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Unix Operating Systems Software

The End Of Minix? 411

Posted by timothy from the i'm-shrinking-i'm-shrinking dept.
Otter writes "Minix is best known as the Unix clone for x86 that inspired Linus Torvalds to write one himself. It's pretty much dropped off the map since. The latest patch for XFree86's xterm drops support for Minix. As the changelog notes, 'Juliusz Chroboczek noted it was removed from XFree86 server; there have been no users since 1996.'"
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The End Of Minix? More

The End Of Minix?

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  • The question is (Score:5, Funny)

    by Compact Dick ( 518888 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:06PM (#4459217) Homepage
    will Andrew T. [Minix's creator] start another flame war? :-)

  • so XFree86 = usage stattistics? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:08PM (#4459230)
    since when were you required to run XF86 when you ran any Unix-based OS?

    Just b/c they feel that there have been no users since 1996 (which is probably the case, but not the point) that means the end of Minix?

    At least get some real proof it is dead before you put such scandalous headlines on the frontpage ;)
    • I still have Minix on an old 286, but I don't use XFree86 since it would be a bit impratical. This probably isn't a fair comparison since I don't really use my Minix box, it's just there like my old Mac Plus.

      • Re:so XFree86 = usage stattistics? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:22PM (#4459310)
        Actially the shame of this is Minix(VMD) and X make a seriously slim little X terminal on crappy old hardware.
        This is a shame, as I learned on Minix, and still have a spot in me heart for it.
        • Do you think my old 286 running Minix could handle X well enough to be a remote x terminal? If it could, it might be possible for me to use it to login to the Solaris servers here at school, so I can work on my computer programming projects a bit easier.

          • Sure. I think so. give it a go, at worse you might just learn something!
          • >Do you think my old 286 running Minix could handle X well enough to be a remote x terminal?

            Not a problem. I have old NCD X-Terms which only have a 68k processor @ 10 or 12 Mhz and 1-4 MB RAM. They run X just fine. Don't expect miracles, though. Netscape takes a minute to draw...
            • Those Xterms are substantially more powerful than a 286 and they're not running the ever-so-bloated XF86.

              That's assuming that the godawful graphics in your 286 make X worthwhile. Anything less than 1024x768 would just be pointless.

              Worse, wasting a 15+" monitor on a 286, when a pentium can be had for less than the price of a monitor?

          • Hardware requirements (Score:3, Informative)

            by 1155 ( 538047 )
            Thought you might be interested in this then (minix looks like what I need to run on any 486 or lower machines I run across, as my fiance is liking unix, so she'll need a compy...):

            HARDWARE REQUIRED
            To run MINIX 2.0, you need a PC driven by an 8088, 286, 386, 486, or Pentium CPU. The system must be 100% hardware compatible with the PC-AT and its successors (i.e, EISA bus, IDE disk, etc.).
            To run the 16-bit version, 640K is the minimum. To run the 32-bit version, 2MB is the minimum. To run comfortably, another 512K is needed.

            A hard disk is not technically required, but is strongly recommended to take full advantage of the system. To load all the sources and be able to recompile the system, 30 MB is the practical minimum but with a 20 MB disk partition, you can still run and compile parts of the system.

            The system must have either a CGA, EGA, VGA, monochrome, or Hercules video card, or another card that emulates one of these. Both 5.25" and 3.5" diskettes are supported, as are printers using the parallel port and modems and terminals using the serial ports. Mitsumi CD-ROMs are also supported, as are some Ethernet cards.

    • since when were you required to run XF86 when you ran any Unix-based OS?

      Ever since everybody begun to think desktops were requirements of a computer.

      I for one don't even run X on my FreeBSD machine. I mean, it's installed, don't get me wrong. But I don't use it. I don't like it, why would I use it?

      What's wrong with Bash?

    • Re:so XFree86 = usage stattistics? (Score:5, Informative)

      by qortra ( 591818 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @01:52AM (#4459821)
      I entirely agree; Minix was never much for Xfree. Visit Andrew T's FAQ:

      "Is MINIX dead?
      Oh no. Far from it. It is simply focused on the target area it was always focused on: education. The excursion into hackerland was a detour. A co-author, Al Woodhull, and I have rewritten the MINIX book based on the new, POSIX-compliant, version of MINIX which Kees Bot produced. It is still be aimed at having students be able to learn the principles of operating systems and most of a real system in one semester. "

  • Hmmm... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:08PM (#4459233)
    You know, considering that Minix made Linus Torvalds want to write his own OS, is that really much of a compliment to Minix? I'm surprised it still had that support. But you know, without Minix, you have to wonder if we'd have anything like GNU/Linux right now.

    • Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually, MINIX alone did not make Linus write his own OS. Linus was dissatisfied with all the OS available then, as he felt they did not fully exploit his i386 machine. Infact, Linus based Linux on MINIX....so if anything, it(Linux) complemented MINIX.
      BTW, MINIX was an OS written by Andrew T, to be used chiefly, for teaching his students Operating Sytems. Linux, as we know it today, is a commercial Operating System. Hence it would be wrong to compare the two.

    • Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Informative)

      by ceswiedler ( 165311 ) <chris@swiedler.org> on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:37PM (#4459395)
      The big problem with Minix wasn't technical, but political; any changes that were made to it couldn't be released except as patches (i.e., you couldn't change it and still call it Minix). Linus bitched once that Minix was only usable with a set of patches by a developer other than AST.

      So the real influence of Minix on Linux was in the GPL. Linus was certain that he wanted to release his code under a license which encouraged change, because of his experiences with Minix. And in fact, it is the GPL which distinguishes Linux from other x86 Unices such as the BSDs, much more than anything technical.

    • Minux is a teaching OS (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Katz_is_a_moron ( 197780 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:58PM (#4459484)
      Comparing Minux to Linux is like comparing a wagon to a Lexus. Minux was never designed to be a production O/S. It was designed to teach for students taking a first course in operating systems design.

  • "Minix is dying!"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mage Powers ( 607708 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:08PM (#4459235) Homepage
    this post makes me think of that BSD is dying stuff ;o
    Minux is dying! Clearly you can see that because its users don't use X windows!

    Just had to ;)
    • Heh, slashdot has ruined me. No matter what it is, an OS, a rock band, or a cancer patient, whenever I hear something is dying, I immediately think, You don't have to be Kreskin to predict its future. Let's look at the numbers. Red ink flows like a river of blood.... I hope I don't ever say this out loud.

  • If Linus were Homer... (Score:5, Funny)

    by stevens ( 84346 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:08PM (#4459237) Homepage

    ...I'd expect to see a post to comp.os.minix that had a single line:

    In your face, Tanenbaum!

    • Re:If Linus were Homer... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Pseudonym ( 62607 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:17PM (#4459296)

      The ironic thing is that Tanenbaum's argument is now correct, even though it was not ten years ago.

      Nobody would now would make a new monolithic kernel if they were in their right minds. However, nobody now would make a new Mach-alike if they were in their right minds either. Microkernels have finally proven themselves to be up to the job of being the basis of serious operating systems (e.g. BeOS, QNX, ChorusOS etc), but they're not the kinds of microkernels that Tanenbaum was advocating in 1992. Microkernels of the time spent far too much time shifting data between servers, whereas modern microkernels a) do at most as much address-space shifting as a monolithic kernel, plus b) they're even more "micro".

      • Re:If Linus were Homer... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @02:12AM (#4459907)
        You miss the same point that all the newly baptized Linux zealots miss when they read that seminal thread.

        The point? Tanenbaum is a *Professor*. The key line "If you were my student, I'd give you an F." -- and he's right. From an academic standpoint, Linux's design was and mostly is completely uninteresting. He's not arguing for microkernels as much as telling a student that plagurizing 20-year old monolithic Unix wasn't exactly groundbreaking work.

        The interesting parts of Linux (free versus $1000/seat, the development model, the licencing) probably belong in a Sociology or History of Technology paper rather than in the Computer Science department with Tanenbaum.

    • Re:If Linus were Homer... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Timmeh ( 555676 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @12:10AM (#4459523)
      Man, I was going to wait until Google groups cached this so I could provide an HTML link, but it just can't wait.
      From: "Kevin Snaden" <kevin@technokev.com>

      Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
      Subject: In your face, Tanenbaum!
      Message-ID: <UF5r9.538333$Ag2.20790885@news2.calgary.shaw.ca>
      Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 04:11:32 GMT

      In your face, Tanenbaum!
      It would seem someone took your advice :P Made *me* laugh.

  • Learning Source (Score:4, Insightful)

    by antibios ( 545713 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:09PM (#4459240) Homepage
    Minix makes an awesome unix OS to learn from. You all must agree that it doesn't have to be used as a production machine, it's really quite suited to use for teaching students.
    • Why exactly is this? Now, I've never used Minix, but I fail to see how, when there's free UNIXes availible to everyone, how one UNIX could be better suited to learning/teaching than another. Wouldn't using a "real" UNIX system be the best way to learn? Unless, of course, Minix has some special features that would evelate it beyond others. As far as I know, the only reason Minix was popular as a learning UNIX was because it was one of few that was available for people to use on their home machines.

