Minix on Handheld Computers?

rev. 16 Nov 2004

Note 17 Oct 2004: I recently received an e-mail that said: Just thought you should know that all of the offsite links on http://minix1.bio.umass.edu/faq/mxhandhld.html ("Minix on Handheld Computers?") are broken, except for the link to http://www.technoir.nu/hplx/minix (Newer Minix port on HP200LX). I checked this out and was not happy to find this was true. However, things were not as bad as they seemed at first -- I found archived copies of the missing material and one new site. There's more on how I found the missing pages below.

Several projects to port Minix to handheld devices have been reported:

• A port of Minix to HP Jornada 680/690 machines is described at http://minixsh.tripod.co.jp/index.html. Original page gone, but found here on Wayback Machine. And here are some notes on another person's experiences with Minix on the Jornada.

• An experiment in booting Minix on the HP200LX palmtop computer has been successful, although more work is needed to make it useful. See Richard L. Dubs's http://www.erols.com/rld website for much more info. Another missing link, but archived copy found on Wayback Machine.

• Another, more recent, report of Minix on the HP200LX can be found at http://www.technoir.nu/hplx/minix. This uses DOSMinix.

• An experiment in porting Minix to the Compaq iPaq handheld is reported at http://www.cs.uno.edu/~venkata/www/index.htm. This was a university class project, and is extensively documented, although apparently not carried through to a complete working system. Another lost page archive found on Wayback Machine But, also see next item...

• The page at http://www.darnok.org/projects/ipaq/ipaq.txt seems to have inherited the Minix to iPaq port project. As of Oct 2004 I don't know if this represents additional work on this project or if this is just a new location for the original documents. There is quite a bit of information here, including source code for the Minix port and documentation about the ARM processor. If the previous link does not work this page can also be found via this link to the Wayback Machine.

• Although this section is nominally about ports of Minix 2.0 to handhelds, a question to the comp.os.minix newsgroup about porting Minix to the ARM architecture elicited this response about an older (Minix 1.5, 1991) project that may be of interest:

  On 15 Nov 2004 Michael Engel (*) wrote:
  ipaqwizard (*) wrote:
  
  > I would like to port Minix to the strongarm and xscale CPU's. Has
  > anyone "successfully" ported Minix to the ARM architecture?
  
  There was a port to old 26-bit ARMs (Acorn systems) using the first
  generation ARM CPUs years ago. You can find it at
  
  <ftp://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/systems/acorn/minix/arm-minix.tar.Z>
  
  This is a port of Minix 1.5.10, so it's quite old. The READ_ME file
  says it has to be compiled on RiscOS, this may be an additional
  difficulty. Nevertheless, it might provide a good starting point.
  

  (*) Alas, in these days of spam I don't want to quote anyone's e-mail address without asking permission. Addresses get harvested from web pages. Look for an archive of comp.os.minix to get contact information.

How I found the missing pages: the Wayback Machine is where I found archives of the pages reported as dead links. There are other possibilities for retrieving information. I have some hints that may be helpful on the Finding Lost Sites and Pages page.

I appreciate feedback about bad links -- I don't have time to check everything myself!