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Minix from Scratch Project Established
decuser writes "The MFS - Minix from Scratch project was established in the wake of the Brown-Tannenbaum controversy. MFS aims to be to the Minix community what LFS is to the Linux community, a recipe for building an alternative OS from 'scratch.'" See the project's website at mfs.sunsite.dk or minixfromscratch.org.
http://saveie6.com/
The problem was that it cost money :P I always wanted to mess around the code on a simple, yet an operating system you could DO something with.
Don't say "Linux!". Have you SEEN how many lines of code that is? I just a lowly hobbyist.
This could lead to the second coming of Linus !!! Let us rejoice and sacrafice junior VB coders to the Gods of Code.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Minix is great for teacher and student, but it shouldn't be the first choice for general purpose operating systems. At one time it didn't even have networking (but maybe that has changed).
Umm.....freedos?
The tempest in a teacup is over whether an OS could be written from scratch by a single person. Making a shared project out of it fails to prove that a single person can do it. Worse yet, Ken Brown's sense of logic will lead him to cry that it's proof that a single person cannot do it.
It's probably a fun project, but it isn't really going to prove anything new that reasonable people don't already know. And it will fail to convince unreasonable people of anything.
I guess though it is also worth noting that while Minix was only designed for teaching OS concepts it has been used for RealWork. The same happened to Pascal. Nobody was ever supposed to write any RealCode in Pascal - it was also intended only as a teaching tool.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It's interesting to see Tannenbaum's influence on Senn:
"I have to be upfront with you, I am a fair newbie at Minix. I have been using Linux since the 0.9 kernel (downloaded via ftp on VMS in 90s) and have a fairly decent background in Unix - solaris, sco, bsd, etc. I got interested in Minix back around the same time too, but I had success with Linux and stayed with it. I got reminded of Minix the other day when Andrew Tanenbaum posted his response to the 'Brown' book - pure enlightenment - http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/."[emphasis added]
Here is some more background infoon the genesis of the project.
Hasn't HURD been trying this for 15 years?
Back in 1992 or 1993, a unix admin suggested that I check out a PC unix called "minix." Back then, "googling" consisted of connecting a ftp clinet to ftp.wustl.edu and manually traversing the directory structure looking for something interesting. I don't remember if it was at ftp.wustl.edu or sunsite.unc.edu, or even on usenet, but I eventually stumbled across this PC unix called "linux." It sounded right, so I went with it.
Months later, I spoke to the admin again, and found that I was mistaken. Rather than type in thousands of lines of code for an 8086 unix kernel, I had a fully functional linux workstation with X11, ethernet and all the rest of the good stuff that we take for granted today but were PC fantasies in the Windows 3.0 days.
Slashdot should stop promoting projects that have nothing more than a Web page.
MFS looks like it's trying to write a manual for installing Minix. That's fine, but will it really teach "operating system design concepts"? Wouldn't Tanenbaum's textbook be better for that? Linux From Scratch teaches you a lot about Linux, but it doesn't teach you how the kernel works.
Just look at all the valuable information available on the MFS Wiki. Lots of useful information suggesting hours and hours of labor by Minix users everywhere. I predict this will be the Next Big Thing. Minix installations everywhere, sweeping the nation, sweeping the world, while Linux fades into obscurity. With BSD dying and Apple beleaguered, Minix will become the next major competitor to Windows.
Back in 2002 or 2003, a Windows admin suggested that I check out a PC operating system called "Windows." Back then, "googling" consisted of pointing a browser at http://www.google.com/ and manually traversing all the porn pages returned looking for something interesting. I don't remember if it was at http://www.google.com/ or http://www.google.de/, or even on http://labs.google.com/, but I eventually stumbled across this PC Windows clone called "Lindows." It sounded right, so I went with it.
Months later, I spoke to the admin again, and found that I was mistaken. Rather than downling thousands of MegaBytes of files for an unreliable operating system, I had a fairly functional Linux workstation which ran Windows programs, ethernet and all the rest of the good stuff that Linux users take for granted today like reliability and security but are PC fantasies for Windows XP users.
This could potentially be rectified by building a "File System Manager" and "Device Manager" that support the Linux device and file system models. Then, all Linux device drivers and file systems etc could be plugged into Hurd and used with little/no modification.
The benefit of an exercise like this is that it would push Hurd into "useful" space so that it would become worth putting effort into, and there would then be a microkernel OS with a rich set of code.
For all Linus' comments about "computer science masturbation", there is still a place for microkernels and they can be pretty damn efficient. Having a solid microkernel OS in OpenSource land is of significant value.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Package management is for sissies!
(just kidding)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
When I left Microsoft it wasn't pre-emptive or very useful. WTF would I want to look at the code, or play with DOS for?
;-]
In my operating systems class I was learning how to implement stuff that Windows wouldn't have for another three years (yes, I implemented pre-emptive multi-tasking in '92 on x86 hardware, and it wasn't bloody well rocket science).
Hell, I was reading Tanenbaum for my Operating Systems course. I used his definitions for a bunch of system calls to implement a UNIX layer in another OS. (Uh oh, now SCO will sue me and my professor. =)
Quite frankly I think implementing Minix from scratch is a hell of a lot more interesting than anything DOS ever did. [ And I have the course notes to prove it
Now, don't get me wrong, BBS Sysop has street cred in my book, but DOS isn't exactly what I'd call a sophisticated system to want to play with that much as compared to a real multi-tasking OS, which Minix most definitely was.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If fact, back in 1991 I was toying around with both Minix and Linux. Minix was pretty cool but it did cost money and it was pretty basic in what it could do. It was pretty much text only. Linux, on the otherhand was something of a baby huey, born on the gigantic side. I remember ftp'ing disk images for days on my 2400 baud modem and then creating a humongous pile of disks.
Minix, on the other hand, was like 2 disks AFAIK, but it wasn't nearly as groovy as Linux was with all that GNU software that was immediately ported over to run on it. I even struggled to get X running on my Debian 0.9 system but never pulled it off with my EGA card that weighed about ten pounds and was covered with hundreds of chips. A VGA card and monitor cost a king's ransom back in those days was way out of my price range.
But compared to MS-DOS and DesqView, which I used to run my old BBS system on back then, Linux was pretty darned cool! You could put a getty on your comport and it kind of was a bbs already, and you could actually do meaningfull things with your computer while it ran the bbs since it had virtual consoles and awesome multitasking even back then, whereas with DesqView you sort of had a poorly performing kind of multitasking system that barely ran anything usefull without taking up so many cycles that nothing really worked well at all. I don't think that Minix was able to do anything like this back then, but then I only really messed around with it for a couple of days.
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