      • Re:Learning Source (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ceswiedler ( 165311 ) <chris@swiedler.org> on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:40PM (#4459407)
        Because it's relatively simple. Have you ever compared Linus's original .99 version (the first he released publically, or anyway the first that I can find) with a modern 2.5 kernel? It's orders-of-magnitude more complex. Minix was designed to follow academic operating system principles, above practical issues such as performance. Because of that, it was easy to understand and teach.

      • Re:Learning Source (Score:4, Insightful)

        by oh ( 68589 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @12:05AM (#4459508) Journal
        Minux wasn't intended to help you learn how to use a UNIX, it was intended to help you learn how to write UNIX.

        It was written to be used as lab work for Operating sytem courses. I don't know about the "no users since 1996" comment. As recently as 1999 (when I was last in University) a group of undergrads were writing a process migration system for it.

        While I agree BSD or Linux are probably much more practical for production use, they are a bit more daunting to the programming student.
        • Right. Measuring Minix against Linux or any OS with pretensions to be a production tool is inappropriate. For some, it probably reflects an unfamiliarity with the Tannenbaum book and a perspective that began sometime after the the code's initial appearance in 1987.

          I own both the first and second editions of Tannenbaum's Minix book. They're both buried in boxes right now, so I can't post a quote, but Minix was written as a teaching tool, not with any intent that it would ever be used a production OS or, for that matter, as a hobbyist OS. At the time, the only way for Tannenbaum to legally use source code as a pedagogic device to illstrate the workings of a Unix-like OS was to write it himself. The typical PC box then -- remember, this is 1987 -- was an XT without a hard drive.

          In other words, Minix code was written to illustrate the points Tannenbaum makes in the book and to work on 640k green-screen XT's with one tiny 5 & 1/4-inch floppy.

    • Absolutely!

      WSU's cs460 [wsu.edu] (and 360) use Minix in an introduction to programming operating systems.
  • If there have been no minix users since 1996, why did they wait six years to drop support?

    • Re:What I would like to know is... (Score:4, Informative)

      by stwrtpj ( 518864 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @12:10AM (#4459522) Journal
      If there have been no minix users since 1996, why did they wait six years to drop support?

      Why do many TERMCAP databases contain vt100 definitions even though most people use a windowing system of some type? Why is the term tty used to describe your login session/device on many UNIX OS's when teletypes went out of fashion years ago? Why do we still refer to the act of the cursor returning to the beginning of a line as a carriage return?

      Most likely the answer is cultural inertia. People are loathe to change things that either work just fine the way they are or simply show no pressing need to change them.

      • Re:What I would like to know is... (Score:5, Funny)

        by falzer ( 224563 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @01:10AM (#4459723)
        Well, you never know when all hell could break loose. That's why you should keep an old vt100 behind a glass case for when the shit hits the fan, and you need a terminal, pronto!

        "BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY"
        • >Well, you never know when all hell could break
          >loose. That's why you should keep an old vt100
          >behind a glass case for when the shit hits the fan,
          >and you need a terminal, pronto!

          I know you're joking, but There Was This One Site...

          We got a call from another office in our organization asking if we still had any VT100s, their last terminal had just died. We did not have any, and we asked them why they wanted one...

          The were using them to configure hubs/switches etc, and didn't realize that any old PC running Procomm or Telix etc. would be an acceptable VT100 replacement.

          I can just imagine those guys lugging around VT100s to set up new hubs, heh heh.

          Our solution wasn't sexy, we had a 286 monochrome laptop with Procomm, but it sure was portable.

  • is this really a question? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Cowrad ( 571322 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:09PM (#4459246)
    If there have been no users since 1996, is there really a need for the question mark in this article's headline?

  • Eh (Score:5, Funny)

    by Junky191 ( 549088 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:09PM (#4459247)
    *Pours out some of the Colt 45 for the OS's from my hood that didn't make it* I'll miss you man.

  • educational (Score:4, Interesting)

    by capnjack41 ( 560306 ) <spam_me@crapola.org> on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:10PM (#4459249)
    Isn't it more of an educational tool these days, rather than a practical OS? I think every CS student had to buy Tanenbaum's book for their OS class. I think it's more of a prototypical UNIX that's good for studying how OS's actually work.

