minix or Linux in ql

[pjw]

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So Minix could sort of run on a QL emulator running on an Atari ST? I'm guessing if that scenario existed, Minix directly on an Atari ST was more plausible. What was the point to get it run on a QL emulator on an Atari? To see if it could work on a QL but they didn't own one?

The various QL emulators for Atari were all hardware emulators, ie they provided QL compatible hardware that the Atari lacked, in particular graphics. The rest of the package was initially just a patched version of Qdos (later a completely rewritten version called SMSQ!) that took over the machine. No need for instruction emulation as it ran on the Atari's own hardware, making it in effect a QL. The Atari was just a better built machine with faster CPUs, more built-in memory and peripherals, and was being actively supported at the time, while the QL was quietly being smothered by Allen F Suger.

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi

The other point about the Atari Hardware emulation, SMSQ/E was developed on an Atari Mega ST, then ported to the QXL, Super/Gold Card on the QL

Minix is an operating system, that uses the hardware directly, and once running will not use the Host machine hadware.

It is unlikely that a QL is fast enough to run Minix, if you think this is wrong, then the Minix Operating System source code is listed in the Minix book as a teaching aid for operating system.

Just needs typed in and compiled, should be easy for a C programmer...

[stephen_usher]

Just needs typed in and compiled, should be easy for a C programmer...

You;d still need to write the hardware initialisation code and all the device drivers. The code in the books is for an IBM PC.

Minix runs on the bare metal.

[bwinkel67]

There may not be a reason to do all that work. We know that there was a working version (albeit slow) and we know some of the folks involved in creating that version. In fact, we know the last person to work on it who got it to a seemingly runable form and we know where they work and have both a LinkedIn and Facebook profile.

The hard part is to figure out a way to contact that person to see if they still have it WITHOUT stalking them. My Facebook message is still pending having him read it...it could be a long while before that happens. I wish I had better LinkedIn mechanism, but again, if anyone on the forum uses LinkedIn for professional networking, you may have a better shot of firing off an email.

Now I'm a pretty good internet sleuth and could likely figure out his work email, but I'm not going there

[afx]

By the way, PC Conqueror behaves like the PC speed of its time on a Q68.

A question about this. How do you mount a drive to emulate a MSDOS boot disk?

[bwinkel67]

A question about this. How do you mount a drive to emulate a MSDOS boot disk?

I briefly looked into that when I did my first test run of Conqueror on my QL. I'm guessing you'd have to create a hard disk image and run Conqueror off of that on the Q68. It's why I haven't tried doing that yet. Maybe you create a small enough hard disk to fit onto a floppy disk and then copy that over to a win container.

[bwinkel67]

Update: I've made contact with Erwin on LinkedIn and he is indeed the same person. Will update here if he has any remnants of the code and is willing to share it. I guess he was student (and so was the other person) when they worked on it.

[bwinkel67]

Ok, got a response. Unfortunately he doesn't have the source anymore.

On Thursday, December 5, 2024 at 9:22pm, Erwin Dondorp wrote

Mike,

I no longer have the source code for Minix-on-QL.
I still know a few properties of it:
* we were basically running Minix as an application. so QDos remained in place.
* each system-call was then executed using QDos code in the device drivers.
* we needed to patch the standard system-call mechanism, which used probably TRAP#0 with a TRAP-number that we could intercept. QDos did not allow that for #0. Thus all executables (that we took from a 68K minix distribution) needed patching. But I think we never ran much more than SH and LS.

Erwin Dondorp

[swensont]

> A question about this. How do you mount a drive to emulate a MSDOS boot disk?

When PC Conqueror came out, it was floppy only. A QL hard drive was fairly rare. Conqueror would boot off of an MS-DOS floppy. I'm pretty the other MS-DOS emulator and the CP/M emulator all booted from a floppy.

Tim

[Peter]

A question about this. How do you mount a drive to emulate a MSDOS boot disk?

I just used a suffciently small PC harddisk image.