These instructions are for people who
The machine is assumed to have at least the following specs
See the Australian minix mirror for more info. Especially the usage (8) man page. Some of this note is lifted from there.
Get the 386, (486, Pentium) versions of the following files from the mirror
The following are optional. SYS.TAZ contains the man pages, headers and kernel source. CMD.TAZ has the source for the rest of the system.
Using a unix system, assuming your floppy is 1.4M at fd0
cat ROOT.MNX USR.MNX >/dev/fd0
This will make a bootable minix floppy. There are two separate files so that the install can be done with smaller capacity floppy disks. Minix will see the two files as separate partitions of the floppy.
For each .TAZ file you downloaded, write it to floppies:
dd if=USR.TAZ of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k count=1 skip=0
dd if=USR.TAZ of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k count=1 skip=1
dd if=USR.TAZ of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k count=1 skip=2
etc, until its all been written.
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. This is the ``partition'' with USR.MNX on it. (So what happened to fd0b then?)
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 second hard disk is hd5, and has primary partitions hd6 hd7 hd8 and hd9. Each primary partition can have 4 logical partitions, a b c and d So your first hard disk might 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
Select the hard disk you are going to install to (hd0 or hd5) by moving the cursor with the arrow keys. Press r. This reads the partition table. Now move the cursor to the primary partition you are going to install to: (hd1, 2, 3, 4 or 6, 7, 8, 9) 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. Once that's done, press w to write the partition table. We don't have to set up the logical partitions within this primary partition, the setup script will do that for us.
The script will then prompt you for the device name of the primary partition you set up, 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. Shutdown take the floppy out and you should be able to reboot 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.
Just go
setup /usragain, but feed in the floppies with SYS.TAZ
Then if you want, go
setup /usragain, and feed it the ones with CMD.TAZ
Minix has excellent man pages. See usage and boot especially.
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
21 June 2000,
11 November 2000