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The End Of Minix?
Otter writes "Minix is best known as the Unix clone for x86 that inspired Linus Torvalds to write one himself. It's pretty much dropped off the map since. The latest patch for XFree86's xterm drops support for Minix. As the changelog notes, 'Juliusz Chroboczek noted it was removed from XFree86 server; there have been no users since 1996.'"
will Andrew T. [Minix's creator] start another flame war? :-)
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
since when were you required to run XF86 when you ran any Unix-based OS?
;)
Just b/c they feel that there have been no users since 1996 (which is probably the case, but not the point) that means the end of Minix?
At least get some real proof it is dead before you put such scandalous headlines on the frontpage
Shouldn't it be called GNU/Minix?
No data, no cry
You know, considering that Minix made Linus Torvalds want to write his own OS, is that really much of a compliment to Minix? I'm surprised it still had that support. But you know, without Minix, you have to wonder if we'd have anything like GNU/Linux right now.
this post makes me think of that BSD is dying stuff ;o
;)
Minux is dying! Clearly you can see that because its users don't use X windows!
Just had to
...I'd expect to see a post to comp.os.minix that had a single line:
In your face, Tanenbaum!
I was going to build a new operating system based on Minix, but I guess I'll have to use this new Linuxthing now. That's too bad.
Minix makes an awesome unix OS to learn from. You all must agree that it doesn't have to be used as a production machine, it's really quite suited to use for teaching students.
If there have been no minix users since 1996, why did they wait six years to drop support?
If there have been no users since 1996, is there really a need for the question mark in this article's headline?
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pants ahoy
*Pours out some of the Colt 45 for the OS's from my hood that didn't make it* I'll miss you man.
Isn't it more of an educational tool these days, rather than a practical OS? I think every CS student had to buy Tanenbaum's book for their OS class. I think it's more of a prototypical UNIX that's good for studying how OS's actually work.
Minix is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Minix community when last month IDC confirmed that Minix accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Minix has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Minix is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Minix's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Minix because Minix is dying. Things are looking very bad for Minix As many of us are already aware, Minix continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Minix leader Julien states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of X86 Minix are there? Let's see. The number of X86 Minix versus 68K Minix posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 68K Minix users. PPC Minix posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of 68K Minix posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of PPC Minix. A recent article put X86 Minix at about 80 percent of the Minix market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 X86 Minix users. This is consistent with the number of X86 Minix Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, Minix went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Minix has steadily declined in market share. Minix is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Minix is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. Minix continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Minix is dead.
Minix is dying
To many, it does seem sad when things go. I remember the particular irony I felt recently when Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy's died. He was a fine person, but really he was just Dave, the guy we all saw on Wendy's commercials, the guy who took a whole day to pronounce the phrase Muchas Gracias. Minix is just a part of history. An important one, it can be easily argued, but one who's time has now come. With a lack of users, there's no motivation to develop the OS any further, so it's just logical progression. Yes, Minix is saying goodbye, but the world still spins. Besides, you couldn't play QuakeIII on it anyway, right slashdotters?
[este]
I used it not too long ago. I had an old laptop that was very underpowered. I found minix and ran it for a while to see how it worked. Great operating system, great book and really fun to play with.
So, while it may be dead (some may claim that it wasn't ever really alive), it is still alive through one of its most successful offsprings, our most beloved Linux!
The Raven.
The Raven
So no, I wouldn't fire off that 'Minix is dying' troll just yet; the presence of Minix filesystem compatibility in its friendly rivals betrays the foothold Minix yet retains among many of the computers that power the Internet today. We wouldn't argue that Linux is dying simply because it doesn't have nearly the desktop share of Microsoft Windows, because we are aware that it is churning away out there just beneath the consciousness of most computer users. So too we should remember that Minix occupies as well a place within our hearts as well as within the Internet.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Even though Minix is long dead, there still is a good question: was a microkernel architecture better, or is Linux's monolithic kernel the right way to go?
WindowsNT uses the microkernel design, but most operating systems since DOS haven't used a monolithic kernel, which was only truly necessary in the days of extremely scarce resources. It's true that Linux does extremely well under many circumstances, but could it have been done even better with a nice, modular, microkernel design?
If history had changed and Minix took off instead of Linux, would we be better off today with the superiority of a microkernel design?
I think we would.
Netcraft has now confirmed: Minix is dead Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Minix community when recently IDC confirmed that Minix accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraftsurvey which plainly states that Minix has mo market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Minix is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin operating system awareness test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Minix's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Minix faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Minix because Minix is dead. Things are looking very bad for Minix. As many of us are already aware, Minix has no market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Minix is the most endangered of all operating systems, having lost 99.99999% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Juliusz Chroboczek noted it was removed from XFree86 server; there have been no users since 1996. This is consistent with the number of Minix related XFree86 Usenet posts.
All major surveys show that Minix has steadily declined in market share. Minix is very sick and its long term survival prospects are nil. If Minix is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. Minix continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Minix is dead.
Minix is dead.Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I figure at the very least the XFree86 people are still using it to test xterm right?
BTW Minix homepage: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/minix.html
At the footer: "Last changed 1996", maybe that is how they get that "no users since 1996" quote.
