Anyone heard of Minix?

[Anonymous]

I saw it in the last DistroWatch Weekly. What caught my eye also was "MINIX 3 has about 4000 lines of executable kernel code."

Anyone tried it?

[mrben]

Minix was the teaching OS that Andrew Tannenbaum created, and on which Linus began to build Linux. IIRC Linux originally used the Minix file system before ext2 came along. It was also partly from frustrations with the limitations of Minix that Linus created Linux.

[Gomer_X]

I saw it in the last DistroWatch Weekly. What caught my eye also was "MINIX 3 has about 4000 lines of executable kernel code."

Anyone tried it?

Minix 3 is out and available as a live CD. It's very minimal (like 20 megs, if memory serves). I had it installed on my laptop for a while. It's a lot like BSD, but mostly it's just like Minix.

Definitely worth checking out, but not very useful unless you're an OS programmer.

[Stony]

Minix was the teaching OS that Andrew Tannenbaum created, and on which Linus began to build Linux. IIRC Linux originally used the Minix file system before ext2 came along. It was also partly from frustrations with the limitations of Minix that Linus created Linux.

They have his book at my old school. I didn't get to finish it, but in the beginning of the book he wrote something about schools, used Unix code to teach about Operating Systems, because when Bell Labs couldn't sell it because of the Monopoly they had. When the restrictions on Bell ended schools stop due to licencing issues. So schools started using teaching theory without implmentations and Tannenbaum didn't like that.

I'm not sure if it's true, but I remeber one of the reasons wasn't just the limitations, but Tannenbaum didn't take patches to keep the code simple as a teaching tool.

I think I'll try to install it again (minix 2) on my 486. Still works AST made good computers I was a beginner at the time and gave up when I got basic linux installed.

[Gomer_X]

I'm not sure if it's true, but I remeber one of the reasons wasn't just the limitations, but Tannenbaum didn't take patches to keep the code simple as a teaching tool.

Tannenbaum does resist submissions to Minix because it was never meant to be a usable OS. It's meant to be small and understandable so people learning OS design can get their heads around it.

Nevertheless people have still expanded Minix and tried to make it useful. I think that's the drive behind Minix 3, and I'm not sure if it's a succesor to Minix 2 or just another track. At the moment I'm too lazy and disinterested to go read the web site and find out.