    • Re:educational (Score:2, Insightful)

      by whereiswaldo ( 459052 )
      Just look at how much MSDOS software abounds on the net... how much C64 stuff there is (hundreds of megs amazingly considering disks were 160KB/side!).

      Minix will be around for many years to come, if only as a .tar.gz file anybody can find and download to check out how operating systems work, or maybe for tiny nano-devices. Who knows?

  • Minix is dying (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:11PM (#4459260)
    Minix is dying

    Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Minix community when last month IDC confirmed that Minix accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Minix has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Minix is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

    You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Minix's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Minix because Minix is dying. Things are looking very bad for Minix As many of us are already aware, Minix continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.

    Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

    Minix leader Julien states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of X86 Minix are there? Let's see. The number of X86 Minix versus 68K Minix posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 68K Minix users. PPC Minix posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of 68K Minix posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of PPC Minix. A recent article put X86 Minix at about 80 percent of the Minix market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 X86 Minix users. This is consistent with the number of X86 Minix Usenet posts.

    Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, Minix went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

    All major surveys show that Minix has steadily declined in market share. Minix is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Minix is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. Minix continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Minix is dead.

    Minix is dying

    • Netcraft has now confirmed: Minix is dead Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Minix community when recently IDC confirmed that Minix accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraftsurvey which plainly states that Minix has mo market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Minix is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin operating system awareness test.

      You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Minix's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Minix faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Minix because Minix is dead. Things are looking very bad for Minix. As many of us are already aware, Minix has no market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Minix is the most endangered of all operating systems, having lost 99.99999% of its core developers.

      Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
      Juliusz Chroboczek noted it was removed from XFree86 server; there have been no users since 1996. This is consistent with the number of Minix related XFree86 Usenet posts.

      All major surveys show that Minix has steadily declined in market share. Minix is very sick and its long term survival prospects are nil. If Minix is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. Minix continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Minix is dead.

      Minix is dead.

  • Evolution... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by este ( 600616 )
    To many, it does seem sad when things go. I remember the particular irony I felt recently when Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy's died. He was a fine person, but really he was just Dave, the guy we all saw on Wendy's commercials, the guy who took a whole day to pronounce the phrase Muchas Gracias. Minix is just a part of history. An important one, it can be easily argued, but one who's time has now come. With a lack of users, there's no motivation to develop the OS any further, so it's just logical progression. Yes, Minix is saying goodbye, but the world still spins. Besides, you couldn't play QuakeIII on it anyway, right slashdotters?

  • Let's not forget ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vlad_petric ( 94134 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:12PM (#4459272) Homepage
    ... that, leaving aside the political debates, flamewars, etc, Minix was the operating system from which Linux was bootstrapped (IIRC the very first Linux versions were compiled under Minix, had the Minix fs "hardcoded" - way before VFS existed, etc.)

    So, while it may be dead (some may claim that it wasn't ever really alive), it is still alive through one of its most successful offsprings, our most beloved Linux!

    The Raven.

  • It's still around (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sheetrock ( 152993 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:15PM (#4459282) Homepage Journal
    True, not many people are using it on the desktop anymore, but there are still a number of things that Minix excels at. It was adapted to embedded computing before Linux, for one thing, because it could run the 286 processor in extended mode. It makes a much more efficient/lightweight server than any *BSD, and is actually responsible for a large segment of the Apache userbase on the Internet yet goes underreported because the server string in the apache-minix package says Linux. Additionally, the code is (IMHO) much easier to follow for CS students, and demonstrates many more esoteric yet practical systems engineering principles than can be found in its fork (Linux).

    So no, I wouldn't fire off that 'Minix is dying' troll just yet; the presence of Minix filesystem compatibility in its friendly rivals betrays the foothold Minix yet retains among many of the computers that power the Internet today. We wouldn't argue that Linux is dying simply because it doesn't have nearly the desktop share of Microsoft Windows, because we are aware that it is churning away out there just beneath the consciousness of most computer users. So too we should remember that Minix occupies as well a place within our hearts as well as within the Internet.

  • Was it superior (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SexyKellyOsbourne ( 606860 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:15PM (#4459284) Journal
    Even though Minix is long dead, there still is a good question: was a microkernel architecture better, or is Linux's monolithic kernel the right way to go?

    WindowsNT uses the microkernel design, but most operating systems since DOS haven't used a monolithic kernel, which was only truly necessary in the days of extremely scarce resources. It's true that Linux does extremely well under many circumstances, but could it have been done even better with a nice, modular, microkernel design?

