Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uxh.cso.uiuc.edu!archetyp From: archetyp@uxh.cso.uiuc.edu (Joseph R Pickert) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: Minix Questions...Eagerly Awaiting MacMINIX!!!! Message-ID: <1990Feb15.193347.2060@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> Date: 15 Feb 90 19:33:47 GMT References: <11067@nigel.udel.EDU> Sender: news@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News) Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana Lines: 36 Let me address some of the issues, and questions re MacMINIX before things reach too fevered of a pitch. First, all indications are that it will be available sometime relatively soon (maybe summer, as Andy says). Many of you were directly responsible for convincing Prentice-Hall to make this software available. The net is a unique resource in many ways, and this is just another example of it. Second, floating point will probably not be available as part of the release but, as mentioned elsewhere, can be added. Please keep in mind that this thing we call MINIX is a maturing body of software, and has not yet reached full growth. Let's not expect too much too soon. MacMINIX will not have every feature to please every palate, or it would be called Mac4.3BSD, would not be available for 10 years, and would cost $125,000 or whatever AT&T sells source for these days. Third, for whatever reason, people seem to be interested in writing stand alone Macintosh software using MacMINIX. Buy Lightspeed C instead. You will be a lot happier. That is not to say you CAN'T do it with MacMINIX, but until some more tools are developed you probably won't want to. Last, integrating the Mac file system. I am working on this now. Would I have bothered to make it run under Multifinder and then not bother to do something reasonable in this regard? You people worry too much. Something will be there, and it might even be suitable for what you want. If not, then the source code is there too. As for the remaining questions: is there a vi, emacs, csh, awk, etc., the tools in the Mac distribution will be essentially the same as the new 1.5 distribution. I will post a final list of utilities when there is one if there is that much interest. Joe Pickert