Prentice Hall is now shipping.
>
>Great! Would someone be kind enough to do a review for the net? I have
>some basic questions:
>	What does $79.95 buy you?
>	Is it useable on a 520 (.5 Meg with single sided floppy)?
>	Does it support hard disks (and if so with any restrictions)?
>	Does the compiler support 32 bit pointers; 32 bit integers?
>	What are differences between the ST version and the PC version?
>	How long does it take to rebuild the system (please mention the
>		configuration used).
>	How robust is it?

I have a pre-release of MINIX-ST; I don't know about difference's

For $79.95 you get the running system with a lot of commands ( as pc version 1.2) ( I think ).
It is usable with 520k & single floppy ( it says ). I run it on a 1040 with 1
720k floppy; because of MINIX i am thinking about buying a hard disk ( but i am 
a poor student ... ). It does support hard disks, but standard only standard 
atari.  The compiler does support 32 pointers; 16 bit int, 32 bit long, float &
double ( length not checked ). He produces really object files, not assembly as
MINIX-PC.
The main differences with MINIX-PC: support large model; different fork.
The fork in MINIX-ST is strange: you make a copy of your text segment and this
text segment is 'swapped' in memory between parent and child process; this is no
problem supposing the child does quickly a exec() or the parent does a wait().
The time to rebuilt the system: On my system for the kernel some hours;
the second change-compile-link-restart about 1/2 hour.
rebuilding all the commands will take very long ( I haven't tried ).
The system is robust, I have not seen it crash.


	

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Klamer Schutte			mcvax!nikhefh!n62	      n62@nikhefh.hep.nl