Minix 1.5 on WinUAE Amiga emulation

modified: 23 May 2005

From: "Andreas Eibach" <aeibach (at) despammed (dot) com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Amiga Minix 1.5.10.2 up and running on WinUAE! :)
Date: Sat, 21 May 2005 20:14:51 +0200

Yeah, after a lot of fiddling I've made it today. MINIX 1.5.10.2 is running
on my PC here with latest WinUAE and an A500 config with lots of RAM!

The resource on
http://home.arcor.de/kickstart/TKA/Tutorials/AmigaMINIX/aminix.html tells
you everything you need to know about MINIX; I think without the original
documentation (pdf'ed) I would not have been able to get it working!
However, this resource tells everything except where to get the 1.5.10.2
upgrades. Gladly I still found them on ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/minix/amiga/ !
If the maintainer reads this, I strongly suggest to update the page!

First, I needed to make the 720k disks WinUAE-readable, though. I needed a
WB 3.x with CrossDOS installed and YADI from Aminet. I copied all 720k disk
images on a HD-partition, and mounted this one as dhX: (X = your choice; I
labelled it MINIX_IMG).
Then I did a
 c:yadi w MINIX_IMG:disk02 pc0:
and I got a working Disk 2 (ROOT). Same with disk03 - disk09.
For WinUAE, you must use *custom ADFs* instead of standard ones, as the
disks are in MS-DOS _size_, but MINIX _format_!

Then I manually upgraded my boot disk with the new kernel image from the
upgrade pack found at FuNet.
(there are no archives; hence remember to use FTP rather than HTTP to get
the pack so you won't have to download every file by hand!)

Everything worked out fine ... BUT...

the ROOT file system has been read-only throughout.
I could not make any change to /etc/rc yet.
For example, as you cannot use /usr/bin/readclock (yet) since it will output
junk, you have to stick to /usr/bin/date.
I even tried to mount the root disk (#2) under a different device name, but
I could not create any file.
Maybe someone of you has a clue why.

All in all though - that was a nice experience! :)

-Andreas