[The author's web site, http://www.rit.edu/~aje9383/minix/), has additional information related to MacMinix. -- asw]

Date: Wed, 22 Jan 1997 16:55:05 GMT
From: Andrew Erickson <aje9383@OSFMAIL.ISC.RIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: MINIX/MacMINIX info needed please

I have a reasonably well-behaved MacMinix system going, so perhaps I can offer a few suggestions...

First of all, I recommend turning off the ramdisk; it's an option under preferences. This will give you more free ram to play with (not too big a deal with 4MB, granted, but...) and it will make the changes to the root filesystem stick around.

The cc command supplied with MacMinix is *only* a K&R compiler. It won't do ANSI stuff, and it certainly won't do C++ stuff (such as iostreams). It also doesn't do floating point stuff (actually, the compiler supports it, but the supplied libraries don't -- they only have stub routines.)

The vi command is a link (only hard links exist) to elvis; no real space is wasted, only an inode. This means, too, if you ever recompile elvis you need to regenerate the vi link, as well as the ed link and probaly a couple others. Several other commands work in a similar fashion; macread and macwrite, for instance.

The manpage files don't come with the default distribution; I managed to find a set of man pages somewhere (I forget where) which were for the PC version. Most things are about the same, but a few programs are different.

If you want a reasonable multi-user environment (with some level of security) you'll have to change quite a few permissions; just a warning.

Hope this helps.
--Andrew Erickson, aje9383@rit.edu

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