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
Minix is a toy. But that's not a bad thing, and people are still playing with it.
Minix was written to give some "real-life" examples for a textbook on operating system design. The guy who wrote it wanted to keep it simple, so that it would be easier to understand.
Back when there wasn't a free *NIX, some people hacked on Minix to turn it into less of a toy and more of a real operating system. The biggest obstacle was licensing issues: Minix is owned by a book publisher, and you needed to deal with them if you wanted to do anything with Minix. If you just wanted to be legal to use Minix you could buy a copy of the book, but anything else (trying to distribute on CD-ROM for example) was pretty much impossible.
If Minix had been released under GPL, Linus might have simply written patches for it, rather than ginning up his own project. Linux would have likely never happened, and I would be using Minix to type this rather than Linux. This is nice history lesson about the importance of software licensing.
Anyway, between the *BSD family and Linux, we have plenty of *NIX operating systems to use; we don't need one more that is stuck back at the toy level and has a messy license. So people are not working on Minix to make it less toy-like anymore.
Because Minix is a toy, you can read the book and dive right in to the Minix code base. You can hack around with it and have a good time. As long as people still read the book, Minix will be a useful toy.
The efforts to grow Minix beyond its toy status are dead. Minix itself remains educational and fun.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
...it wasnt ready to take on the desktop computing
the Professor the made Minix does not like Linus to much since Linux took off....Linus tried to get him to sign a book that the proffesor wrote, the dude snubed him and has made comments since about his oppinion of Linux :-)
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I would hardly call minix an OS for the X86. You can run it on anything. It's incredibly hackible too. Very unfortunate that college OS classes don't usually use it any more. Very unfortunate that colleges don't usually teach OS classes anymore.
I remember running it on my XT years ago and copying files in one virtual terminal while playing a crappy text based adventure game in another and running top in yet another. It's impressive what you can do when you put your 8mhz and 640k to good efficient use.
Or maybe I will.
I am SO upset right now that you simply cannot imagine what I am going through. First of all, I use Minix on three of my four computers. Minix is certainly NOT dead, and I don't know why so many people think that it is. It's the most retarded thing I have ever heard of.
McVoy issued another clause to his ButtKeeper license stating those working on Minix can go fuck themselves. Linus agreed. Then Larry started to throw his own feces around. At that point Linus was strangely silent, looking down at his feet uncomfortably.
Slashdot is alot of editorial sludge, but at least intelligent. This is just ... how can we say ... retarded?
It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: Minix is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Minix community when recently IDC confirmed that Windows accounts for less than a fraction of 0.01 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Minix has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Minix is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a nerd to predict Minix's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Minix faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Minix because Minix is dying. Things are looking very bad for Minix. As many of us are already aware, Minix continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Minix X is the most endangered of them all, having lost 100% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Minix leader someguy states that there are 7 users of Minix. How many users of Minix X are there? Let's see. The number of Minix versus Minix X posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 1 to 0. Therefore there are about 7/0 = undefined Minix X users. Minix posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Minix X posts. Therefore there are about 7 users of Minix. A recent article put Minix at about 100 percent of the Minix market. Therefore there are (7+0) = 7 Minix users. This is consistent with the number of Minix Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles at MinixVille, abysmal sales and so on, Minix went out of business and was taken over by Linus T. who sell another troubled OS. Now Linux is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Minix has steadily declined in market share. Minix is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Minix is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. Minix continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Minix is dead.
Fact: Minix is dead
I live in a giant bucket.
The fact that they are no longer supporting Minix has no consequences whatsoever!
Minix is frozen in time, and any of the old XFree86 sources that have ever worked with it will work with it forever. After a certain amount of debugging has taken place, one no longer needs to support software for an unchanging OS.
Dog is my co-pilot.
What is wrong with the slashdot editors that they can't call it by its proper name: GNU/Minix !!!!
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
That we'll never see a Beowulf cluster of Minix machines?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I can't remember where I saw the thread, probably a Linux kernel news group eight or so years ago, but there was a friendly "I've used Linux longer than you" discussion where the winning entry said that they still had an entry for ast in /etc/passwd.
I've still got an IBM PC w/ a 10 MB HD that has Minix installed. I keep meaning to get rid of it, but just can't quite bring myself to do so. Someday I'll do it and then I'll probably see the same model being appraised for a small fortune on Antiques Roadshow.
FreeSpeech.org
Most universities teach minix at an advanced OS course. Its simplicity makes it very easy to fathom many major components of today's OS's. Minix runs rather well on VMWare, too!
Comparing Minux to Linux is like comparing a wagon to a Lexus. Minux was never designed to be a production O/S. It was designed to teach for students taking a first course in operating systems design.
I have an old 286 with 1meg of ram. It had DOS 2. something on it, and I got rid of that and stuck MINIX on. It was one of those cool old 286's that looked like a briefcase and had a fold out screen and keyboard...a precursor to the laptop I guess :)
How could minix die, my OS classes was the minix OS. We took the book, learned the concepts and then rewrote parts of the OS for assignments. Minix is the only OS small enough to teach, and still be relivant to current OS implementations to carry over. I like Linux, but it is too big to teach in one semester. Minix fills a much needed space in the OS land scape. -- GTD
http://www.funwithpenguins.com
Okay, so it's not finished, but it's somewhat useable, especially on older 32 bit hardware. Looking through dselect, there's quite a few apps available for it. The machine I'm using it on is a bit flaky (think there's a mobo/mem problem, because Linux actually crashes on it, too). I've got another machine sitting around that I'm going to try it on.
