Software is just a story about winners and glory and you know that it's true
Sometimes, when porting POSIX software to Minix, ./configure breaks because it didn’t find the ld command.
The Minix toolchain doesn’t have a ld per se. But most of the times, there is not any special linking involved so Minix ACK-based C compiler is just fine for these tasks.
My solution: make a link to cc called ld and put it on /usr/bin.
It works!
As of April 29th, Minix Google Group Clean RSS support will be discontinued. The newsgroup has been replaced with a public mailing list and SPAM problems have disappeared.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
Probably, you will ever need to replace the keymap in Minix (nor other operative system). However I needed. Today I made a strange discovery: there was no mapping for the tilde ~ character in the Minix 3’s Spanish keymap.
So I update my copy of /usr/src/drivers/tty/keymaps/spanish.src and found it was true: there was not a mapping. So I decided to assign it to the [Alt Gr + 4] combination like other OSes do.
Apply this patch:
Index: spanish.src
===================================================================
— spanish.src (revision 4206)
+++ spanish.src (working copy)
@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@
/* 02 – ’1′ */ ’1′, ‘!’, A(’1′), ‘|’, ‘!’, C(‘A’),
/* 03 – ’2′ */ ’2′, ‘”‘, A(’2′), ‘@’, ‘”‘, C(‘@’),
/* 04 – ’3′ */ ’3′, 0372, A(’3′), ‘#’, 0372, C(‘C’),
-/* 05 – ’4′ */ ’4′, ‘$’, A(’4′), ’4′, ‘$’, C(‘D’),
+/* 05 – ’4′ */ ’4′, ‘$’, A(’4′), ‘~’, ‘$’, C(‘D’),
/* 06 – ’5′ */ ’5′, ‘%’, A(’5′), ’5′, ‘%’, C(‘E’),
/* 07 – ’6′ */ ’6′, ‘&’, A(’6′), 0252, ‘&’, C(‘F’),
/* 08 – ’7′ */ ’7′, ‘/’, A(’7′), ‘{‘, ‘/’, C(‘G’),
Then execute (as root) in the CLI:
# make && make install
# cp /usr/lib/keymaps/spanish.map /etc/keymap
# reboot
Note: /etc/keymap is the file which contains your current keymap. Replace it with your new binary keymap.
Tada! Log in again a check it out your new key mapping! ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ :D
In our final post, we will see how we can recompile the kernel from our clean Minix 3.1.3a install. You will never fear again compiling yourself a kernel :D
Although Minix 3.1.4 has not been released officially yet, you can grab the sources from trunk and have virtual memory support (so you don’t have to try running programs with chmem and by the trial-and-error process.
In first place, log in as “root”. After that install Subversion from packman (package #104). Don’t bother to grab the sources for subversion, you won’t need them. Then, follow these instructions.
After rebooting, you should see Minix 3.1.4 after loading the boot image.
It is possible that some system commands stop working (such as ps). There have been major changes so they will crash. You will have to build them and install the new version of these tools (make && make install). You will find them on the /usr/src/commands folder.
Sources:
In this post we will explain the process of installing Minix 3.1.3a (this is very straightforward) and configuring our virtual NIC.
If you followed the steps in the previous post, you would have a virtual machine configured and you are booting the Minix 3.1.3a ISO right now.
The Minix installation is very easy. Follow the steps until Step 2. This is crucial. Here you are about choose which network card would be used. Select the card #6 named “AMD LANCE”. Write 6 and press ENTER.
Once the setup has finished, reboot your system: (“shutdown” and “boot d0p0”).
After that, we are going to edit the file “/usr/etc/rc” to swap the lance driver with the one before it. Log in as “root”, and type “mined /usr/etc/rc”.
Go to line 82 (it says “echo –n Starting services…”). Press CTRL + ], write “82” and press ENTER. Put the caret in the beginning of the next line (use arrow keys) and press CTRL + @. Mark down to, and including, next line that states “fi”. Then press CTRL + K to cut it and copy it into the buffer. Move below the line that says “up inet”. Press CTRL + Y to paste the contents of the buffer.
Look at the picture above. The text inside the red box is what you should have pasted. Press CTRL + W to write the changes to the disk. Later press CTRL + X to exit to the shell.
Reboot the system as you did it previously. Log in and try ping’ing to any place (e.g. “ping rafavargas.com”). You should receive “rafavargas.com is alive” as response is everything worked as expected.
References:
My name is Rafa Vargas. I'm an undergraduate student of Computer Science at University of Seville, Spain. I am mainly interested in computer security, usability and the business of software.
