Status of Minix1.hampshire.edu and mirrors modified: 29 Jun 2006

For MINIX 3 go to http://www.minix3.org. (Minix 3 released Oct 2005)

What happened to Minix1.hampshire.edu?

I operated a Minix server at minix1.hampshire.edu since 1994. It became a significant repository of information and contributed software for Minix 2. But, MINIX 3 was officially released in late October 2005 and Operating Systems Design and Implementation, 3rd edition, which describes MINIX 3, was published in January 2006. By then the old Pentium 133 hardware upon which I had been running the minix1.bio.umass.edu and minix1.hampshire.edu servers was becoming unreliable.

I do not have easy physical access to either of these systems, and I felt that trying to upgrade them to MINIX 3 remotely would be problematic. Also, I no longer work in the Department of Biology at the University of Massachusetts. My former colleagues there had been gracious in allowing me to continue to run the minix1.bio.umass.edu mirror machine, but I felt it was time to retire it.

Minix1.hampshire.edu also has been taken off-line. I hope to upgrade or replace it in the future, but I cannot predict when that will happen. I am currently running private servers with MINIX 3, and testing the reliability of MINIX 3 as a server, with good results.

These Minix1 machines at Hampshire College and the University of Massachusetts demonstrated that standard Minix versions from 1.5 through 2.0.4 running on modest hardware could be used as a base for serving http and ftp content on the Internet. I believe MINIX 3 will be useful in this way too, and I hope to bring a MINIX 3-based server back to the Internet sometime in the future. But in the meantime, I want to make the content previously available on these machines accessible again. For this purpose I have posted the contents of the Minix1 website on the commercial website I run as http://minix1.woodhull.com. This is, alas, a Linux server running the Apache web server. While I have nothing against Linux or Apache I will miss the fun of demonstrating that Minix and Michael Temari's Minix Httpd can be useful servers.

Initially, only the web (http) pages are being moved to the new site. The contributed software depository is not available yet. However, if anyone really wants to get one of the packages that was previously available in the Minix1 public ftp directories, please write me and I will try to arrange to make the files available.

Old links and old pages

Al Woodhull, 12 March 2006
<asw@woodhull.com>

Update 29 June 2006

Minix1.woodhull.com has now been reorganized and updated. Almost all of the content from the old minix1.* sites is now here. The major exception is older versions of Minix. Only Minix 2.0.4 is now here for download. Other versions can be found elsewhere, there is a list of versions and download sites here. As always, I appreciate hearing about incorrect links or missing files.