Minix 3 has been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code again this year. That’s pretty good news. Last year I applied and I was one of the mentored students. My project (Minix USB Stack) could not be finished, but I learnt a lot about Operating Systems by the way. I spent almost a month to get Minix 3.1.3 working on my machine. There was not a reliable source of information or there were too many assumptions about the underlying hardware. I wish I had a tutorial like the one I am about to write.
The easiest way to give a try to Minix is running it on a Virtual Machine such as VMware. Go to wmware.com and download VMware Workstation. Once you have installed it, we could move on.
I assume you were able to download and install VMWare Workstation.
In first place, download the latest version of Minix (3.1.3a) from the website. Extract the ISO image from the file. If your favorite compression program does not support the Bzip2 format, then you might try 7-Zip. Now, you are ready to create the virtual machine.
Creating the virtual machine
Open VMware Workstation (Start > All Programs > VMWare > VMware Workstation). Press Ctrl + N to create a new virtual machine through the Wizard. Follow the each step as you can see in the pictures.
Choose Workstation 5 in Hardware compatibility. There is a strange bug in VMware that makes Minix 3 to freeze just after booting.
Choose a representative name for your virtual machine. I used such an creative name as ‘Minix3’.
Minix 3 does not support more than one processor, so choose One.
My physical machine have RAM enough, so I gave Minix 1GB of RAM. However, if this is not your situation, try to allocate 128 MB of memory for your virtual machine at least (make that 512 MB if you plan to run X).
Use NAT to share your network connection with your virtual machine without trouble.
Don’t care about this. Minix 3 does not support SCSI disks.
The maximum disk size never should be bigger than 128GB, because Minix does not support much than that. 4.0 GB should be enough to test Minix. Check “Allocate all disk space now” if you want to get the most out of your VM.
If you did every step correctly, you should see a screen like this:
The next post will explain how to install Minix 3 (this is very straightforward) and how to modify the rc file to workaround the LANCE DMA bug (so as to make your virtual network interface card work in Minix).
