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From: cyliax@bank.ecn.purdue.edu (Ingo Cyliax)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Question: Using the ST source for a non-ST machine.
Message-ID: <1990Mar13.163733.7816@ecn.purdue.edu>
Date: 13 Mar 90 16:37:33 GMT
References: <10061@unix.SRI.COM>
Sender: news@ecn.purdue.edu (USENET news)
Reply-To: cyliax@bank.ecn.purdue.edu (Ingo Cyliax)
Organization: Purdue University Engineering Computer Network
Lines: 33

In article <10061@unix.SRI.COM>, henry@ginger.sri.com (Henry A.
Pasternack) writes:
> 
>    I would like to port Minix to a generic 68020 machine, using the
> Sun as a development system.  If I buy the source to Atari Minix, is
> there any way of getting it into a Sun without an Atari computer?  Is
> there any way of getting the ST source on a Unix compatible medium?

Henry,

Probably the easiest way to do it is to borrow an Atari and upload the
sources to your Sun using kermit or Xmodem, after you uncompress/unarchive
them. Otherwise you will have to find a machine with 3.5" disk drive that
can read the Atari floppies (Sparcstations, Sun3/80 or some PC), and then
write some utilities to read Minix filesystem under SunOS. After extracting
all the archives from the Minix-ST disks, you will need an archiver on the
Sun that can read Minix *.a archives to unpack the sources. Borrowing a
atari is probably the easiest/fastest.

BTW, I'm planning on porting it to a 68020 system as well. I'm starting my
port on a Sun with gnu-C. Does your 68020 system have a MMU ? If it does,
have you thought about doing a protected Minix-68k ? That's what I would
eventually like to do. Has anyone else looked at protected Minix-68k ? I'm
afraid that the only thing portable about it would be support for a 68851
MMU and maybe a 68881 FPU, the device drivers would be very different for
everyone. The user programs should certainly be Minix-ST binary compatible.

Gruss, -ingo

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