:-)
Haven't gotten around to trying X yet.
I'm not sure where they're going with the project, really, because, as you said, there doesn't seem to be alot of active development. What is there are quite a few good ideas, and something that's Not Unix.
Got a spare ext2 partition sitting around? Give it a shot. The Hurd.
That's exactly why Tanenbaum created Minix in the first place. He created it in response to AT&T closing their Unix source code to other people. He wanted a simple Unix operating system for students to learn on.
If he bloated Minix, another Linux could have been created, but he did not want that. So, Torvalds took it and went his way.
I am in a class right now using Minix as a teaching tool, and I feel it definately has its place in learning how to modify a Unix operating system.
dude... the guy on the far right goes to my college! small world eh?
Look, ma! I'm a karma whore
I'm downloading it now, just to say I'm the only user left!
Please, dont download it and ruin it for me.
People will say how easy minix is to understand and program for. I totally disagree and to rebuttal, linux is way easier to write drivers for and other low-level stuff for. Minix was a mess, that is probably why it never caught on(and of course licensing). It will take you a year to figure out how to write a driver in minix, it may take 10 minutes in linux. The microkernel approach made it brutally slow also. pass msg->tolib->lib passes to kernel->kernel passes to memory->memory passes msg to->whoknows where->msg finally gets to user program.
---- Berlin Brown http://www.newspiritcompany.
Not really :)
A new variant on the tired:
"God is dead" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead" - God
can be:
"Linux is obsolete" - Andy Tannenbaum
"Minix is obsolete" - Linus Torvalds
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Here's the obligatory link to Tanenbaum's 1992 "Linux is obsolete" post.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Minix has always lived as Andrew T intended and probably will remain that way for quite some time. Minix is an EDUCATIONAL tool. It is meant to be gone over and understood within a semester in college. It excels at this purpose and many colleges use it to this end. It will die when all the colleges use something else. Just because hackers and tinkerers don't use it anymore doesn't mean it is dead.
IMHO, the end of something that people use should make news, and the end of something that noone uses shouldnt.
or is this just nostalgia?
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Anyone who knowns anything about Minix beyond the name of its famous creator and his battle with Linus, would tell you that it's all about the educational value. Had Tanenbaum allowed developers to do as they pleased with it, yeah it would be able to run RTCW and Mozilla, but Minix would lose it's ability to educate CS students. It would be spaghetti code similiar to the GNU/Linux kernel.
As far as I know, Minix is the only OS that comes with a textbook that teaches you how to hack it.
the apple ][ has users but not enough to consider it "alive" does it? who deems an OS officially dead? is it 4:20 yet?
RIP Minus...Minus was survived by his brother Plus, cousins Multiply and Divide, and many descendents.
Two main desktop OSs use it: WinNT/2k, and MacOS X, built on the Mach kernel.
In fact, the first Linux distro I used (and still run on a Radius 8100 clone) was running on top of a Mach kernel: MkLinux.
Shame that MkLinux development stalled. The project could've accomplished some way cool stuff. The Linux kernel was implemented as a virtual server above the Mach kernel and in theory you could've run mulitple instances of the Linux server.
-jpeg
OK, so we'd like to develop an OSS'd text-mode
app that uses any serial ports available
on a modest (possibly dated) x86 box
(the box -may- be a 286, but if your sug'd OS
requires a bit more, we'll meet its CPU req'ts)
Needed: [Your sug's for] a very slim, C-based
OSS Op Sys that will facilitate running of
our application (eg to program, upload/down-
load data to/from such devices as GPS's &
scanning receivers; the latter might need a
faster serial-port speed, ie to provide fast
channel/sec scanning rates)
We'd like to program it using a well-docu-
mented C compiler (that might as well be a
part of the suggested Op Sys, but needn't,
as long it's also available at OSS prices)
Would MINIX fit the bill? If not, what do
you think might?
Oh, we'd prefer not to have to buy a book
in order to use / program up the target app.
What'cha think would do the job?
TIA
I wonder (and I really do wonder, I'm not an OS hacker at all) if Minix might not have suffered from the same limitations--i.e., it's designed for teaching, but are it's lessons the ones people use in the real world?.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
Does this make Minix the patriarch of Linux?
Now I'm confused; "l" comes *before* "m"...
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *inix community when IDC confirmed that *inix market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 0.1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *inix has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *inix is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *inix's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *inix faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *inix because *inix is dying. Things are looking very bad for *inix. As many of us are already aware, *inix continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Minix is the most endangered of them all, having lost 99.3% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departure of long time Minix developer Tannenbaum only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Minix is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Minix leader Tannenbaum stated that there are 70 users of *inix. How many users of Minix are there? Let's see. The number of *inix versus Minix posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 70/5 = 14 Minix users. *inix/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of *inix posts. Therefore there are about 7 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put Minix at about 80 percent of the *inix market. Therefore there are (70+14+7)*4 ~ 360 *inix users. This is consistent with the number of *inix Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, *inix went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *inix has steadily declined in market share. *inix is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *inix is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *inix continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *inix is dying
Minix exists to demonstrate a clear and concise kernel for use in an operating systems course. You can grok the whole OS in one semester.
