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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]
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!
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.
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
Actially the shame of this is Minix(VMD) and X make a seriously slim little X terminal on crappy old hardware.
This is a shame, as I learned on Minix, and still have a spot in me heart for it.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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
The big problem with Minix wasn't technical, but political; any changes that were made to it couldn't be released except as patches (i.e., you couldn't change it and still call it Minix). Linus bitched once that Minix was only usable with a set of patches by a developer other than AST.
So the real influence of Minix on Linux was in the GPL. Linus was certain that he wanted to release his code under a license which encouraged change, because of his experiences with Minix. And in fact, it is the GPL which distinguishes Linux from other x86 Unices such as the BSDs, much more than anything technical.
Because it's relatively simple. Have you ever compared Linus's original .99 version (the first he released publically, or anyway the first that I can find) with a modern 2.5 kernel? It's orders-of-magnitude more complex. Minix was designed to follow academic operating system principles, above practical issues such as performance. Because of that, it was easy to understand and teach.
"...why would I use it?"
To browse the web. Lynx and co are nice and all, but the web really was the one final killer app in favour of the GUI.
The entire web paradigm is built graphical manipulation. You simply can not get a good web experience from the CLI.
Everything else you could argue, but not the web.
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?
Yeah, we're still out here. From what I can gather from the MINIX-L list, it has more of a following outside the US. There seem to be few folks in the Middle East and Southeast Asia using it. Still not a large number in any case.
It may not be Linux, but what the hell else am I gonna run on an IBM 5150? Besides, I keep telling myself that "someday" I'll learn how to code, then hack around with it.
the no
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
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."
I entirely agree; Minix was never much for Xfree. Visit Andrew T's FAQ:
"Is MINIX dead?
Oh no. Far from it. It is simply focused on the target area it was always focused on: education. The excursion into hackerland was a detour. A co-author, Al Woodhull, and I have rewritten the MINIX book based on the new, POSIX-compliant, version of MINIX which Kees Bot produced. It is still be aimed at having students be able to learn the principles of operating systems and most of a real system in one semester. "
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.