Retro Canada
Experienced Member
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:
To write the image on CF:
Then stick it in your XTIDE and the PC happily boots on MINIX
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