UNIX on Amiga 500?

[Edward D. Berger]

David Herron stated something about Amiga Minix not having source on 
disk.  This is not true.  Amiga Minix (as delivered) contains 9 floppies:
  1.) is the AmigaOS loader, and utilities
  2-9) are Minix format disks with binaries and sources...

The manual explains how to compile the "kernel" from floppies.
(This would be difficult to do without the sources...)

There is several updated minix.img files available for ftp from ftp.cs.vu.nl.
  in /pub/sreiz (the first kernel to support the A590 hardrive's XT drive)
  in /pub/raymond ( an updated kernel to support both the A590 XT & SCSI)
                    this may work with the A2091, but I haven't tried it.
                    This version should work on 68010s as well.
                    It loads and will basically run (allow login, ls, etc.)
                    on my A3000/16 if the /usr disk is write protected.
                    otherwise it does crash, sigh.
  there was a newer version in /pub/raymond that didn't work on my A3000.
  These are only binaries, official source updates have not been released.

So I now have Minix installed and usable on my A500/A590 with the sources,
but it is currently useless for me to recompile the kernel, since it won't
support the hardisk, though the exercise may have educational value....

Minix binaries for the ST should run on the Amiga version, but I haven't 
gotten around to trying that yet. (Its only been a few days...)
There should be quite a bit of useful Minix software in the archives like
gcc, UUCP, etc.  I wouldn't expect Prentice Hall to include them in the
basic package.  Partially because it is a 'Teaching OS' and they would be
superfluous(sp?), and partially because the size of the distribution, would
become to large. (How many floppies is too many?)

Minix is an interesting package for those people who are interested in 
learning more about the internals of a message passing, multitasking OS,
or learning about 'System Administration' on more modest equipment than
the A300UX(en).

-Ed Berger
 eb15 at andrew.cmu.edu