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MINIX works on XTIDE

R

Retro Canada

Experienced Member
Joined
Aug 23, 2012
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Vancouver, BC
I was looking for which *NIX flavour would work on a 5150 with XTIDE it turns out MINIX works flawless. All the others direct access the HDD controller like SCO Xenix and PC/IX.

And installing MINIX on the CF card it is the best part

All you need is the POSIX dd command for that either on linux, macOS or CygWin32. Not sure about WSL. And of course a CF to USB adapter. CygWin32 is a bit tricky and you need to run the terminal as administrator.

Donwload the PCE emulator http://www.hampa.ch/pub/pce/pce-0.2.2-xt-minix-2.0.2.zip (2.0.2 is the last one to work on PC-XT) and there is a handy hdd image there: the hd0.pimg file. Then you just need to write it to the CF card skipping the very first sector (512 bytes) with the command below.

WARNING: make sure the correct device for your CF card (in my case /dev/disk3). I do not take any responsibility on that ;) get the wrong device and you can erase your system partition! If the card is mounted with a valid partition you need to unmount it first like on macOS:
Code: 
diskutil unmountdisk /dev/disk3

To write the image on CF:
Code: 
sudo dd if=hd0.pimg bs=512 skip=1 of=/dev/disk3

Then stick it in your XTIDE and the PC happily boots on MINIX :)
 
What about next solution:
- boot from floppy
- FDISK the CF card
- make a copy of the first sector of the CF to the floppy using DEBUG floppy
- copy the whole IMG to the CF card
- restore the first sector using the floppy

Just an idea.....
 
Ruud said:
What about next solution:
- boot from floppy
- FDISK the CF card
- make a copy of the first sector of the CF to the floppy using DEBUG floppy
- copy the whole IMG to the CF card
- restore the first sector using the floppy

Just an idea.....
Click to expand...

Why ? Also the first sector from the PIMG is not a real valid sector but a file header for the emulator. I don't see why all the hassle as a simple DD command is so simple. you don't need a partition to write as raw to a CF card when you direct write to the device: /dev/diskX, or /dev/sdX...
 
Awesome! Never could get MINIX going on my XT when I tried, back in the day...of course, I knew a lot less then than I do now! Perhaps I'll revisit that, since it's just a matter of swapping Flash media to go between MINIX and DOS.
 
Ruud said:
Unfortunately this "sudo dd ..." doesn't work on my Windows machine. So it is not as simple as you think :)
Click to expand...

*CygWin32* and run the terminal as administrator. Don't use sudo in this case, just dd. Finding the correct device is the tricky part.
 
Awesome Job! I'm planning to show a Turbo XT at the Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest in march. I'll try to set it up with this info. Many thanks!
 
Retro Canada said:
*CygWin32* and run the terminal as administrator. Don't use sudo in this case, just dd. Finding the correct device is the tricky part.
Click to expand...

You can also play with Win32 Disk Imager, but it will not write a smaller image to larger device, the file must be the *EXACT* size.

So first you read the full device to a file using win32dsk image, like a 2GB CF will generate a 2GB img and then using any hex-editor like HxD you copy the whole .PMIG file to the beginning of the 2GB image but don't forget to skip the first 512 bytes from the PIMG as they are not a valid sector. So copy from position 512 from PIMG to position 0 of the CF image.

Then just write the edited 2GB file back to the CF using again the win32dsk imager.

Yes you choose windows you must suffer. :p
 
I have been working on getting various versions of Minix installed on my 5155 all day and the OP's solution got the job done in less than 15 minutes. I'm not sure how to react to that (other, of course, than to confirm that the OP's solution works for me).
 
djfitzgerald said:
I have been working on getting various versions of Minix installed on my 5155 all day and the OP's solution got the job done in less than 15 minutes. I'm not sure how to react to that (other, of course, than to confirm that the OP's solution works for me).
Click to expand...

Don't feel bad, I tried to get it going on my 5160 PC/XT for a week or so in the early 2000s and never got it working :) Still haven't tried the linked image on an XT-IDE yet. Too busy hacking on other things.
 
glitch said:
Don't feel bad, I tried to get it going on my 5160 PC/XT for a week or so in the early 2000s and never got it working :) Still haven't tried the linked image on an XT-IDE yet. Too busy hacking on other things.
Click to expand...

It worked like a charm, I was really impressed. The only real problem I've run into is that the Minix install seems to perpetually think that my system has 700+ kB of RAM, when my physical system only has 512. It hasn't caused any problems yet...
 
To what degree is minix tied to IBM specific hardware? The only other computer I've heard mention of it running on (just a mention, not the actual realization) is the Tandy 2000, which is very compatible at the bios level, or pretty much so. I ask because I'm leaving open the hopes that something will eventually run on my Northstar Dimension. If all else fails. And the way it's looking, all else might fail ...

I have to ask, anyone have disks/images of Netware-86 or something equivalent? It would have to run on an 8088/8086/80188/80186.
 
Retro Canada said:
I was looking for which *NIX flavour would work on a 5150 with XTIDE it turns out MINIX works flawless. All the others direct access the HDD controller like SCO Xenix and PC/IX.

And installing MINIX on the CF card it is the best part

All you need is the POSIX dd command for that either on linux, macOS or CygWin32. Not sure about WSL. And of course a CF to USB adapter. CygWin32 is a bit tricky and you need to run the terminal as administrator.

Donwload the PCE emulator http://www.hampa.ch/pub/pce/pce-0.2.2-xt-minix-2.0.2.zip (2.0.2 is the last one to work on PC-XT) and there is a handy hdd image there: the hd0.pimg file. Then you just need to write it to the CF card skipping the very first sector (512 bytes) with the command below.

WARNING: make sure the correct device for your CF card (in my case /dev/disk3). I do not take any responsibility on that ;) get the wrong device and you can erase your system partition! If the card is mounted with a valid partition you need to unmount it first like on macOS:
Code: 
diskutil unmountdisk /dev/disk3

To write the image on CF:
Code: 
sudo dd if=hd0.pimg bs=512 skip=1 of=/dev/disk3

Then stick it in your XTIDE and the PC happily boots on MINIX :)
Click to expand...


Does XENIX 2.1.2/3 not work on a 5150/5155?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PHmTTznV-U

https://winworldpc.com/product/xenix/8086
 
Does it require a 286 or better? I'll eventually get some version of nix running, I suppose. This is a sizeable project, or should I say would/will be. Once that happens, I'll have to figure out how to get the individual computers on a board to work with the main system (which is running Unix). The main system needs to serve up dos and apps to the mini PC's. Of course having the original software to operate this would be ideal. But it would be uber cool to be able to get something working from scratch.

I actually have the 1st end MINIX book scanned. When time allows I'll have to go through it.
 
Doesn't Minix use the BIOS for I/O operations? It should work on most x86 hardware that provides a PC-conforming BIOS.

Are there any versions of Minix that exploit the multi-threading capabilities of the 286+ BIOS?
 
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