These instructions are for people who
The machine is assumed to have at least the following specs
The Australian minix mirror is aarnet. See the usage (8) man page for detailed instructions. Once you have installed minix, you can see this by typing ``man usage'' at the command line.
Boot up the machine with the boot floppy.
Press = when prompted, to boot into minix.
Tell it fd0c when it asks for the device with /usr on it.
Wow, we already have minix running! Now you can login as root (no passord needed) and run
setup
Hit enter for default keyboard.
Next you get thrown into the minix partition editor. Read the help you get by pressing the ! and ? keys.
The first hard disk is hd0, with primary partitions hd1 hd2 hd3 and hd4. The Each of these partitions can have sub-partitions. For example hd1 may be broken up into hd1a hd1b hd1c and hd1d. We only need to set up a primary partition, and the setup script will do the subpartitions for us. Your first hard disk will end up looking like this:
/dev/hd0 Whole hard disk #0
/dev/hd1 MINIX primary partition
/dev/hd1a MINIX root partition
/dev/hd1c MINIX /usr partition
All we have to do is create hd1 to be the whole disk. Press ``!'' to get some instructions. Also ``?''. But basically, do this:
Select hd0 (if it isn't already) by moving the cursor with the arrow keys. Press r. This reads the partition table.
Now move the cursor to hd1 Move to the partition type field for that partition and press ``-'' till it says 81 MINIX
Then move the cursor across and set up the cylinder boundaries for the partition. It highlights stuff if its screwed, which is helpful. Set the first to cyl 0 track 1 sect 0, and last to the second last cylinder on the disk.
Once it looks like you have one big partition taking up the whole disk, and no higlighted numbers, press w to write the partition table.
The script will then prompt you for the device name of the primary partition you set up. Tell it hd1, and it all gets easy again.
It formats the partition and copies the stuff from the floppy into it. When its done, it says confusing stuff about putting the ROOT floppy back in. Ignore that - its the same one you booted off. Type ``halt'', take the floppy out, hit the reset button, and you should be rebooting into (minimal) minix.
Once you've rebooted, login as root again and go
setup /usr
Hit enter for default options and feed it the USR.TAZ disks.
If you want man (for manual) pages (yes you do), and the kernel source code (you need to recompile to get a network card going) just go
setup /usragain, but feed in the floppies with SYS.TAZ
Then if you want the source code for the commands, go
setup /usragain, and feed it the ones with CMD.TAZ
Minix is now installed. You have a bit more work to do to set it up properly. For example you ought to add an account for yourself rather than using the root login. But you will have to learn a bit about it to do that.
Minix has excellent man pages. Log in as bin, because it has a nicer shell than root. To see the ``usage'' man page, the first stop in learning about MINIX, type
man usage
At the command line.
To work out how to add a new user, see the adduser page. And to find out what is happening as the machine boots up, and how to configure a few things see the ``boot'' man page.
enjoy!
This is free, you can use it and distribute it under the terms of the GNU Public Licence (GPL) or the GNU Documentation Licence. See GNU for these.
My email address is below. Let me know if you found this helpful, or if it didn't help you and it could have if it was better. Or just mail me and tell me what you are doing with minix!
Greg O'Keefe
gcokeefe@postoffice.utas.edu.au
June 2000,
13 November 2000