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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.'"
How is this offtopic?
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
Please note that no X users does _not_ equal no users at all. As has already been pointed out, some people never use X on some boxes
I'm going over here and I don't know why!
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.
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