    If history had changed and Minix took off instead of Linux, would we be better off today with the superiority of a microkernel design?

    I think we would.

    • Re:Was it superior (Score:4, Interesting)

      by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:30PM (#4459361) Homepage Journal
      I believe in microkernels. Just look at QNX. Ever tried to make a decent Linux boot floppy? It's hard, and would be easier if the kernel were more modular. Fortunately, it is moving in that direction. The MINIX file system is still available, and makes a very good choice for floopies: full file permissions and very little space wasted. ext2 takes up half the floppy and reiserfs doesn't even fit on it. MINIX may be dead as a production system, but its legacy lives on, and it's still good for OS courses, which is what it was made for.

    • Re:Was it superior (Score:4, Informative)

      by rweir ( 96112 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @12:58AM (#4459679) Homepage Journal
      WindowsNT uses the microkernel design

      Er, no. It started off as microkernel, but things keep getting but into kernel space for performance reasons: thusly [freshmeat.net].

      If history had changed and Minix took off instead of Linux, would we be better off today with the superiority of a microkernel design?

      Hehe [gnu.org].

      In conclusion: microkernels may or may not be theoretically `better', may or may not perform better, but they are fuckloads more work to do right.

  • go help this poor bastard (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=U TF-8&frame=right&th=a03279bba643e7dc&seekm=jdm2oa. rmo.ln%40merlin.l6s4x6-4.ca#link1

  • It won't really die... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by E-Rock-23 ( 470500 ) <lostprophyt@NospAm.gmail.com> on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:21PM (#4459307) Homepage Journal
    I'm sure there'll be a handful of people who will keep it alive. Not to mention that it still has educational uses as far as getting to know a UNIX style system without paying UNIX prices.

    Nothing ever really dies. People write emulators for video game systems, and in turn those systems live on in one form or another. If Minix inspired Linux, then in all reality Linux is a living tribute to Minix. Hell, there are even people who keep Yugo Automobiles up and running!

    The only way anything truely dies is if everyone up and abandons it. There have to be some Minix enthusiasts out there who will keep on tinkering with it. Who knows. Maybe an underground development network will spring up now that it's been declared all but extinct...

  • Still alive in academia (Score:4, Informative)

    by ill_conditioned ( 529750 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:22PM (#4459312)
    Minix is still alive and kicking, especially in the academic world. I know at Washington State University, seniors in computer science are required to write a variant of the Minix kernel in their operating systems course. I found it quite enlightening, and it is a project that can be completed fairly easily in one semester. It does a good job of teaching basic operating system theory without getting bogged down with tons of details. I don't think we could have done the same with the linux kernel. As far as outside of education, I'm sure there are some old klunker machines still running Minix for one reason or another, but as far as Minix and XFree... it's more or less toast.

  • minix still great for what it was designed for (Score:4, Insightful)

    by joe_bruin ( 266648 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:23PM (#4459318) Homepage Journal
    my os class was taught on minix. it's great for os hacking because it is *simple*. that's what minix was designed for, it is an academic operating system. try re-implementing the semaphore implementation on linux vs. minix, and you'll understand the educational value.

  • I figure at the very least the XFree86 people are still using it to test xterm right? ;-)

    BTW Minix homepage: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/minix.html

    At the footer: "Last changed 1996", maybe that is how they get that "no users since 1996" quote.

  • Minix is a toy (Score:5, Informative)

    by steveha ( 103154 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:25PM (#4459330) Homepage
    Minix is a toy. But that's not a bad thing, and people are still playing with it.

    Minix was written to give some "real-life" examples for a textbook on operating system design. The guy who wrote it wanted to keep it simple, so that it would be easier to understand.

    Back when there wasn't a free *NIX, some people hacked on Minix to turn it into less of a toy and more of a real operating system. The biggest obstacle was licensing issues: Minix is owned by a book publisher, and you needed to deal with them if you wanted to do anything with Minix. If you just wanted to be legal to use Minix you could buy a copy of the book, but anything else (trying to distribute on CD-ROM for example) was pretty much impossible.

    If Minix had been released under GPL, Linus might have simply written patches for it, rather than ginning up his own project. Linux would have likely never happened, and I would be using Minix to type this rather than Linux. This is nice history lesson about the importance of software licensing.

    Anyway, between the *BSD family and Linux, we have plenty of *NIX operating systems to use; we don't need one more that is stuck back at the toy level and has a messy license. So people are not working on Minix to make it less toy-like anymore.

