Introduction

Minix is a sort of "baby unix" operating system designed for instructional purposes, simple enough to be covered, or at least explored, in a semester but complex enough to illustrate real systems principles and practice. Minix will give us valuable and badly-needed hands-on experience and examples. The popular Linux operating system was derived from an earlier version of Minix.

Minix can be run on almost any Intel-based 80x86 machine, and both 16 and 32-bit versions are available. For those without even an old PC, we have arranged for access to the PCs in the circuits lab. In addition, the Bochs 80386 PC-emulator can run Minix (and also DOS and early versions of Windows) on any sufficiently fast Unix X-windows system, though the emulated system will necessarily run relatively slowly.

Getting Started

For those that don't have a CD-ROM drive, a copy of the Minix CD-ROM that came with your text is available online, locally. Before trying to install a Minix system you should read the following files. Installation floppies can be made from the CD-ROM or the on-line copy here; in addition I have a couple of sets of disks that students can borrow.

Further Minix Information

For more info on Minix, you may want to visit Al Woodhull's Minix page or Andy Tanenbaum's Minix home page.

The Bochs PC Emulator

If you have access to a reasonably fast system running Unix and X windows, say a 120 MHZ Pentium or better with 30 megabytes of spare disk space, the Bochs emulator can provide a convenient way to experiment with Minix. Bochs emulates a PC, including BIOS, disks, and limited graphics hardware; this makes it possible to run an entire Minix (or DOS) system in an X-window. Unfortunately, the emulator is probably too slow to be useful when run on the SGI Indigos in the open undergrad labs.

If you want to try the emulator, you should get the latest version, which runs Minix (and DOS) more reliably that the version that came on the CD-ROM. Be sure to compile the emulator it with all the optimization flags set.