Now developers can focus their efforts on Linux.
Looking at kernel.org, I see a list of 16 different platforms that run Linux...I see 5 that would run Minix 1.5...Only 1 that runs 2.0...
It's obvious that the developers have already started leaving for Linux development.
Can anyone honestly say that there is a good reason to use Minix over Linux/BSD???
I think it says something when the main page for a "modern" OS isn't running its own web server...
I'm sure there's a good reason why the development team decided to remove Minix support from xterm...this was most likely holding back development of new features.
I actually cant wait for version 5.0 of XFree86...we finally get color mouse pointers (currently available through CVS)...
In the spring of 1999 (or maybe it was winter...) I took an operating systems class at UCLA. Basically it was the fundamentals of operating system design, but we used Minix for our projects. We had to do things like modify the 'ps' program, the memory manager, etc. in order to learn about core concepts. Minix was interesting, although getting it running was a task in itself. Good thing I had a second computer that year!
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Where's all the Austin Powers "Minime" Jokes? Couldn't find *one*.
Table-ized A.I.
I just installed Minix on my XBox, and now I find out that it's dead.
You know, there's some poor bastard out there reading this on a machine running Minix who just read the line, "no one's used it since 1996". Imagine for a moment, if you will, how that person must feel right now...
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
If Mr. Tanenbaum had released Minix as GPL back during the birth of Linux...
so true. i only heard of minix from a coworker (while still a student). my os class consisted of that book with dinos on cover and one program with semaphores and shared memory. i would much rather have liked to learn the minix source, but i can do it now on my free time.
Putting operations in hardware rather than software doesn't mean that there will be fewer of them or that they will take significantly less time.
OO simply has a lot of overhead, which is often the price paid for a clear conceptual model.
Modern microkernels are in practice a lot more similar to monolithic kernels in their system calling and kernel inter-server communications.
I used Minix to get some kind of UN*X up on a friends Atari STE in 2000 or so. It made a cool looking terminal.
Sorry to say, the space button fucked up, and the machine was broken in the attempts to fix it.
ouR X Virtual Terminal
X-Term replacement.
Minix is dead? Now people are going to start praising how great it was and people will start development projects with it...Now when is the Mac going die...
There's some simularity here. No-one in the right mind these days would use pascal (in the non-Delphi sense) for anything like a serious purpose.
But as a first introduction to procedural code as a teaching language it's superb.
Ditto minix. No-ones gonna run it on a serious machine, but there's a lot to learn if you run it on crappy old hardware.
What do you think of Linux?
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Linus for producing it. Before there was Linux there was MINIX, which had a 40,000-person newsgroup, most of whom were sending me email every day. I was going crazy with the endless stream of new features people were sending me. I kept refusing them all because I wanted to keep MINIX small enough for my students to understand in one semester. My consistent refusal to add all these new features is what inspired Linus to write Linux. Both of us are now happy with the results. The only person who is perhaps not so happy is Bill Gates. I think this is a good thing.
MINIX was always a dog, with its ridiculous single threaded file system.
If you wanted nice small OS check plan9 (recently
freed, minimalism itself) or Andrew Valencia's vsta (very nice small OS, much nicer than minix ever was). Both are actually usable too, unlike minix.
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/
http://w
-S. (who ran minix/m68k for some time, but didn't like it)
The statements about the death of Minix are out of the line. Minix is dead, dead from the very start. It is not a OS in the same way other OSes are and never was supposed to be such way. Minix is the crash dummy, the body of the anatomic room, the prototype A. Tanenbaum was not trying to make a real OS but a tool for students to learn how to create operating systems. And he kept this OS in such way.
However, there was this guy that came from the Northern cold, played a little with the cadaver and thought he could even overwhelm Frankenstein. For a few starry nights, he chunked, cutted, ripped Minix body into pieces to rejoin them into a new more perfect body, something that today reminds to some people a cute penguin...
That is probably one of the reasons for the harsh reaction of Tanenbaum on seeing the new monster and realizing that "it's alive". Well, Frankenstein was made from mortified human pieces, while Minix was dead from start and should have stayed in that status for long. So we may understand his shock seeing a living Linux.
Well this is half-humour half-stupidity but I tried to give another view of the story, in a more dummy way. Minix is a great system but, it was never intended to become another OS in the market. It is interesting that it gave birth to such an OS, but it never was in a position to concur with it. Minix and Linux have had always different purposes. The fact that it is being buried down, is not a problem on Minix but on the system. If one looks well around, he may see that the bottom line of development is dying. For the last years, there's been a fall on the creation and development of software infrastructure like OSes. So, this is not a sweet thing to see. It is a worrying signal that we may see some downgrade on specialists for the near future.