    Because Minix is a toy, you can read the book and dive right in to the Minix code base. You can hack around with it and have a good time. As long as people still read the book, Minix will be a useful toy.

    The efforts to grow Minix beyond its toy status are dead. Minix itself remains educational and fun.

    steveha

    • Re:Minix is a toy (Score:3, Troll)

      by AJWM ( 19027 )
      Nice comparison. Lego and Meccano (aka "Erector Set" in the US) are toys too, but can be darn educational and occasionally useful. And fun.

    • Re:Minix is a toy (Score:5, Informative)

      by foonf ( 447461 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:47PM (#4459439) Homepage
      Minix is owned by a book publisher, and you needed to deal with them if you wanted to do anything with Minix. If you just wanted to be legal to use Minix you could buy a copy of the book, but anything else (trying to distribute on CD-ROM for example) was pretty much impossible.

      Actually Minix was finally relicensed under a BSD-like license [cs.vu.nl] recently, albeit 10 years or so too late.
    • If Minix had been released under GPL, Linus might have simply written patches for it, rather than ginning up his own project.

      And Linus wouldn't have to argue with AST. Look at my sig.

  • Minix is NOT dead. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:34PM (#4459383)

    I am SO upset right now that you simply cannot imagine what I am going through. First of all, I use Minix on three of my four computers. Minix is certainly NOT dead, and I don't know why so many people think that it is. It's the most retarded thing I have ever heard of.

    • Re:Minix is NOT dead. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mj01nir ( 153067 ) on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:59PM (#4459490)
      Yeah, we're still out here. From what I can gather from the MINIX-L list, it has more of a following outside the US. There seem to be few folks in the Middle East and Southeast Asia using it. Still not a large number in any case.

      It may not be Linux, but what the hell else am I gonna run on an IBM 5150? Besides, I keep telling myself that "someday" I'll learn how to code, then hack around with it.

  • Now hold it just a minute. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Archeopteryx ( 4648 ) <benburchNO@SPAMpobox.com> on Tuesday October 15, 2002 @11:48PM (#4459448) Homepage
    The fact that they are no longer supporting Minix has no consequences whatsoever!

    Minix is frozen in time, and any of the old XFree86 sources that have ever worked with it will work with it forever. After a certain amount of debugging has taken place, one no longer needs to support software for an unchanging OS.
  • That we'll never see a Beowulf cluster of Minix machines?
  • I can't remember where I saw the thread, probably a Linux kernel news group eight or so years ago, but there was a friendly "I've used Linux longer than you" discussion where the winning entry said that they still had an entry for ast in /etc/passwd.

    I've still got an IBM PC w/ a 10 MB HD that has Minix installed. I keep meaning to get rid of it, but just can't quite bring myself to do so. Someday I'll do it and then I'll probably see the same model being appraised for a small fortune on Antiques Roadshow.

  • Minix very much alive (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Most universities teach minix at an advanced OS course. Its simplicity makes it very easy to fathom many major components of today's OS's. Minix runs rather well on VMWare, too!

  • I'm going to be the only user! (Score:4, Funny)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @12:08AM (#4459514) Journal
    I'm downloading it now, just to say I'm the only user left!

    Please, dont download it and ruin it for me.

  • As with BeOS, the M$ monopoly strikes again!!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @12:23AM (#4459567)

    Not really :)

  • +1, Funny (Score:4, Funny)

    by Mike Schiraldi ( 18296 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @12:28AM (#4459586) Homepage Journal
    A new variant on the tired:

    "God is dead" - Nietzsche
    "Nietzsche is dead" - God

    can be:

    "Linux is obsolete" - Andy Tannenbaum
    "Minix is obsolete" - Linus Torvalds

  • Karma whoring (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mike Schiraldi ( 18296 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @12:31AM (#4459596) Homepage Journal
    Here's the obligatory link [google.com] to Tanenbaum's 1992 "Linux is obsolete" post.
  • Minix has always lived as Andrew T intended and probably will remain that way for quite some time. Minix is an EDUCATIONAL tool. It is meant to be gone over and understood within a semester in college. It excels at this purpose and many colleges use it to this end. It will die when all the colleges use something else. Just because hackers and tinkerers don't use it anymore doesn't mean it is dead.

  • Aw man... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lord Puppet ( 300347 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @01:45AM (#4459797)

    I just installed Minix on my XBox, and now I find out that it's dead.

