Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari!uqcspe!bunyip!brolga!ggm
From: ggm@brolga.cc.uq.oz (George Michaelson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Mgr under minix
Message-ID: <265@brolga.cc.uq.oz>
Date: 23 Jan 89 06:18:12 GMT
Organization: University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Lines: 39


	I used mgr (possibly in an earlier version) at ucl.cs and I would
say it is the best candidate yet for porting to minix. It is delightfully
simply coded, and considerably smaller both in terms of it's runtime 
requirements and sourcecode than X. 

The problem is that the version I saw, used underlying SUNos primitives to do
much of the work. That is, the ioctls for mouse control, and the bitblt 
support were not totally "standalone" in my opinion. [I only looked at
code to try and add embedded cut & paste, and not in much detail]

Furthermore I can't see why a port from SUNos on 68000 to SUNos on 386i 
should be expected to take more than a few days given the closely coupled
nature of the two "systems" as a whole. -The MAC port is a better indication
of workload, but again the message implied it was under native MACos which 
would also offer much embedded support for mouse and screen interaction.

For minix much of this would have to be done from scratch.

I would suggest asking the people in York University who ported BLIT to
the arari-ST under GEMdos to comment on the work. -They also appear to be
very MINIX literate [hello guys!]

Given the variety of different IBM/PC graphics standards to be supported you
are looking at a LOT of different underlying models to assure it would work
under all available systems [ega/cga/hercules/brain-damaged-amstrad etc etc]
for all graphics and all meese.

If somebody *did* succeed in doing this, and perhaps extended the client-
server model to use amoeba as well as TCP, or some serial line comms to 
mainframes a la blit on 19.2k then this would be a very very attractive
system. 

	-george

-- 
ACSnet: ggm@brolga.cc.uq.oz                    Phone: +61 7 377 4079
Postal: George Michaelson, Prentice Computer Centre
          Queensland University, St Lucia, QLD 4067