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Minix from Scratch Project Established

Posted by timothy on from the but-that's-unpossible dept.

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.

9 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. Horray! by Billly+Gates · · Score: 5, Funny
    All six of us are happy. :-)

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    http://saveie6.com/
  2. My god people by Timesprout · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  3. Isn't Minix intentionally incomplete? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It is my understanding that Tannenbaum never wanted Minix to be feature complete because it is a teaching OS, not a production OS. He often rejected submitted patches on these very grounds. The idea was to use Minix in a teaching environment. By keeping Minix simple and incomplete, instructors could tailor lab assignments to provide missing features and extensions.

    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).

  4. Re:Just to be jerks.... by oO+Peeping+Tom+Oo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Umm.....freedos?

  5. This is for real, folks. by commodoresloat · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  6. Re:I always wanted to get Minix .. by IrresponsibleUseOfFr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, now you can download it for free.

    Minix

    If you don't like the licensing terms, then choose Linux. Since that was like kinda of the whole point.

    Linux is a lot of code. But, LOC isn't the most valuable measure of complexity. Although, it can be overwhelming at first. A lot of Linux code won't be of much interest since it will deal with archaic devices and such. But, Linux as an overall system is well-organized. Which will mean as a hobbiest, after you find the parts of system you want to play around with, it should be easy to modify.

    The only real part that will screw you is the fact that as a monolithic kernel, if what you modify has a bug, it can potentially affect every part of the system (but usually it isn't so bad). And, this is usually no worse than any C-type coding unless you are playing around with the file-system.

    More on-topic, I don't see any reason why you'd want to rewrite Minix. There is always this type of bully-ing going on. It doesn't mean that 3rd parties should run off like a bunch of chicken littles. Plus there are other projects like xBSD's or Linux that are not necessarily easy to contribute to, but nevertheless you will affect a lot more people and gain their accolades if successful. Meh, I guess it is their time to waste and there are certainly other less productive things they could be doing.

    --
    Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true! -Homer Simpson
  7. Re:Agree. Better places to put in effort by EvilAlien · · Score: 5, Funny
    Do you seriously think Hurd will ever actually achieve "real OS" status? The project started in bloody 1990 after 7 years of RMS flailing around in his attempts to build a free OS.

    I expect Microsoft to move towards a BSD-ish source license and that I will be playing Duke Nukem Forever on the Phantom console or Linux before Hurd becomes a real OS ;)

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    perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
  8. Re:Agree. Better places to put in effort by The_Dougster · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, I just got it booting on my Asus A7N8X with Western Digital WD1200JB and NVidia GeForce FX 5900. Turns out there is a newly discovered bug in gnumach which barfs when you have lots of RAM installed. Add the command uppermem 523648 to Grub's boot entry and magically it all works.

    For the more adventurous, you can check out Hurd on L4. The link is to a wiki page that I have been working on recently. But while you can actually run the Hurd and do things in the X-Window system with Gnumach, the L4 variant is just getting off the ground. Some recent crucial code porting has recently occured and we may soon see a libc0 for Hurd on L4 with any luck. If you want to spend about an hour making a bootable debugger then check out the link :-P

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    Clickety Click ...
  9. Getting Hurd working by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 5, Interesting
    One of the biggest issues with Hurd does not seem to be the basic OS architecture, but rather the lack of support for various file systems, devices, PPP etc.

    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.