  • You know... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Loki_1929 ( 550940 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @01:51AM (#4459815) Journal
    You know, there's some poor bastard out there reading this on a machine running Minix who just read the line, "no one's used it since 1996". Imagine for a moment, if you will, how that person must feel right now...

    • WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by NoMoreNicksLeft ( 516230 )
      You think that's funny.

      I use awstats as my web statistics package, which happens to check if the OS is CP/M. I didn't know what to think when I saw that... maybe they werer just being thorough.

      Well, once per month, I actually get a hit from someone using it. I mean... damn. I like vintage stuff and all (I just managed to get my Amiga 2000 up and running not so long ago, and I actually have a copy of Atari ST Minix) but how in the hell do you browse from CP/M?

      I need to find this guy. Whether I should bitchslap him, or bow down in worship when I do, is something to debate

      Note: I have a friend that likes to screw with me, telnets in and manually adds bizarre headers. But this isn't him, nor can I imagine someone else doing this for kicks on strangers' websites. I really am shocked and bewildered, in a way.

  • From the horse's mouth.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by irexe ( 567524 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @04:30AM (#4460283)
    This is an entry from Tanenbaum's personal faq. I think this explains fairly well why the comparison between Minix and production unices is fundamentally crippled:

    What do you think of Linux?
    I would like to take this opportunity to thank Linus for producing it. Before there was Linux there was MINIX, which had a 40,000-person newsgroup, most of whom were sending me email every day. I was going crazy with the endless stream of new features people were sending me. I kept refusing them all because I wanted to keep MINIX small enough for my students to understand in one semester. My consistent refusal to add all these new features is what inspired Linus to write Linux. Both of us are now happy with the results. The only person who is perhaps not so happy is Bill Gates. I think this is a good thing.

  • The real truth about Linux (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ektanoor ( 9949 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @04:55AM (#4460321) Journal
    The statements about the death of Minix are out of the line. Minix is dead, dead from the very start. It is not a OS in the same way other OSes are and never was supposed to be such way. Minix is the crash dummy, the body of the anatomic room, the prototype A. Tanenbaum was not trying to make a real OS but a tool for students to learn how to create operating systems. And he kept this OS in such way.

    However, there was this guy that came from the Northern cold, played a little with the cadaver and thought he could even overwhelm Frankenstein. For a few starry nights, he chunked, cutted, ripped Minix body into pieces to rejoin them into a new more perfect body, something that today reminds to some people a cute penguin...

    That is probably one of the reasons for the harsh reaction of Tanenbaum on seeing the new monster and realizing that "it's alive". Well, Frankenstein was made from mortified human pieces, while Minix was dead from start and should have stayed in that status for long. So we may understand his shock seeing a living Linux.

    Well this is half-humour half-stupidity but I tried to give another view of the story, in a more dummy way. Minix is a great system but, it was never intended to become another OS in the market. It is interesting that it gave birth to such an OS, but it never was in a position to concur with it. Minix and Linux have had always different purposes. The fact that it is being buried down, is not a problem on Minix but on the system. If one looks well around, he may see that the bottom line of development is dying. For the last years, there's been a fall on the creation and development of software infrastructure like OSes. So, this is not a sweet thing to see. It is a worrying signal that we may see some downgrade on specialists for the near future.

  • duh... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by joto ( 134244 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @05:05AM (#4460341)
    Of course minix is dying for real-world use. Minix was never designed to do anything practical. Minix was designed to be a minimal multi-tasking unix-like micro-kernel OS that was small and simple enough for students to understand in half a year. It still is.

    If people were running XF86 on top of Minix, that would in my mind make them crazy. The way to work with minix nowadays is to run it inside e.g. VMware, not to run it as your primary OS. Minix was never intended to be anything but a toy.

    But it is a good toy. I have just recently started to look at it, and it is very easy to learn from. And personally, I would rather see it stay that way. It's much better to have a simple educational toy, than a half-assed attempt at making it more complex, and more suitable for actual work. Because for actual work, there are already so many alternatives that are so much better: Windows, Linux, *BSD, Solaris, ...

    I doubt many minix users really care about the dropped support. They are there for the kernel, and could care less about support for third-party programs.

    And Tannenbaums strict control of the source have proven to be right. I can today download minix, and it still has some resemblance to what is described in the book. If Linus and the other good minix hackers had had their own way, minix would today look entirely different, and thus be useless for teaching.

