MINIX

MINIX is a UNIX clone written by Andrew Tannenbaum as a tool to teach operating system design. I choose to run MINIX after getting fed up with being told how wonderful LINUX is. In an act of defiance I found MINIX and began to install it on machines that LINUX won't run on. Furthermore, I did it with out any instruction manuals or scripts.

I feel vindicated.

The first machine I installed MINIX on was an AT&T 6300 with 640K and a 30 Mb hard card. I had to use the TinyRoot image to get the machine to boot. If you are familiar with MINIX, then you know that the Tiny version of MINIX was released with Kees J. Bot's terse advice of:

"Note that you are on your own in this enterprise, anyone mad enough to still use an XT had better be smart enough to find his own way."

Sure enough, the installation script wouldn't run, so using only the information in usage(8) I partitioned the hard drive, created the file systems, copied the kernel over, and began un-taring the rest of the files. All went well, except that I kept getting kernel panic errors when booting. I disabled the ram disk to free up some memory, and everything was fine. Better yet, I was able to get new user accounts to survive a reboot. I was able to get email working and even got telnet mostly working (I could telnet to myself...)

My success with MINIX on such a limited system spurred me on to investigate my junk box. From here sprung my current MINIX box, Scrappy.

Scrappy is constructed with 100% salvaged, repaired, rebuilt, or hacked together parts:

The motherboard is an old 286 that the CCC-shop got rid of.
The hard drive is 50 Mb IDE that was salvaged from a hard-card tossed out in an old IBM XT.
The video card and EGA monitor are from a junked AT&T 6300. No one else would use these parts... they are proprietary to AT&T PCs.
The I/O controller was junked due to water damage, but works fine for me.
The network card is a hacked-up rebuilt NE2000 compatible that some CS yutz fried by plugging an LCD projection panel into the thicknet port. I tried to rebuild the card with the voltage conversion module from another blown net card and some wire. It almost works... just have to use the 10B-T connector.
The memory is currently at 4 Mb consisting of the following modules:
- Two 1 Mb SIMMs tossed by A local company as being "obsolete" (Thanks Dan!)
- Two 512 Kb SIMMs tossed by the CCC-shop as being "obsolete" (Well, they are...)
- 1 Mb of ram residing on the mother board as several 256k x 4 DIPs.
The power supply was tossed because of a blown "power good" line. Most motherboards won't even boot from it, but my motherboard is stupid.. er.. robust enough to not care.

Scrappy

The installation of MINIX onto this machine was much easier as I could use the full i86 version and the install scripts shipped on the root disk. After installing, I disabled the ram drive so that I wouldn't have to copy the new user accounts and password files back to the hard drive before shutting down. I installed the telnet and FTP patches to the kernel and recompiled for my specific machine. 15 minutes later Armageddon had networking abilities... and wouldn't boot properly. I read a few man pages and soon realized that since the machine wasn't connected to a network, it couldn't find a DNS and had to rely on it's internal hosts table. Only I hadn't created one yet. So, I made one. Reboot, and all was well. I could FTP from myself to my account (kind of pointless I know, but a test none the less) and I could almost Telnet to myself by name not number. I kept getting the classic "no pttys left" error. A bit more reading and the pttys were created with the MAKEDEV command. Reboot and all is well.

Later I upgraded to version 2.0.0 which was very easy considering what I was used to working with.

I have even managed to get Scrappy to handle RARP and web serving here in my apartment. Next year I get to turn Scrappy loose on the Internet and see what happens...

My other MINIX machine is blargh.wpi.edu this will hopefully become a local FTP site for MINIX.

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Created by: Joseph M. Krzeszewski
Last updated: 3/10/1996