TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

It was brought to my attention a long time ago that although I've ranted and raved about dozens of Linux operating systems and a handful of non-Linux OSes, I've never once touched upon Minix.

Minix was (arguably) the inspiration for the Linux kernel. It existed before Linux but after UNIX, and has been talked about in usenet circles for time immemorial. It was originally developed by Andrew Tanenbaum, but as far as I can tell he's not involved with version 3.

I was apprehensive to try out Minix since traditionally it has never even pretended to be useful for desktop application; only as a teaching tool for the fundamentals of OS programming.

As of version 3, however, the MINIX site has declared their intention to be useful on "resource-limited and embedded" computers. I figure my VM might qualify as a resource-limited computer, so I gave it a shot.

Install:

This one's definitely not for the faint of heart. I logged in as root and ran "setup", which gave me a series of text prompts.

I chose an ethernet driver and set up my partitions. The partitioner wasn't what I was familiar with (cfdisk) but it wasn't rocket science either. I navigated the menus, deleted my old partitions and set up a new one for MINIX.

I was warned that MINIX would take up 78MB. With a multi-gigabyte harddrive, I think I'm safe on space. I understand that for an embedded system space would be at a premium, which is likely the reason for the warning.

The partitioner didn't give me any choice about scanning for bad blocks. The scan informed me it would take roughly and hour and a half, so I hit CTRL+C in hopes it would cancel. Thankfully, it did and continued on to the file installation.

Once everything was installed, I was told to reboot and tell Minix where to boot from. The syntax reminded me of FreeBSD: boot d0p0.

Upon reboot I was told to run "packman" with the install CD in the drive to get X Windows running. I did, and was asked if I wanted to update the package list from the network. I said yes.

That was a mistake. Apparently when I chose my ethernet driver during the install I chose the wrong one. In my own defense, there was only one "Intel" option and it might not have been the kind of chipset my Core Duo board uses.

Thankfully, CTRL+C saved me again, dumping me to a prompt and allowing me to re-launch packman. The CD has a lot of programs on it. The list showed me 97 choices fo things to add. Most were pretty standard (nano, pine, gcc). I picked option 92 (X11R6.8.2) and let it churn away.

I was told everything installed correctly, so I went ahead and added a few little things (nano for instance). I then decided to reboot. That was another mistake.

Reboot gave me a GRUB boot prompt. Considering I know nothing about how MINIX sets up partitions, I was basicaly clueless as to how to boot at this point.

It was however clear to me at this point that MINIX would not fulfill my needs, so I decided to end the rant there.

Software Selection:

Not much is included other than basic X Windows and command line tools. I was amused to see a text-based dungeon crawler in the Packman list.

Who's it best for?

This isn't Ubuntu Linux, or even Linux at all, and it shows. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but you need to know what you're getting into.

If you're an email/web browsing/solitaire kind of person, MINIX is not going to fit your needs. It requires much to much setup work and has a comparatively tiny support community compared to Linux.

As a learning experience, though, MINIX is actually kind of neat. It uses a microkernel (as opposed to the monolithic kernels used by most modern OSes), and it's definitely tiny and fast. It also uses the standard GCC compiler, so it's possible to program on it.

I can't see myself using it regularly, but I'm interested to see what future versions of MINIX look like as their desktop solutions mature. They're just making the move from teaching tool to practical OS, but I think they have a solid foundation from which to build.