minix or Linux in ql

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi

Back in the old days, when all I had was a Trump Card and 40Mb Miracle Hard Disk, I had Conqueror SE running with multiple hard disk images for MSDOS, on the Miracle Hard Disk.

I just read the manual and the procedure to create hard disks is clearly written.

I will have to get the system running on the Q68.

[bwinkel67]

I just used a suffciently small PC harddisk image.

I wonder if their is a way to grow the harddisk. Maybe today, on a modern computer, it would be possible by editing the file. Would love to take a look at a copy of a small Conqueror hard disk. Do you have a generic one you could share? I could try and create my own I suppose.

[bwinkel67]

Also got in touch with Felix:

On Friday, December 6, 2024 at 4:13pm, Felix Croes wrote

If you're looking for the source code, I'm afraid I no longer have it. My original port was a proof of concept, just barely usable on the QL, and I think I never published the diffs. I threw away my QL (which was no longer working even when I posted the announcement to comp.os.minix) some years ago.

Erwin Dondorp put some serious effort into it. He may still have the code.


On Friday, December 6, 2024 at 4:14pm, Mike wrote

I actually also connected with Erwin Dondorp here on LinkedIn yesterday. Unfortunately he no longer has any of the source code.


On Friday, December 6, 2024 at 4:14pm, Felix Croes wrote

I see. I checked my old archives to make sure, and I really don't have it anymore.

[bwinkel67]

Interesting article by Andrew Tanenbaum on the history of Minix. I found this scouring archive.org for anything Minix in the .nl domain. What's funny is that there are two universities at play here: University of Amsterdam (or UV Amsterdam) and Vrije University Amsterdam (or VU Amsterdam). the QL-to-minix folks went were students in the first, while Andrew Tanenbaum was a professor at the latter.

https://cacm.acm.org/research/lessons-l ... -of-minix/

[bwinkel67]

Ok, I'm getting a bit out of hand with this. I was looking through the comp.os.minix group and found lots of interesting things, esp when searching for "QL" or better "Minix QL" instead:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix

You might think, "Mike, you are spending way too much time on this" and you aren't wrong. But it's the end of the semester and instead of the dreaded grading, this is more fun. In any case, I found this post from Felix:

The person who takes my place as Minix QL guru is Erwin Dondorp, email address:don...@fwi.uva.nl . Also at work on Minix QL is Jeremy Allison, email address: J...@GEC2.PHYSICS.MANCHESTER.AC.UK .

So that puts Jeremy Allison in the chain. Well, he's a bit bigger fish:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Allison

I cross-referenced some searches and he indeed went to Manchester University. His LinkedIn bio says he was at Sun MIcros Systems from 1988 to 1994, but an Samba.org blog makes mention of his time at Manchester University:

https://www.samba.org/samba/news/articl ... umn18.html

He's definitely an interesting person, but a) likely too busy to respond and b) if he does, unlikely he kept an archive of it. I also found that Felix has an entire GitHub repository but checked and didn't have any remnants of code (I mean, he would have known about it but I couldn't help it). Unfortunately, the timing is all wrong here since 1990 is just too early for web stuff.

Still, can't hurt to poke around. Also, from the comp.os.minix page, Felix revealed that his port only took 4 days, and half of that was transferring the stuff over to the QL via serial port. The fact that it was a QDOS application doesn't seem to be that odd, since version 1.1 that Andrew Tanenbaum wrote for the IBM PC used the same approach. So maybe it's just cross-compiling version 1.5 of Minix and fixing some missing calls. Perhaps a summer project if I don't get anywhere with it.

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi,

... then as I suggested earlier, since the Minix source code is detailed in various editions of "Operating Systems Design and Implementation" by Andrew Tanenbaum, as a teaching aid to developing the Minix operating system, written in the C language.

Could C68 not be used to compile the Minix source, adding the QL specifics code, with faster QL systems, this could work.

But I am not sure why?

[aalea]

Versión 1.5 (and all versions) of Minix is available online, and also for Atari st and for macintosh, compile with C68 or with GCC shall not be a problem, but we need some parts that are missing:

The boot part, that do the initial configuration, memory allocations, config of traps, etc... I think that for other systems is in assembler.

The minimum I/O drivers, this include keyboard, screen and floppy disk as a minimum.

Rs232 and hard disk (qubide?qimsi?) will be optional

Comparing the Mac, ST and pc versions, shall help on decide which part need to be touched, luckily Minix source code is prepared for 68000, but even with this, is a huge work that need deep knowledge not only of the QL but also of Minix.