Hate to swear, but I think your getting my point by now. XF86 probably doesn't know about Minix-VMD Minix-VMD is a 32-bit version of Minix, which has X-Window support. Sure, Andy Tannenbaum is a very unhappy person tonight, as he is the inventor of not only Minix but Amoeba. But there are other things?, is Andy still kicking himself at his kinda pro-NT stance on Linus during "Who's OS is Better" battle several years ago where he quoted: " The alternative is a microkernel-based system, in which most of the OS runs as separate processes, mostly outside the kernel. They communicate by message passing. The kernel's job is to handle the message passing, interrupt handling, low-level process management, and possibly the I/O. Examples of this design are the RC4000, Amoeba, Chorus, Mach, and the not-yet-released Windows/NT." " MINIX is a microkernel-based system. The file system and memory management are separate processes, running outside the kernel. The I/O drivers are also separate processes (in the kernel, but only because the brain-dead nature of the Intel CPUs makes that difficult to do otherwise). LINUX is a monolithic style system. This is a giant step back into the 1970s. That is like taking an existing, working C program and rewriting it in BASIC. To me, writing a monolithic system in 1991 is a truly poor idea." Then Linus claimed that Minix was doing Andy brain damange. (Why did Linus bother replacing the Minix kernel with Linux in the first place, it gives the impression of "Andy/Linux" as opposed to "GNU/Linux" and even some others "NetBSD/Linux"! Full flame war is at Google Groups
If people were running XF86 on top of Minix, that would in my mind make them crazy. The way to work with minix nowadays is to run it inside e.g. VMware, not to run it as your primary OS. Minix was never intended to be anything but a toy.
But it is a good toy. I have just recently started to look at it, and it is very easy to learn from. And personally, I would rather see it stay that way. It's much better to have a simple educational toy, than a half-assed attempt at making it more complex, and more suitable for actual work. Because for actual work, there are already so many alternatives that are so much better: Windows, Linux, *BSD, Solaris, ...
I doubt many minix users really care about the dropped support. They are there for the kernel, and could care less about support for third-party programs.
And Tannenbaums strict control of the source have proven to be right. I can today download minix, and it still has some resemblance to what is described in the book. If Linus and the other good minix hackers had had their own way, minix would today look entirely different, and thus be useless for teaching.
refer to:
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/minix.html
and see for yourself.
Minix was a cute little UNIX introduction to a lot of people. An older version ran on the Amiga as well. It's the way I've made my transition from Amiga -> Minix -> Linux. This Minix never came with XFree86, and I believe it was quite a hassle to install if you really wanted it. Most people playing with Minix ever since Linux was ported to the Amiga, did it as a toy introduction to UNIX, and had no real need for X, anyway.
:-)
While I believe Minix does prove to be a little silly a choice these days, it's still a nice look back into the old-style (Version 7??) UNIX, for people who just weren't born that long ago
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Personally, I remember getting the book and being amazed that one could just read a program that was an OS - till then it was all black arts to me. Anyone who did the same might also be interested in the book "A Small C Compiler" which demystified compilers for me.
I would have thought that there was still a place for a _simple_ open source OS for students and hobbyists ? Linux has to do real work on too-many machines making it somewhat cluttered these days so surely it's better for learning and playing to look at a simple but functional OS, like Minix ?
Thanks to Mr Tanenbaum for his continuing work - I am sure he is clever enough to ignore the pathetic taunts of the ignorant in this forum, and elsewhere.
Don't you know that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die?
"Agree with them now, it will save so much time."
Minix's original licence was ok; you can make as many copies as you like and give it from friends. But Prentice got greedy, and restricted this in later releases, to the point they owned more of less until then owned all of nothing.
You think that's funny.
I use awstats as my web statistics package, which happens to check if the OS is CP/M. I didn't know what to think when I saw that... maybe they werer just being thorough.
Well, once per month, I actually get a hit from someone using it. I mean... damn. I like vintage stuff and all (I just managed to get my Amiga 2000 up and running not so long ago, and I actually have a copy of Atari ST Minix) but how in the hell do you browse from CP/M?
I need to find this guy. Whether I should bitchslap him, or bow down in worship when I do, is something to debate
Note: I have a friend that likes to screw with me, telnets in and manually adds bizarre headers. But this isn't him, nor can I imagine someone else doing this for kicks on strangers' websites. I really am shocked and bewildered, in a way.
Since Minix has been put under the BSD license since April 2000, I wonder why nobody has made an effort yet to port it to embedded systems (PalmOS PDAs with Dragonball CPUs, for example, should be an ideal target). Minix should be much better suited for many embedded applications than the much more complex Linux kernel.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
Right. Measuring Minix against Linux or any OS with pretensions to be a production tool is inappropriate. For some, it probably reflects an unfamiliarity with the Tannenbaum book and a perspective that began sometime after the the code's initial appearance in 1987.
I own both the first and second editions of Tannenbaum's Minix book. They're both buried in boxes right now, so I can't post a quote, but Minix was written as a teaching tool, not with any intent that it would ever be used a production OS or, for that matter, as a hobbyist OS. At the time, the only way for Tannenbaum to legally use source code as a pedagogic device to illstrate the workings of a Unix-like OS was to write it himself. The typical PC box then -- remember, this is 1987 -- was an XT without a hard drive.
