Slashdot Mirror
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
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!
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?
--
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
No.
The name "GNU/Linux" is derived from the fact that almost all Linux distros make good use of the GNU tools. Minix makes no use of them.
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
``Shouldn't it be called GNU/Minix?''
No, because Minix doesn't use the GNU toolset. Besides, I am thinking about installing Minix on my 486-without-FPU. Guess I need to go for an old version of X if I want it?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
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
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.
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 !!!!
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
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.
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.
I'm downloading it now, just to say I'm the only user left!
Please, dont download it and ruin it for me.
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
--
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.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
This one's better. (Stolen from Fark)
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
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."
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.
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.
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.
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]
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"
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.
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
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.
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.