Minix 3

In fact, it all started with Minix. Minix was a miniature Unix, written by Professor Andy Tanenbaum (AST) from the Free University in Amsterdam. An american with a german name teaching in The Netherlands. Here's a Google map of the place: Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and as you can see, they are extending the buildings.
AST used to write his lessons and books around his Minix operating system which ran on just about any 80x86 processor. At some time, the founding fathers of Linux discovered Minix and wanted more features than AST needed for his teachin projects. A quarrel was started amd after some time, the group that was no group, split. If you Google hard enough you can find the flames between AST and the Linux founding fathers, but it's not a particularly enlightened part of the history of Linux.

AST stood firm and remained owner and maintainer of Minix. Many of his books, among which is 'Operating systems, design and implementation', use the Minix sources to clarify how things are done. After 1993, nobody outside the Amsterdam University ever paid attention to Minix.

In 2006, a new release of Minix saw the light of day. It is a called 'Minix 3' and it is a complete rewrite of the old workhorse. The section below (grey rectangle with green text) are excerpts from the official Minix 3 webpage at http://www.minix3.org/.

MINIX 3 is an open-source operating system designed to be reliable, flexible, and secure. It is based on MINIX. MINIX 1 and 2 were intended as teaching tools; MINIX 3 is usable on resource-limited and embedded computers and for applications requiring high reliability.
This new OS is small. The parts that run in user mode are divided into modules, well insulated from one another. When a driver crashes it is automatically replaced without requiring any user intervention. These features enhance system reliability.

POSIX compliant
Networking with TCP/IP
X Window System
Languages: cc, gcc, g++, perl, python, Pascal, Modula-2
Over 400 UNIX programs
Full multiuser and multiprogramming
Many improvements since Minix 2
Device drivers run as user processes
High degree of fault tolerance
Full C source code supplied

Installing Minix is easy. The most important steps are:

Get an ISO file at http://www.minix3.org/download/ and burn it to a CD-ROM
In Linux, use 'cfdisk' and 'QtParted' to create a section of 'Free space' of 3 GB or more
Boot from the Minix 3 CD
Start Minix and follow the instructions
Reboot into Linux and change the lilo.conf file.

For easy booting, you need to change the lilo.conf file of your system as follows:

       other=/dev/hda2
          label=Minix
          table=/dev/hda

and then run the lilo command to install the multi boot loader. And that's it. Now you can boot right into your new system in the usual manner.

When you opt for a full install (which I would recommend), the system will recompile the GCC libraries at the end of the packman cycle. The message tells that 'this takes up to 2 minutes on a recent machine'. Be prepared to find out that your machine is NOT recent!
On Lithium (450 MHz AMD K6-2 with 256 MB of RAM) it took close to an hour! So don't despair if the process takes a little longer than a couple of minutes.

You can check the compile phase as follows:

change to a new terminal with <Left Alt><Right arrow>
log on as root
start the command 'top' as you would in Linux

The topmost process (the one eating up 92% of the CPU cycles) is the compiling process.

Until now, this is all great fun. The Linux knowledge can be utilised immediately inside Minix 3. I'm getting to like things. Perhaps it's time for a separate Minix 3 topic on Fruttenboel....

Page created on 14 February 2007 and

Page equipped with FroogleBuster technology