In other words, Minix code was written to illustrate the points Tannenbaum makes in the book and to work on 640k green-screen XT's with one tiny 5 & 1/4-inch floppy.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Minix is dead, so why is this news? I knew that years ago.
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
>> To do anything practical...
I'm guessing you haven't read Tannenbaum's books. He never intended anyone to do "anything practical" with Minix. He wanted code to illustrate the OS design principles he was teaching. At that, the code had to work on XT's without a hard drive, fit on a 160k floppy, and run on a machine with less than 640k of memory.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Open source: Rebels at the gate
By Rick Micciuti
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
October 14, 2002, 4:00 a.m. PT
For years, Andy Tanenbaum and other top executives at Minix railed against the economic philosophy of open-source software with Orwellian fervor, denouncing its communal licensing as a "cancer" that stifled technological innovation.
Today, Minix claims to "love" the open-source concept, by which software code is made public to encourage improvement and development by outside programmers. Tanenbaum himself says Minix will gladly disclose its crown jewels--the coveted code behind the Minix operating system--to select customers.
"We can be open source. We love the concept of shared source," said Bill Veghte, vice president of the Minix Server Group. "That's a super-important shift for us in terms of code access."
Did Minix suddenly find open-source religion? Hardly. It was dragged there kicking and screaming by its customers, who are increasingly drawn to open-source software like Linux, whose inner workings of code can be seen by anyone and modified.
While small in scope, Minix's adoption of some key open-source tenets is monumental in meaning. It is an acknowledgement that the company sees the technology as its most serious competitor in years and is taking steps to make sure its Minix franchise can survive the attack.
The open-source movement also represents a larger threat to Minix that transcends any particular technology or company: The high-tech industry has undergone a psychological shift that encourages challenges to Minix, which for many years had been technologically possible but practically unthinkable.
For a combination of reasons ranging from the troubled economy to mistakes in Minix business strategies, many large companies are wondering, for the first time in maybe a decade, why they pay so much for its products and how they can get by with less.
"This is going to force Minix to look at how they structure their software architecturally, and how they package and market their products, and I think that's good," said Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Minix.
Minix has itself to blame at least in part for strengthening the hand of its rivals. A controversial new software licensing policy, which raises prices for some customers and asks them to pay in advance for future releases, has angered many Minix customers and driven them to seek cheaper alternatives such as Linux.
While no one expects the open-source trend to affect Minix's profits immediately--the company is still ringing up record sales and has roughly $40 billion in cash--it is clear that the technology's popularity has forced the company to respond.
"Minix hasn't yet been hurt by Linux in any absolute sense, but open source gives customers alternatives," said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst with market researcher Illuminata. "It means Minix has to devote some of its resources to thinking about how to combat it. It makes Linux and open source a strategic problem, not a 2002 revenue-loss problem."
Minix customers say the software giant has already made significant changes, such as sharing source code with large customers and launching a "trustworthy computing" initiative to button-up troublesome security holes in its software.
"We're learning, if you will, from the Linux world," Minix Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told CNET News.com.
The company's next server version of Minix will ask clients to join online newsgroups for support and advice, following the community-based traditions of the open-source philosophy.
"With open source, I can make systems work where closed-source software just won't," said Phillip Windley, chief information officer of the state of Utah and a longtime Minix customer. "I can't always afford to wait for a software vendor to come around to my way of thinking."
Speak truth to power.
It's still being worked on, although why anybody would be working on a port to the DEC Alpha in 2002 is beyond me.
Andrew Tanenbaum is also the writer of "computer networks" and that book rocks. ... It could have tought me more if it were not for the price of the book and lack of any alternative information source.
As for minix, it failed to switch to the 286 protected mode on the machine where I tried it, but what it surely tought me was to be indulgent towards the slackware installe procedure
I can t blame A.T. for criticising linux architecture, but I sure hope he would put more course material in the open.
excells at teaching programmers how to work together writing unix!
Mr T was wrong, unfortunately
Don't Tread on OpenSource
I'm a bit tired of reading about the Minix vs. Linux debate when its apparent that most don't realize that Tanenbaum et al. did not write Minix as a general purpose OS. Minix was written as a teaching tool for operating systems classes. Tanenbaum has refused to add more "user" features to Minix because he wanted an educational Unix clone students could interact and program with without getting lost. Writing an operating system that a student can understand and learn from is a lot harder than writing an operating system that only already-knowledgable-programmers can work on. So in the future please be kind to Mr. Tanenbaum or at least do a touch of research before blasting him with "in your face Tanenbaum" statements I've read here. I realize siding with Tanenbaum on /. is not a popular position but the one thing that really gets me upset here is when people blast a good man (Tanenbaum) who's done a lot of good work over blind advocacy to on operating system.
Oh and just to make sure I get modded down as Troll...let us all remember this quote from Mr. Tanenbaum's books: "The desire for a free production (as opposed to educational) version of Minix led a Finnish student, Linux Torvalds, to write Linux. This system was developed on Minix and originally supported various Minix features (e.g., the Minix file system)". So yes if you are a Linux fan remember Linux's roots come from Minix so trashing Minix its tantamount to trashing your parents.