  • Use of Minix (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Pflipp ( 130638 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @05:24AM (#4460374)
    Minix was a cute little UNIX introduction to a lot of people. An older version ran on the Amiga as well. It's the way I've made my transition from Amiga -> Minix -> Linux. This Minix never came with XFree86, and I believe it was quite a hassle to install if you really wanted it. Most people playing with Minix ever since Linux was ported to the Amiga, did it as a toy introduction to UNIX, and had no real need for X, anyway.

    While I believe Minix does prove to be a little silly a choice these days, it's still a nice look back into the old-style (Version 7??) UNIX, for people who just weren't born that long ago :-)

  • Minix = great OS on old hardware/embedded (Score:4, Informative)

    by Florian ( 2471 ) <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de> on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @06:27AM (#4460499) Homepage
    I fail to see why dropped XFree86 support would kill Minix - as it doesn't make much sense to run Minix on hardware powerful enough to run an X server. After trying several alternatives (Small Linux with kernel 1.0.9, FreeDOS, V2OS), I found Minix an excellent OS for a laptop with a 386sx/20Mhz CPU with 2 MB RAM and 40 MB hard disk. On this hardware, Minix gives me a fast-running, stripped-down Unix shell environment comparable to Busybox (or respectively, Linux rescue floppies like Tomsrtbt), with a decent vi clone (elvis-tiny), a C compiler (!) and full man page documentation. It is a very sound choice for turning fleamarket hardware into a word processor with the Uni toolchain (grep, sed, sort, make etc. - for a full list see here [cs.vu.nl]). Exchanging data between Minix and other OSes is a snap thanks to Minix-fs support in the Linux kernel and the availability of mtools for Minix. With its academic background, Minix is a very cleanly designed, BSDish OS. Its major drawbacks are lacking job control (suspending, backgrounding and foregrounding processes), an almost DOS-like limitation on the length of file names and, unless you use the MinixVM fork, no virtual memory.

    Since Minix has been put under the BSD license since April 2000, I wonder why nobody has made an effort yet to port it to embedded systems (PalmOS PDAs with Dragonball CPUs, for example, should be an ideal target). Minix should be much better suited for many embedded applications than the much more complex Linux kernel.

  • Minix is not for general use (Score:3, Informative)

    by DrStrange ( 72008 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @07:49AM (#4460778)
    I'm a bit tired of reading about the Minix vs. Linux debate when its apparent that most don't realize that Tanenbaum et al. did not write Minix as a general purpose OS. Minix was written as a teaching tool for operating systems classes. Tanenbaum has refused to add more "user" features to Minix because he wanted an educational Unix clone students could interact and program with without getting lost. Writing an operating system that a student can understand and learn from is a lot harder than writing an operating system that only already-knowledgable-programmers can work on. So in the future please be kind to Mr. Tanenbaum or at least do a touch of research before blasting him with "in your face Tanenbaum" statements I've read here. I realize siding with Tanenbaum on /. is not a popular position but the one thing that really gets me upset here is when people blast a good man (Tanenbaum) who's done a lot of good work over blind advocacy to on operating system.

    Oh and just to make sure I get modded down as Troll...let us all remember this quote from Mr. Tanenbaum's books: "The desire for a free production (as opposed to educational) version of Minix led a Finnish student, Linux Torvalds, to write Linux. This system was developed on Minix and originally supported various Minix features (e.g., the Minix file system)". So yes if you are a Linux fan remember Linux's roots come from Minix so trashing Minix its tantamount to trashing your parents.

  • Minux still alive and well (Score:3, Insightful)

    by j-turkey ( 187775 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @09:04AM (#4461325) Homepage
    Minix is not dead.

    Al Woodhull's Minux box is still alive, well, and running here [hampshire.edu], in the third floor of Cole Science center at Hampshire College [hampshire.edu], in Amherst, MA. Al Woodhull is the co-author of the Minix operating system, and I believe that he still helps maintain it (occasionally).

    The fact that it is still up and running an Apache server is a testament that it is still a functional operating system...more than just an educational toy. Here is a quote from the site:

    To the best of our knowledge, minix1.hampshire.edu is the oldest web site based upon standard Minix. The site actually began operation in April 1994, offering anonymous ftp access using Michael Temari's Tnet system on Minix 1.5 on an 80286 system. In February 1996 the web site was added to the site, then operating under Minix 1.7.0 on an 80386. The mirror site at turing.oit.umass.edu was added in 1998, and changed its name to minix1.bio.umass.edu in October 2001.

    So what if XF86 isn't being written for it? Does X make it a real OS? Is an OS not functional without X11R6? Does that make all of those X-less servers that I built and maintain toys?

    --Turkey

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