Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!ukma!mailrus!um-math!hyc
From: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: ST Minix
Message-ID: <431@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu>
Date: 18 Oct 88 02:07:33 GMT
References: <126@cwjcc.CWRU.Edu> <241@lzaz.ATT.COM>
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Reply-To: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
Organization: University of Michigan Math Dept., Ann Arbor
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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?
>
>Thanks in advance for any info.

You might want to start reading comp.os.minix from now on...

A few observations - I have a Supra 20 meg hard drive, (Miniscribe 8425S)
which I am now using with Minix. The software release (Supra's) is 3.20. I
used to have a much older release, which created partition information
that Minix was unable to recognize. This is no longer a problem with the
latest formatter & such from Supra.

The hard disk driver supports up to 4 partitions per disk, up to 8 controllers,
two disks per controller. The distributed system only supports SCSI 0, unit 0.
You must rebuild the system to support additional drives.

The floppy driver supports 2 single or double sided drives. The driver is
written such that it reads regular TOS formatted disks at highest speed; I've
been using Twister format disks but they read much more slowly. (However, I
suspect the boot disk uses TOS to load, because it loads much more quickly in
Twister format.) The driver seems to be able to read any format TOS will, i.e.,
82 track, 10 sector/track works just fine.

Other people have answered the other questions, so I'll stop here...
--
  /
 /_ , ,_.                      Howard Chu
/ /(_/(__                University of Michigan
    /           Computing Center          College of LS&A
   '              Unix Project          Information Systems