The Advanced Development Group at NCR Cambridge, OH was using Minix in their GNOME project in 1987. The GNOME project was an attempt to accelerate object oriented programs and increase processing power on NCR Tower computers. The main goal was to develop a Multibus hardware accelerator card with three Transputer processors(T800's) on them. This hardware accelerator design experimented with a new MMU and cache design that supported object oriented paging and object caching. We initially ported Minix to this Transputer hardware accelerator board. The port took two months but we had Minix running and distributed over 3 Transputers. We also had the previously mentioned licensing difficulty with Prentice Hall, but that did not kill the project. Management kill the project and reassigned us to other projects that had more pressing neeeds.
'Nuf said...
-- Linus
"The web"? And what do you use "the web" for? Click on shiny pictures and moving monkeys?
;*)
REAL hackers browse with lynx on their PDA. ALL DAY....
Luckily, I'm not a REAL hacker
Another surprisingly good microkernel: Windows NT4/2000/XP. Particularly as it's implemented under Windows 2000. In NT4 it wasn't entirely mature. In XP it's buried under loads of eye-candy and spyware. The code for it prolly looks like hell, and would be an embarrassment to MS if it was released. But it works surprisingly well.
But it's not a microkernel anymore. It now supports exactly one platform, and that's by both intent and design. Platform-specific crap was introduced with NT 4.0, and has only gotten worse.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Linux worked for Bell Labs during the time that they put a LOT of effort into developing their version of Unix.
After his internship was done he returned to school and began work on the Linux Kernel. Hmmmm. a little strange that the project he started had so much in common with the one he just left at Bell.
I use linux when it suites my needs and think it has developed into a respectable OS for many different uses but that does not excuse Linux from stealing the source to Bell Labs Unix project and calling it his own.
When did this happen!! and it was going so well I though it was going to be around forever just like BEOs and pc/m and windows now I find out its been relegated to the scrap heap of history ohhh god why why!! - ohh wait a minute Minix what the fuck is Minix!-I though the headline was Linux
Shin: a device for finding furniture in the dark.
Now that Minix is officially "dead", and Linux is advanced and complicated, what UNIX-like OS is recommended for students learning the ins and outs?
Al Woodhull's Minux box is still alive, well, and running here, in the third floor of Cole Science center at Hampshire College, in Amherst, MA. Al Woodhull is the co-author of the Minix operating system, and I believe that he still helps maintain it (occasionally).
The fact that it is still up and running an Apache server is a testament that it is still a functional operating system...more than just an educational toy. Here is a quote from the site:
So what if XF86 isn't being written for it? Does X make it a real OS? Is an OS not functional without X11R6? Does that make all of those X-less servers that I built and maintain toys?
-Turkey
a beowulf cluster of minix!
is that it's totally unsuitable for Beowulf clustering!
My company spent thousands trying to get clustering working on this hick-dicky and had to give up in desgust!!
Tanenbaum's name is truely mud around here, whereas Linus has delivered on his promises
Do you know any old-timey music?
Clear, Dark Skies
Hmm. I'm sure a microkernel system will work for a UN*X-like OS. However, I really doubt that it's a good idea to implement yet another Unix-alike on a microkernel - it won't really make use of the kernel.
Unix is built around the central idea of files (and the related pipes, sockets, etc...).
Microkernels, on the other hand, are built around the idea of IPC, or, to be more direct, function calls.
So if a microkernel is used only to exchange the function calls that are necessary to provide file system capabilities, then it is probably used very inefficiently.
I think microkernels are really the way to go for desktop systems, because desktop systems, while benefitting from the concept of files, have almost nothing to do with files. When you're working with a spreadsheet app, all that happens are function calls (or callbacks, which is really the same): you click the mouse, and the graphics/input systems calls a function in the spreadsheet app, which then performs some calculations. To display the changes, the spreadsheet app calls a series of functions in the graphics/input system.
No files involved, are there?
Of course, the X client/server design uses a file (a socket) to communicate the function calls, but that's really just an unnecessary layer of complexity.
So yes, I'm calling for a paradigm shift. Implement a system on top of a microkernel that doesn't give a shit about Unix (if it can run most POSIX apps then great - but don't make it a priority). Make it a desktop system. Use C++ as the major language of the operating system, so that components that reside in a different address space can easily be accessed as native language objects - and applications won't have to bother whether those components are local, in a different address space or on a different computer. There are many things that need to be worked out, but it can result in a very sane and flexible design.
Maybe something like this has already been implemented (or started), but I haven't found anything - microkernel developers seem to be focussed extremely on theory instead of practice.
What kind of College doesn't teach OS classes? It must be a very baaad college...
Thought you might be interested in this then (minix looks like what I need to run on any 486 or lower machines I run across, as my fiance is liking unix, so she'll need a compy...):
HARDWARE REQUIRED
To run MINIX 2.0, you need a PC driven by an 8088, 286, 386, 486, or Pentium CPU. The system must be 100% hardware compatible with the PC-AT and its successors (i.e, EISA bus, IDE disk, etc.).
To run the 16-bit version, 640K is the minimum. To run the 32-bit version, 2MB is the minimum. To run comfortably, another 512K is needed.
A hard disk is not technically required, but is strongly recommended to take full advantage of the system. To load all the sources and be able to recompile the system, 30 MB is the practical minimum but with a 20 MB disk partition, you can still run and compile parts of the system.
The system must have either a CGA, EGA, VGA, monochrome, or Hercules video card, or another card that emulates one of these. Both 5.25" and 3.5" diskettes are supported, as are printers using the parallel port and modems and terminals using the serial ports. Mitsumi CD-ROMs are also supported, as are some Ethernet cards.
Well, as long as they don't drop support for Coherent, I'll be happy. :-)
microkernel != cross-platform
dipshit.
Minix is lasting longer than it would have if it was not Linus Torvalds inspiration.
Jonahweb.com has stuff.
I've still seen a lot of mini-distros out there that use some form of minix. Actually, I believe that the system I use for firewalling (a 1-disk bering leaf firewall) uses minix.
I dont buy that one bit. Plenty are still using it to learn from, as it was much more understandable and documented than most anything out there.
I would consider them users.
Do they need X? Donno about that, but saying 'no users' is rather incorrect.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's still being used for educational purposes at my school. Its kernel is small and compiles fast, so one can easily learn something about OS internals. The whole system (with compiler, kernel sources etc.) fits into 27MB RAM-disk, so it's possible to configure an old PC to be an 'bulletproof' system where each student can have root provoledges and one doesn't need to reinstall/reinitialize it each course.
welcome to minix. you can run on anything. the only limit is yourself.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
I think he's trying to make a funny.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
That was part of the problem.
The other thing that annoyed Linus was that AST wouldn't make MINIX dependent on the 386 chip so it could feature protected memory and virtual memory. AST wanted MINIX to work on Atari STs, Amigas, 8086 machines, and whatever else students happened to have access to. Linus just wanted a UNIX he could hack on on his 386, and didn't care if it wouldn't work for the rest of us.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Linux has long passed its usefulness as an overhyped no good OS. Unlike Minix, linux has no teaching value because the kernel code is so poorly written. We need to get past the abortion that is linux and work on advancing the state of the art in OS, not reinventing Unix all over again due to linus's Not Invented Here syndrome.
Slashdot still reports news about it...apparently...
I used it in 1997.
Here's at least one user that could use bugfixes in the future! http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/print/0,23102,3 399433,00.html
I learned/am learning UNIX on Linux, but I'm still going to try Minix on Bochs, as I really want to learn how to do system/OS programming, and the Linux kernel is a tad too complex. Minix seems to be the perfect system for learning this, especially because I can change the code and just restart Bochs.
Any other similar OSes that are built for educational purposes?
Slashdot is a waste of time. I enjoy wasting time.
I will never give up BeOS and I will die for Jean-Louise Gassee.
OK, you might be a troll, but I think I will respond anyway (in Norse myth, trolls turn to stone when you question them long enough for the sun to rise ;))
;) And SCO != Linux despite the fact that Caldera bought them ;)
;)
And, for
the record it *is* the *worst* Unix implementation
of any *ever* (when compared to the commercial
and/or BSDs; Linux loses on its crappy VM
subsystem alone.)
Funny I thought SCO held that title
As for inventing stuff, lets look at the most innovative things Microsoft has done-- Bob and Clippy
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Have you ever even been to another country? Trust me, the USA are not a good role model. We have a seriously fucked-up society, with more crime, poverty and social problems than pretty much anyone else in the world.
As Andrew Tannenbaum must be tired of telling you guys, minix is an educational operating system. It was never designed for the market (that's linux's job), but rather design to aide students in the learning of the art that is known as the design and implementation of the modern operating system. Even so, Andrew still uses minix himself, so it can't be dead! :)
Is that s\he wrote some code and got a whole lot of people to use it, while everyone else (like Andy and RMS) were busy lecturing everyone about what is the right thing. In fact there is one in every company that is still alive and I am sure there are a few in Microsoft.
Aren't big websites required to comply with ADA these days? Lynx shouldn't have a slightest problem with web sites designed for reading software!
True, but doesn't bash get a lot heavier when you hack it up for the zsh functionality, and about the colours, I use the zsh themes anyway =)
The way to corrupt a youth is to teach him to hold in higher value them who think alike than those who think differently
Linux is not a commercial operating system. It is a fscking OS kernel.
Red Hat may be a comercial OS, Linux is not...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I didn't say that, cockgobbler. When you put platform-specific code into a microkernel, it's no longer a microkernel, is it? Now wipe Bill Gates' cum off your chin and go away.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
As operagost noted, NT 3 was a microkernel OS and NT 4 was not. (A 14Mb kernel is not "micro" by anyone's standard.) I believe (I may recall this incorrectly) the main thing they did was import the GDI subsystem into the kernel to improve multimedia performance in NT Workstation, and used the same setup in NT Server despite the fact that servers do not generally need multimedia performance.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Mr. Jones related an incident from "some time back" when IBM Canada
Ltd. of Markham, Ont., ordered some parts from a new supplier in Japan. The
company noted in its order that acceptable quality allowed for 1.5 per cent
defects (a fairly high standard in North America at the time).
The Japanese sent the order, with a few parts packaged separately in
plastic. The accompanying letter said: "We don't know why you want 1.5 per
cent defective parts, but for your convenience, we've packed them separately."
-- Excerpted from an article in The (Toronto) Globe and Mail
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